Gregory, (Isabella) Augusta, Lady

Gregory, (Isabella) Augusta, Lady (1852–1932), Irish landowner, who entered the theatre in middle age with an unsuspected gift for comedy-writing which, but for her contact with Yeats and the Irish dramatic movement, might never have been realized. She proved an indefatigable worker in the movement which led to the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. In 1909 she won a notable victory for the Abbey by frustrating attempts to suppress the production of Shaw's The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, and in 1911 took the company on a stormy and triumphant visit to America. The best known of her numerous masterly short plays are comedies of peasant life: The Pot of Broth (with Yeats, 1902), Spreading the News (1904), Hyacinth Halvey (1906), and The Workhouse Ward (1908); but she is also known for two fine patriotic plays, Cathleen ni Houlihan (with Yeats, 1902), and The Rising of the Moon (1907), and for one brief peasant tragedy, The Gaol Gate (1906). Later she wrote fantasies of mingled humour, pathos, and poetic imagination—The Travelling Man (1910), The Dragon (1919), Aristotle's Bellows (1921), and others. She also contributed to the Abbey repertory many translations, of which The Kiltartan Molière, a version of several of Molière's plays transplanted to the west of Ireland, is the best known.