dressmaker and the dressed, of the milliner and the
millinered, in gown or hat.

The National Theatre Society, Limited, which is the legal name of the
organization that controls the Abbey Theatre Company, may not play what
plays it will at the Abbey; the two leading theatres of commerce in
Dublin, the Gaiety and the Theatre Royal, having, as Mr. Yeats records,
"vigorously opposed" the Abbey being given "a patent as little
restricted" as their own. "The Solicitor-General," Mr. Yeats continues,
"to meet them halfway, has restricted our patent to plays written by
Irishmen or on Irish subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided these
masterpieces are not English." This restriction has not interfered with
any feature of the work of the Abbey Theatre, Mr. Yeats believes, save
in the building-up of an audience, some people remaining away, perhaps,
who might have been attracted had "such bodies as the Elizabethan Stage
Society, which brought 'Everyman' to Dublin some years ago, been able to
hire the theatre."

No phase of the dramatic movement has been more interesting and none
has been more important than this building-up of an audience to
appreciate the plays. Whether with the poetic plays of Mr. Yeats and the
ironic extravaganzas of Synge alone, such an audience as has been built
up--an audience estimated by Mr. Yeats in 1906 to consist of four
thousand young men and women--could have been won is problematical; that
is, it may be doubted that the very best the movement has produced would
have attracted a sufficient audience to enable the company to keep
together after the expiration in 1910 of Miss Horniman's guarantee.
Certain it is, however, that Lady Gregory's farces were a great help,
both in building up and in holding the Abbey audience. It was for the
purpose of affording comic relief to the plays of Mr. Yeats and to the
first plays of Synge that Lady Gregory started to create them. They
attracted all who loved laughter and merriness and a loving caricature
of country-folk,--and who do not?--and one of them, "The Rising of the
Moon" (1907), had a distinct patriotic appeal, as had Mr. Yeats's
"Cathleen ni Houlihan," which brought some who would not otherwise have
come to the Abbey Theatre. The third most definitely "national" play of
the movement, "The Piper" (1908) of Mr. O'Riordan, may have also drawn
some who would not otherwise have come to the theatre, but if it did so
it brought them there, as did "The Playboy