“All that I Am Craving Is the Talk”: Collaboration, Translation and Lady Gregory’s Workhouse Ward

ABSTRACT Central to the collaborative dynamics of the Irish Revival, Lady Gregory had a particularly fruitful working relationship with Douglas Hyde (Dubhghlas de hÍde), whose plays she translated and, in many instances, co-authored. This article takes as its case study Gregory’s 1908 play The Workhouse Ward, which arose out of a dramatic scenario she provided to Hyde as the basis for his Teach na mBocht (1903) – translated by Gregory as The Poorhouse (1903). By studying Gregory’s scenarios and draft translations alongside the various published versions, the article responds to Hélène Buzelin’s call for a “process-oriented kind of research” into translation practice. Through this genetic approach, the article allows us to better understand how language and gender politics shaped key plays of the Irish national theatre movement and argues that future editions of Gregory’s and Hyde’s works should include all plays in which each author had significant creative input.

Gregory herself took lessons with Borthwick, and developed a working knowledge of the language that led to her translating works by Hyde and others, in turn forming a key element of her own "bilingual style" when writing in English. 5But, as Gregory's private reaction to Hyde's Kiltartan speech demonstrates, there were also tensions inherent in their relationship, which would come to the fore in more wide-ranging controversies triggered by the plays of Gregory's close colleague J. M. Synge. 6By inviting the Gaelic League into Coole Park in order to entertain the local workhouse children through stage performance, Gregory brought together three institutionsthe language movement, the national theatre movement and the workhousewhich constituted the network of her own collaboration with Hyde through translation.In hosting such gatherings, Gregory made of her home not just a backstage arena in which writers gathered to prepare their plays but a veritable performance space in which the drama 3 In the 1891 census, 680,174 people were recorded as being Irish speakers (14.5 percent of the total population), while the figure recorded of those who spoke Irish only was 38,121 (0.8 percent of the total population), down from 319,602 in 1851.Hindley, Death of the Irish Language, 19.

5
The term is used by Declan Kiberd to refer to the work of J. M. Syngeit also applies to Gregory's writing.Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language, 5-6; 196-215.6   In 1903, Hyde left the Irish National Theatre Societywhich had recently staged Gregory's first playin protest at their production of Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen.Hogan and Kilroy, Laying the Foundations, 75; Kelly, Yeats Chronology, 88.In 1911, Hyde publicly repudiated any connection between the Gaelic League and the Abbey Theatre, now codirected by Gregory and W. B. Yeats, in response to pressure from key fundraisers, who were angry at Gregory linking the League and the Abbey during a controversial tour of Synge's Playboy of the Western World in the United States.Dunleavy, "Pattern of Three Threads", 140-1.See also Dunleavy and Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde, 319-20.  of the Irish Revival was played out. 7As we will see, this drama unfolded at a time of major tensions between different factions and figures in the Revival.
Gregory later claimed that Hyde and Borthwick's puppet show at Coole heralded "the beginning of modern Irish[-language] drama". 8However, in spite of this being stated in an introduction to her own translations, she omits herself from the ensuing story, making no mention of her role as translator of ten of Hyde's plays.This reflects a broader pattern in which female writers are often written out of their collaborations with male colleagues, 9 sometimes by literary critics, sometimes by collaborators themselves.In the above example, Gregory writes herself out of her own story, as she also seems to have done in the better-known case of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, one of the many plays she co-authored with W. B. Yeats. 10 That instance of co-authorship was brought to light by James Pethica's manuscript research into the early versions of the play, providing a good example of how gender inequality in the public sphere can be challenged by examining compositional drafts. 11Following this methodological lead, my article takes a genetic approach, tracking Hyde and Gregory's collaboration through the compositional drafts of a co-authored comedy initially published as Teach na mBocht alongside Gregory's translation, The Poorhouse, in Yeats's periodical Samhain (1903), then substantially re-written by Gregory as  The Workhouse Ward (staged 1908).Since genetic analysis takes into account the temporal aspect of a work's creation over time, it can highlight the use of "different strategies at different moments in the composition of [a] translation". 12A diachronic analysis of Gregory's translation manuscripts will reveal her growing independence from Hyde and Yeats as she developed her own skills as a playwright.
For Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning, "all translation is collaborative", due to translation's inherently social nature. 13But some translations are more collaborative than others, going far beyond what is written on the page.My genetic approach to tracking the Gregory-Hyde collaboration is a response to Hélène Buzelin's call for a "processoriented kind of research" into translation practice, analysing the genesis of translations as part of their evolution within a broader network. 14Building on Bruno Latour's 7 Though there is not sufficient room in this article to fully explore Coole Park's status as a performance space, it is notable that many revivalist accounts of life there revolve around the testing out of new works on a select audience, usually through private readings, as well as cultural performances of a broader variety, such as the signatures left by visitors on the famous Autograph Tree.Similarly, a full analysis of the engagement of inmates from Gort Workhouse in Gaelic League activity is an important topic that requires further research.8 Gregory, Poets and Dreamers, 2nd ed., 196.As Brian Ó Conchubhair notes, "Theatre in Irish, such as it is, began not in Ireland but in the first Steinway Hall on 14 th Street, Manhattan, where the New York Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language staged Paul McSwiney's libretto An Bard 'gus an Fó: A Gaelic Idyll on Thanksgiving 1884'.Ó Conchubhair, "Twisting in the Wind", 251.Hyde and Borthwick had attended a historical performance entitled The Passing of Conall in November 1898.The Freeman's Journal reported that one scene of this "play" had been translated into Irish and then "acted both in Irish and English"."Aenach Tirconaill -The Great Irish Festival", Freeman's Journal, 19 November 1898, 6.For more on earlier dramatic texts in Irish, see O'Leary, "What Would Willie Say?", 159-60 and Ó Siadhail, Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 19-21.9   London, Writing Double, 3-4. 10 For Nicholas Grene, "it seems likely that, apart from the early plays The Land of Heart's Desire and The Countess Cathleen, Gregory had a hand in every one of Yeats's plays before 1908", showing just how important her input was to his early theatrical oeuvre.Grene, "Lady Gregory", 63. 11 See Pethica, "Our Kathleen". 12Cordingley and Montini, "Genetic Translation Studies", 4. 13 Cordingley and Frigau Manning, "What Is Collaborative Translation?", 23.Such concepts were very much in the air during the Revival, with Synge declaring that "All art is a collaboration" in his preface to The Playboy of the Western World, a play which itself draws heavily on translation.Synge, Plays 2, 53. 14Buzelin, "Unexpected Allies", 215.
Actor-Network Theory, Buzelin has studied the actor-networks involved in translations carried out for contemporary publishing houses, often done by teams of translators. 15hile the networks involved in the composition of Teach na mBocht / The Poorhouse / The Workhouse Ward are quite different in nature, Buzelin's method can bear fruit here too.Paying close attention to the translation dynamics involved in particular word choices will allow us to fully appreciate the diversity of roles the two writers played within the different networks they occupied: as well as being Hyde's translator, Gregory was a landowner, patron, folklorist and a key playwright in the early national theatre movement; as well as writing plays in Irish for Gregory's theatre, Hyde was a translator, folklorist, education activist and a key figure in the language revival movement.These relationships between translation, playwriting and other forms of cultural work will inform my analysis of Teach na mBocht / The Poorhouse / The Workhouse Ward.First, I will set the stage by examining some of the other translations Gregory and Hyde were involved in.

Gregory translating Hyde
Despite the centrality of translation to their working relationship, it has never been easy to identify the precise translational dynamics between Hyde and Gregory. 16Philip O'Leary sums up the situation in scholarship on their work when he writes of Gregory's "not always easily isolated influence on Hyde's plays". 17Examining Gregory's preliminary scenarios and translation manuscripts allows us to see that influence at work.In what follows, I briefly examine the translation patterns in two plays published in her Poets and Dreamers (1903), The Marriage and The Lost Saint, which were shaped by the creative network established at Coole Park. 18Coole is said to be the workshop of Ireland", wrote Gregory proudly in 1902.19 The Coole workshop became a key workplace for writers like Yeats and Hyde, 20 with Gregory at the helm, pushing them to get work done.This expectation from his host was clear from the outset of Yeats's time there: 21 On his first visit, he later recalled, he did little workand then discovered that this was a disappointment to his hostess.By the following summer, when he was again at Coole, a routine had been established and [George] Russell [AE] could write to Gregory: "he ought to be locked in his room with a certain amount of work to be done or he ought not to get dinner until he has produced a specified number of lines every day".22 In 1901, Gregory would express her own wish to keep Yeats on a short lease: "Lock him up.[…] No work no breakfast". 23She continued to be the instigator of writing work at Coole, later to be joined in this role by Yeats himself when they pushed Hyde to compose plays.This gives a good idea of Coole's workshop atmosphere, where writers came and went under Gregory's watchful and encouraging stewardship.Hyde and Gregory's plays arose out of this creative milieu, with Yeats as another key collaborator, the two men spending multiple summer trips together at Coole around the turn of the century.
Yeats and Gregory were keen to have plays staged in Irish, and saw Hyde as the man for this job, so they provided him with material with which he could quickly compose them.An Pósadh (The Marriage) was based on a tale told to Gregory about the blind poet Raftery (Antaine Raiftearaí, 1799-1835). 24In the play, he comes to the house of a recently married young couple which contains very few material possessions.Raftery encourages them to welcome members of the local community into their sparsely furnished home, whereupon he proceeds to milk each visitor for gifts.The piece ends with the community realising they have been in the presence of the legendary Raftery, whose day's earnings he has left to the young couple.A Young Man then reports that he has been at Raftery's gravethe figure they saw was a ghost.All the principal action is outlined in Gregory's typescript scenario, entitled "The Wedding", which contains no direct speech, but does include phrases that ended up in the published dialogue. 25With this in mind, we can see Gregory's translation of the play as one step in a longer collaborative process, and her status as a co-author as well as a translator.
Gregory's manuscripts record an increasing distance between Hyde's texts and her translations.The main trend is for her to move from literal, word-for-word translations to (slightly) freer interpretations, albeit never straying so far that her English versions could not be used as parallel texts to the Irish original, an important aspect in serving the language-learning ambitions of audience members drawn from Hyde's Gaelic League.For instance, when Martin speaks of "féasta ár bpósta" [the feast of our wedding], Gregory initially translates this as "our wedding feast" before entering the open variant " dinner ", which is what appears in the published text. 26Likewise, when Raftery tells some recently arrived boys to invite others to the wedding, the translation is first a fairly literal rendering of Hyde's "Abair leo go bhfuil bainis 's damhsa le bheith annso anocht, 's go gcaithfidh siad teacht isteach": "tell them there is a wedding + dance here this evening, + they must come in" (SP 88; MMS 23r).In the published text, Gregory gets rid of the paratactic syntax carried over from the Irish, making the phrase more direct: "tell them they must come in: there is a wedding-dance here this evening" (SP 89; PD 223).Similarly, when Another Boy says of the people, "Ní thiocfaidh siad isteach", Gregory first drafted the literal "They will not come in", then opted for a 22 Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 182. 23Ibid., 570n77. 24See Dunleavy and Dunleavy, "Introduction", 18; Gregory, Poets and Dreamers, 2nd ed., 35.Henceforth referenced as PD in the text.Hyde had been carrying out his own research on Raftery when he met Gregory, and this shared interest in the poet was an important basis for their collaborations.See Dunleavy and Dunleavy,Douglas Hyde, Typescript of outline of play, with the author's ms.corrections, Berg Collection. 26Hyde, Selected Plays, 86-7.Henceforth referenced as SP in the text; PD 220; Translator's manuscript, Berg Collection, 17r.
Henceforth referenced as MMS in the text.
more pointed interrogation in the published text: "Why would they come in?" (SP 88-9; MMS 25r; PD 223).In the notebook, the songs Raftery sings too are translated literally, but given a freer translation in the published playtext.While this gradual movement away from direct translation is by no means unheard of as a strategy for translators, I will show that these textual shifts are part of a broader picture whereby Gregory gradually gains authorial independence from Hyde.This is not to suggest that the power dynamics were all one-way; according to Hyde, Gregory and Yeats literally pushed him to write another play.On 25 August 1902, he recorded (in Irish) in his diary: "They shoved me into my room and I wrote a small play in three or four hours on Angus the Culdee". 27This was An Naomh ar Iarraidh  (1902; translated as The Lost Saint, 1903), and though no scenario exists in Gregory's or Hyde's archives at the New York Public Library, she does mention creating one with Yeats in order to structure the drama.Gregory's same diary entry mentions scenarios for Hyde's The Nativity (Dráma Breithe Chríosta, 1902) and a "Fearful Dream", again in collaboration with Yeats, once more showing just how collaborative these plays were. 28There was probably collaboration in the translation too: one account has Hyde reading An Naomh ar Iarraidh aloud at Coole, "translating it back into English as he went along". 29If Hyde was already presenting his own English version in this way, before Gregory produced her own translation, this indicates yet another aspect to the collaboration process between the two, one that may have been repeated across other plays. 30While translation manuscripts show Gregory gaining distance from Hyde's text, retrospective accounts of the composition process show that the lines of influence in this collaborative team were multidirectional, and that they shifted over time.
We again see Gregory's budding authorial independence in her translation manuscripts of The Lost Saint.The saint of the title is yet another unassuming Old Man, who takes care of menial tasks around the school.While the teacher and students go out, he helps the failing pupil Conall to remember a poem attributed to Saint Aongus Céile Dé.When the others come back, Conall recites the entire poem to his dumfounded teacher, who then discovers that the Old Man is none other than the saint himself.Here again, Gregory's drafts move away from word-for-word translation of Hyde's versions.While she first translated "béile" as the general "meal", her typescript introduces the more specific " dinner ". 31 The fairly literal translation of a talented student speaking bravely before his lesson, "there is no fear on myself" (for "níl eagla orm-sa"), is 27 Dunleavy and Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde, 223.Trans. in Dunleavy and Dunleavy.Emphasis added. 28As James Pethica points out, this "Fearful Dream" was likely an early title for Hyde's play Pleusgadh na Bulgóide; or The Bursting of the Bubble (1903).Lady Gregory's Diaries, 312n14.Though it is commonly assumed that Gregory is responsible for the English-language sections of this bilingual text, Liam Mac Mathúna makes a convincing case that the translator was Hyde himself.See Mac Mathúna, "Na róil a bhí ag an gCraoibhín Aoibhinn". 29Gregory qtd in Murphy, "Dear John Quinn", 125. 30For instance, Gregory often leaves question marks in her translations when having difficulty with an Irish word.Given their close working relationship and his constant encouragement of her Irish-language learning, it is possible that Hyde helped her with such translational difficulties.On the topic of Gregory's proficiency in Irish, Maureen Murphy notes her difficulties with the spoken language while taking Irish classes at the turn of the century.Murphy, "Gregory and the Gaelic League", 146-7.There are errors in her translations, as when she translates "ceól na bhárr" [excellent music] as "music on their roof" in The Tinker and the Sheeog.changed to " for myself" for the published text (LSTS 01r; SP 108-9; PD 236).Likewise, when the Old Man tells the teacher to trust in God's grace, "ní chuimhnímid ar na neithe do chailleamar" [we do not think on the things we have lost] (SP 114) becomes "he does not think on the thing we are without " (LSTS 05r; SP 115; PD 241), the final verb changing as well as the subject of the phrase.Having said this, there are also instances of more direct translation, as in the teacher's angry words to his forgetful student: "O mo náire thu!" ["Oh, my shame you are!"] (SP 110-11; PD 239) or when "as so amach" becomes "from this out" (SP 116-17; PD 243).But Gregory is not averse to reshaping her English equivalent, as when the line "tá an leanbh sin go ro mhall ag foghluim" is reduced to "that child is half-witted" (LSTS 04r; SP 114-15; PD 241).The above evidence shows that Gregory draws strategically on word-for-word translation, but is not afraid to go her own way when it comes to phrasing the dialogue of plays she initially structured.
With preliminary scenarios, collaboration in translation and some forceful encouragement in getting the work written, translation was by no means a straightforward process in Hyde and Gregory's creative partnership.This corresponds with the complexity of other, less successful collaborations in the national theatre movement.When Yeats was working with George Moore on their version of Diarmuid and Grania, it was suggested "that Moore should write the play in French, that Lady Gregory should translate it into English, that Taidgh O'Donoghue should render it into Irish and Lady Gregory translate it back again into English; after which Yeats was to put style upon it". 32Though the initial texts were not in French, Gregory's collaborations with Hyde on The Marriage and The Lost Saint were just as complex.With Gregory's input at both ends of the writing process, these plays are truly collaborative, but in spite of this, they are not included in Ann Saddlemyer's edited volume of the author's collaborations and translations.From a historical perspective, this is understandable, as we tend to grant authorship to the first published author of a playtext.But, given the interwoven nature of these plays geneses, there is a strong case for them to be included in any future edition of Gregory's works.Likewise, I would question the decision to omit Teach na mBocht from Hyde's Selected Plays on the grounds that its English version is an "adaptation[…] rather than [a] translation[…]". 33This is true of The Workhouse Ward, but not The Poorhouse.As we shall now see, both translation and adaptation were involved in this work of deeply interwoven authorship.

From Teach na mBocht to The Workhouse Ward
What would eventually become The Workhouse Ward was just as collaborative in nature as Gregory and Hyde's earlier plays.In Gregory's account, the play again had a highly developed scenario before she gave it to Hyde to compose in Irish as Teach na mBocht.This preliminary plan was transcribed and published in her 1913 autobiography, Our Irish Theatre, where it takes up no fewer than four pages. 34The scenario features all the main details of the plot: two elderly men quarrel in their workhouse beds (Colm and Pádraig in Teach na mBocht; Colum and Paudeen in The Poorhouse; Mike McInerney and Michael Miskell in The Workhouse Ward);35 Colm/Colum/Mike receives an offer from his recently widowed sister (Cáit/Kate/Honor) to come and live with her on a farm; he then declines that offer when she refuses to also take his quarrelsome workhouse companion.While, as we have seen above, Gregory created scenarios with Yeats in the knowledge they would be handed over to Hyde for him to write plays in Irish, she was not always enthusiastic about doing so.On this occasion, she recalls, "I intended to write the full dialogue myself, but Mr. Yeats thought a new Gaelic play more useful for the moment, and rather sadly I laid that part of the work upon Dr. Hyde". 36The above reminiscence suggests the decisive role that Yeats played in shaping Hyde and Gregory's collaboration.Again, note the sidelining of the female authorthis time by her colleaguesomething which is well worth bearing in mind when analysing the continued evolution of the play.
Published in 1903, her translation, The Poorhouse, came near the beginning of Gregory's playwriting career.Though the manuscript draft of this translation could not be found during my research, an examination of the published texts shows Gregory following the pattern established in the analysis of the plays above, initially making fairly literal translations of Hyde's play, with "ar deargmheisce" translated as "red drunk" (DTh 216; CP4 297) and Irish syntactical structures again mirrored in the English.There is evidence of Gregory's playwriting nous even at this early stage, however, leaving "a little space" between the two beds in the opening stage directions (CP4 295)rather than the more specific "cúig slata" [five yards] of Hyde's original (DTh 213)so that each group of players could decide for themselves on the precise setup in light of the given stage dimensions.A typescript held in the Berg Collection also shows that there were some limits to direct translation.In an early exchange with the Matron, Colm complains that if his heart was pulled out, scrubbed and put back again, "I would have some ease", the addition of the determiner "some" qualifying the Irish phrase "go mbeadh socracht agam" (DTh 213).37However, as a whole, the translation published in Samhain is close to the Irish-language version, again reflecting Gregory's proximity to Hyde at this early stage in her career.
Five years later, Gregory had become the most popular Abbey Theatre playwright, achieving success with plays such as Spreading the News (staged 1904), Hyacinth Halvey (staged 1906), The Gaol Gate (staged 1906), The Jackdaw (staged 1907) and The Rising of the Moon (premiered 1904; staged at the Abbey 1907).In his account of collaborating with Gregory on Where There is Nothing (published 1903), which they rewrote as The Unicorn from the Stars in 1907, Yeats recalls a marked shift in Gregory's playwriting skills in these intervening years: I wrote in 1902, with the help of Lady Gregory and another friend, a play called Where There Is Nothing […].[In 1907,] I asked Lady Gregory to help me turn my old plot into The Unicorn from the Stars.I began to dictate, but since I had last worked with her, her mastery of the stage and her knowledge of dialect had so increased that my imagination could not go neck to neck with hers. 38 was not every day that W. B. Yeats admitted to being second-best in powers of the imagination.However, his statement needs to be seen in the light of Gregory's stage successes, which made her "the best 'draw' of the lot of you", as Yeats was bluntly informed by Abbey benefactor Annie Horniman in 1906. 39This included Hyde, Synge and all the other Abbey playwrights.Gregory herself says of the adaptation of The Workhouse Ward: "I had more skill by that time" with regards to playwriting, something a frequent collaborator such as Yeats was well-placed to judge. 40When considering how Gregory elbowed her way back into the composition process of The Poorhouse by re-writing it as The Workhouse Ward, it is important to bear this increased skill in mind.
When Gregory came to re-write the play, she made it her own.By setting the adaptation in "Cloon Workhouse" (CP1 97), she relocated the action to the imaginary village used throughout her oeuvre, leaving us in no doubt that we are now in her theatrical world.Galway placenames such as Skehanagh, Lisheen Crannagh, Newtown Lynch and Duras aid this, constructing an offstage world linked to the area in which Gregory lived and was associated with in the public imagination. 41The immediate impulse for the adaptation may have been the fact that an English-language production of The Poorhouse in 1907 "wasn't entirely successful", with the Irish Independent declaring that it was "hardly worth the while of an experienced writer for the stage putting before the public". 42The Independent listed both writers as co-authors, a tactic explained in Gregory's note for a 1906 edition of the play: Dr. Douglas Hyde and I wrote The Poorhouse together, I giving in plot what he gave back in dialogue.I would not have my name put with his then, as I thought the play would be more acceptable to Irish speakers without even the ancestry of a scenario in the "Bearla" [sic].
But now we find that players in English in their turn think we should wrong what was created in Gaelic by playing it in translation; so we have put both our names to the little play with the object rather than the hope of commending it to both sides. 43egory is incorrect: her name does appear alongside Hyde's in her 1903 translation published in Samhain, albeit as translator rather than co-author. 44But her note outlines the aim however undiplomatically expressedof reconciling Irish-and English-speaking theatre practitioners at a time when different factions of the national theatre movement were under huge strain. 45Whatever about this ambition, The Poorhouse itself had a very short run (of only three performances), and Gregory soon took the opportunity to rewrite the play. 46hile, in her memoir, she was careful to note that this was done "with Dr. Hyde's full leave", the setting of the adapted play is all Gregory. 47he talk": from theatrical tool to offstage gossip In re-writing the play, Gregory cut the offstage audience of other inmates who comment on the two men's quarrel and substantially added to the dialogue.One such passage added to The Workhouse Ward has Michael Miskell rejecting his departing companion's offer of tobacco as compensation for the impending loss of company: Ah, what signifies tobacco?All that I am craving is the talk.There to be no one at all to say out to whatever thought might be rising in my innate mind!To be lying here and no conversible person in it would be the abomination of misery! 48skell is not the first Gregory character to thematise the importance of talk.For Saddlemyer, "'the talk' is all" for those who populate her comic plays, with the threat of being deprived of social contact the greatest this critic can imagine for Gregory's characters. 49owever, there is also evidence of a darker side to such speech, rumour and gossip across the playwright's oeuvre.In The Travelling Man, the Mother recalls being driven out of the house where she worked as a serving girl "because of some things that were said against me" (CP3 21).In The Full Moon, the reluctant hero Hyacinth Halvey says he would leave town "if it wasn't for the talk the neighbours would be making" (CP3 38).Gregory's first play staged at the Abbey was Spreading the News, in which village gossip leads to a wrongful arrest for a murder that never happened (CP1 15-29).In The Gaol Gate, two women mourn outside a prison not only the death of an imprisoned young man, but the malicious gossip that threatens to ruin his posthumous reputation (CP2 5-6).And at least two Gregory characters complain of there being "too much talk", one in an asylum, the other in a rural village. 50In these instances, talk is a malignant force, but The Workhouse Ward foregrounds the importance of "the talk" as the glue that constitutes social networks, as well asif we are to believe Michael's pleadingsomething that holds together the very agents that constitute these networks.While Yeats would high-handedly dismiss Gregory's writing as the work of an author belonging to a world "that is merely social", again suggesting a gendered dismissal of her theatrical craft, "the talk" is the engine of her plays, and no doubt played a part in making them so popular. 51he form of dialogue deployed in The Workhouse Ward had a specific source.Éadaoin Ní Mhuircheartaigh traces the "talk" of this play to the agallamh beirte, a form of performed Irish-language poetry recited by two speakers.52 Though Gregory's drama is not in verse, and though her dialogue is unrhymed, the to-and-fro of the two-handed dialogue evokes a form which she was familiar with from Gaelic League events.53 What is more, the insults exchanged evoke the frequently comic tone of the agallamh.Of the thirty-nine paragraphs of dialogue exchanged between Pádraig and Colm in Teach na mBocht, only Pádraig's plea for Colm to remain with him in the workhouse lacks the bite of insult or threat of physical violence (DTh 218).
As Anthony Roche has noted, Pádraig's accusation that Colm was educated at a "Souper school" (CP4 296) stands as an Anglicism in Hyde's Irish text: "ní chuig scoil na Soupers a bhínn ag dul ag fáil mo chuid foghlama mar thusa" (DTh 215). 54Indeed, this is part of a broader pattern whereby terms associated with state institutions remain in English in Teach na mBocht -"barracks" and "Peelers" being two other examples (DTh 216).Writing on the widespread use of English loanwords in turn-ofthe-century Irish, Patrick Dinneen commented: "The lexicographer may deplore the introduction of loan words, but he is bound to recognise their existence".He goes on: Every tongue borrows from other tongues, and it is a sign of health and vigour when a language can assimilate a crop of foreign words and reduce them to subjection by the rigorous application of its own syntax and of its own inflexional forms. 55 shown in Gregory's use of "pilér" as part of her description of the Punch-and-Judy show, her collaboration with Hyde took place right in the midst of such linguistic borrowing and remoulding, into which Dinneen's dictionarycommissioned by Hyde's Irish Texts Societyattempted to provide a standardised reference point. 56Of course, playwrights have freer linguistic rein than lexicographers, so it is noteworthy that both The Poorhouse and Teach na mBocht feature unassimilated loanwords, marked in italics in the published texts and carefully underlined on Gregory's translator's typescript.In The Poorhouse these Gaelicisms are the Irish-language insults "Rogaire" [rouge] and "sprealaire" (CP4 296, 298, 301), the latter translated in Dinneen's 1904 dictionary as a variant form of "breallaire": "a giddy, thoughtless fellow, a poltroon".
"Souper" would have been a particularly sensitive insult for Gregory in the period she was working on The Workhouse Ward, and the surrounding circumstances may explain why this term of abuse does not appear in her rewritten play.In January 1907, yet another controversy erupted around Synge's work, with riots taking place during the opening run of The Playboy of the Western World, which ignited tensions in Gort.As we have seen above, Gregory used Coole Park to stage entertainment for children from the local workhouse.Following what was seen by some as her fellow Abbey director's assault on Irish national character, Gregory was banned from hosting these children at her home.On 17 August 1907, the dispute rumbled on, as Gregory told John Quinn: 52 Ní Mhuircheartaigh, "Drámaíocht Dhúchasach?". 53Ibid., 40. 54Roche, "Re-working The Workhouse Ward", 180. 55Dinneen, "Editor's Preface", xi. 56In this case, Gregory had personal ties to the linguistic source: the English term "peeler" derives from the association of the Irish constabulary with Prime Minister Robert Peel, a key figure in her late husband William's political career (OED).
The link was still alive as late as February 1899, when she approached Peel's son to enquire about arranging a clerkship in the House of Commons for her own son, Robert.Hill, "Finding a Voice", 32.
I am still suffering from the Playboy run.
[…] The embargo has not been taken off the workhouse children, & a feeling is being nourished against me by a Sinn Féin or G[aelic] L[eague] curate in Gort that I am not to be trusted even that I am "souperizing"! 57 To understand the damage of such anti-Gregory gossip, we need to understand the history of the term "souper".David W. Miller outlines its history: "In popular Catholic memory, proselytising the starving during the Famine is called 'souperism', from the term 'souper' that was applied to a starving Catholic who was converted to Protestantism".Miller traces localised use of the term in Dingle, Co. Kerry "before the 1845 potato crop failure" that triggered the Famine.However, it was in the 1850s that the term became widespread in newspapers like the Freeman's Journal. 58In 1907, the term "souper" had contemporary resonance for a Protestant landowner seeking to maintain positive relations with her predominantly Catholic tenant farmers. 59Like many of her tenants, Gregory was intimately aware of the legacy of the Famine, though from a very different perspective to theirs: her late husband William Gregory, MP had created the infamous Gregory Clause in the Poor Law Bill of 1847, which limited relief to those holding no more than a quarter of an acre. 60Since this meant that their families were then also ineligible for relief, tenant farmers were presented with a terrible choice: "To save himself and his family from starvation a cottier would have to relinquish his plot". 61In introducing this clause, William Gregory created a dark legacy which successive instances of local charity would never shake off.Such was the backdrop to Lady Gregory's being labelled a "souper" in local gossip against her. 62n Gregory's diaries, a frequently stated priority is to carefully negotiate the changing relationships of landlord and tenant brought about by the turn-of-the-century Land Acts so that her son Robert can peacefully inherit her estate.Hence, a public dispute like thisat a time when relations were already strainedwas particularly threatening.Five years earlier, however, Gregory had been happy to have this term included in the original text. 63The "souper" insult is part of her preliminary sketch for Teach na mBocht, where she emphasises the taboo nature of souperism in edits to her typescript: "Other old man remembers time the other was suspected of going to souper school" (PTS 01r).With the negative connotations associated with souperism, and her late husband's role in the mass suffering brought about by the Famine, she may not have wished to broach the subject in The Workhouse Ward at a point where she herself was being accused of "souperizing". 64In this instance, "the talk" that circulated in Gort against Gregory following the Playboy riots may have led to the removal of this insult.

Workhouse shadows
As well as influencing the vocabulary of the play, the Famine also haunts The Workhouse Ward through its being set in an institution associated with poor relief.There are language dynamics at play here too.Though Irish was "already in rapid retreat before 1845", the Famine "played its part" in the language's decline by disproportionately affecting rural areas where it was most widely spoken. 65More to the point, the workhouse was where Gregory collected much of her Irish-language folklore, usually assisted by a translator. 66Gregory and her theatre collaborators drew much of their creative material from rural, Irish-speaking districts, be it language, setting or sometimes even pieces of clothing. 67Teach na mBocht / The Poorhouse / The Workhouse Ward can be seen as an institutional offshoot of the cottage-kitchen style that dominated the early national theatre movement, 68 with the sister's promise of rural domestic bliss -"A wide lovely house I have; a few acres of grass land" (CP1 101)forming an alluring contrast to the bedbound conflict we see onstage.However, box-set domesticity was by no means the only spatial form in Gregory's plays.As Patrick Lonergan has pointed out, she often set her plays outdoors, in spaces quite unlike the frequently used cottage-kitchen setup. 69Given this versatility, why use a workhouse for this play?If theatre spaces are "almost invariably haunted in one way or another", then Gregory's choice of setting evokes very particular, very unsettling ghosts. 70 biographical reading could, with some justification, claim Gregory's source for the scenario as inspiration for the stage setting: she heard the story in Gort Workhouse about a quarrelling couple, so the workhouse was an obvious place to set the play. 71However, the workhouse in the early national theatre was by no means a neutral space; it was a powerful agent of meaning, freighted by the "taint" of material poverty and its association with Famine relief. 72Gort Workhouse had a particularly grim history of overcrowding and mass burial during this period, which led to the local Board of Guardians being convicted of negligence in 1848. 73Lady Gregory would have been fully aware of its history, with her husband having chaired the Board of Guardians in the 1850s. 74With this in mind, it is no surprise that the social "taint" of the workhouse is evident across her dramatic writing: her stage characters repeatedly describe the institution in negative terms, from Bartley Fallon's fear of dying if he is sent there in The Full Moon (CP3 44-5) to Darby's shame at having been "partly reared in the workhouse" in The Bogie Men (CP1 113). 75n Teach na mBocht / The Poorhouse, Hyde and Gregory play on these negative associations in Cáit's opening words to Colm: "Ara, a Choilm, a chroí, nach bocht an áit a bhfeicim thú" (DTh 217) ["Aurah, Colum, achree!Isn't it a poor place that I see you?"] (CP4 298).Indeed, the comic nature of Colum's choice to stay in the workhouse is underpinned by the audience assumption that it is an awful place to liveas playgoers, we bring our own knowledge of the ghosts haunting a stage setting to any given production.His justification of this choice highlights public "talk" about the workhouse "taint", telling his sister that the institution is "not as bad you know as they say" (CP4 300; emphasis added).However, it is important to note that the staged image of life in the workhouse is comfortable, not carceral: the action opens with the Matron asking Colm if he would like some milk, and there is no sign of the institutional mistreatment that other Gregory characters complain about and fear.In The Workhouse Ward, Gregory again has the visiting sister reference the social stigma associated with the institution: "It is no credit to me a brother of my own to be in this place at all" (CP1 101). 76ut, in Teach na mBocht / The Poorhouse, the workhouse is remarkable insofar as it isin contrast to its representation in the dialogue of this and other Gregory playsa fairly neutral backdrop to the comic action.Likewise, in the later rewrite, the workhouse "taint" is not the dominant aspect of the stage space.In The Workhouse Ward, all interactions with other inmates and staff members are cut, leaving the focus more directly on "the talk" of the two men. 77Her edits also render the spatial politics of the institution more malleable for those wishing to restage the play, making it a much more neutral spatial agent than one might expect.Ultimately, staging as comedy an institution associated with Ireland's greatest tragedy creates deeply unsettling theatrical effects.

Conclusion
No collaboration can be fully reconstructed.However, by "letting the archives speak" and following the material traces of Gregory and Hyde's creative partnership, we can get a deeper understanding of how their network worked. 78In her article on the potential benefits of Actor-Network Theory for translation studies, Buzelin calls for a "genesis of literary translations" that takes into account "strategies, negotiations, struggles, conflictsbut also alliances" involved in bilingual literary production. 79Drawing on the translation manuscripts in the Berg Collection helps to provide such insight into Hyde's and Gregory's creative strategies.An analysis of the different textual versions of this play further erodes the "battle of two civilizations" model that P. J. Mathews has critiqued as being overly influential in studies of the Revival. 80Instead, what we see is the bilingual nature of their collaboration, with Gaelicisms and Anglicisms cross-pollinating different versions, and each author involved in shaping English and Irish versions of each other's texts.
Such genetic research can also extend our notion of authorship.Previous scholarship has led us to reconsider the authorship of revivalist plays once considered the work of a single writer, the best-known example being the belated inclusion of Gregory as co-76 This stigma is already evident in Gregory's scenario, where the sister "doesnt [sic] like to think of her brother being in the workhouse" (PTS 01r). 77Ní Mhuircheartaigh, "Drámaíocht Dhúchasach?", 40. 78Houlihan, Theatre and Archival Memory, 249. 79Buzelin, "Unexpected Allies", 208. 80Mathews, Revival.
author, with Yeats, of Cathleen ni Houlihan.What I have suggested above is a further reconsideration of authorial activity in collaboratively composed texts, particularly when it comes to future editions of Gregory's and Hyde's works.When there are new editions of these playwrights' dramas, it would be worth including all plays in which they had a significant creative input.Furthermore, since we know that there were multiple hands at work on many of the plays that emerged from the Coole "workshop", this argument may be relevant for other cases within the Irish Revival, and possibly beyond it as well.
Alongside these alliances, "struggles" and "conflicts" existed too, with Gregory often finding herself sidelined as a female author in a male-dominated network, even writing herself out of her retrospective account of her collaborations with Hyde.She was clearly put out to be told she should hand a play over to Hyde for composition in Irish.However, having built up the strongest stage record of any Abbey playwright, five years later she reclaimed the text by adapting it as The Workhouse Ward.The conflict within the play in the form of vituperative "talk" found its counterpart in the offstage world around Gort, and, knowing what we know about the difficulties women have faced in the Irish cultural sphere, it is difficult to believe that anti-Gregory gossip in the wake of Synge's Playboy did not also have gendered aspects to it. 81hile Gregory faced opposition in Gort following the Playboy riots, the 1908 staging of The Workhouse Ward firmly established her as the Abbey's leading playwright, with the Freeman's Journal calling her "the most prolific" as well as "the healthiest and most attractive" of the Irish National Theatre Society writers. 82As we know, this reputation did not last: having been performed almost every year from 1908 until the Second World War, Gregory's Workhouse Ward has only had five productions at the Abbey since 1945, only recently to be revived. 83However, O'Leary's extensive list of Irish-language translations of Gregory's work shows that her plays did not fall out of favour in Irish.O'Leary points out that Gregory was the most popular revivalist playwright when it came to translations of her work into that language, indicating that the staged afterlife of Gregory's work has needed the language just as much as the early versions did. 84Engaging further with archival materials in both languages promises to tell us more about the collaborations and networks of the Irish Revival, thus deepening our knowledge of the politics of bilingual theatre collaboration.