Hear a discussion on The Death of Fionavar, 1916 play by sisters Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz published during the Rising
Hear a discussion on The Death of Fionavar, 1916 play by sisters Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz published during the Rising
A discussion of The Death of Fionavar (1916), a play by Eva Gore-Booth with illustrations by her sister Constance Markievicz.
University College Cork, Ireland (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Transcript
On the 2nd of November in 2015, the 1916 play by the Irish writer Eva Gore-Booth, The Death of Fionavar, was performed as a staged reading at Cork City Jail. Now Cork City Jail is where Constance Markievicsz, sister of the playwright, spent time in prison during the Civil War.
We missed the opportunity to perform the play closer to that date of its actual publication. The actual temporal setting was as evocative as the physical setting, because we were able to put it on on All Souls Day. And the play is actually set on Samhain. So we were in that mystical time when the division between this world and the next is at its thinnest, which is important to the play.
The piece was performed by a combination of professional actors and students from the drama and theater studies department here in UCC under the direction of Dr. Marie Kelly. We also had some alumni students in the performance. And it was directed by Julie Kelleher, who is the artistic director at the Everyman. The performance was made possible by the Irish Research Council from a fund for commemorative activities.
Now the play The Death of Fionavar was in fact a commemorative publication that appeared in May 1916, just a few weeks after the Rising. And it was decorated for this particular publication with drawings. And "decoration" is the word that Markievicz used. Markievicz herself did the illustrations while in jail. As we know, she was sentenced to death for her part in the Rising. She claimed to have done these beautiful black and white drawings using quills that she fashioned out of rook's feathers that she found in the prison yard.
The play is dedicated to the martyrs of the Rising. There's a poem that prefaces the play in which Gore-Booth refers to those participants in the Rising as "poets, utopians, bravest of the brave, dreamers turned fighters, but to find a grave." Now that word "utopia" associated with Eva Gore-Booth recurs in 1927 in a better known text by Yeats, the poem "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz."
And the poem opens, "Light of evening, Lissadell, great windows open to the south. Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle." The gazelle being Eva Gore-Booth, for whom apparently Yeats nurtured a little bit of an infatuation. He never acted on it, however. The poem goes on to regret the grown beautiful girls' engagement with various political activities, including what he refers to in connection with Eva Gore- Booth, "vague utopia," presumably the dream of the 1916 rebels.
Now the sisters met Yeats while they were still young women in Lissadell. And Yeats, to his great credit, recognized Gore-Booth's considerable literary powers, and he was influential in helping her get started in her very successful literary career. She published nine well-received volumes of poetry. Her poetry and prose appeared in magazines, journals, newspapers all around the English speaking world.
She was extremely well known, though we have forgotten her, a very popular poet. She also published seven plays that would sometimes be published alongside poems. However, her success in getting the plays actually onto the stage was not as great as her publication record. In fact, there was one rather unfortunate back and forth between herself and the National Theater about staging Unseen Kings, which they decided to pass on in the end.
Nearly all of Gore-Booth's plays take Irish myth and legend as their source material. And she was very conscious of growing up in a kind of heroic landscape there in and around Sligo. She was particularly taken with the figure of Maeve, and who was supposedly buried at Knocknarea, not too far from Lissadell House.
In fact, Gore-Booth used Maeve more than once as subject of her writing. And you will notice in the performance that Knocknarea is mentioned many times. Other physical landmarks from in and around Sligo such as Rosses Point are also identified. Clearly the play is set very concretely in that Sligo landscape.
The Death of Fionavar is taken from a longer play about Maeve called The Triumph of Maeve, which was originally published in 1905. In that longer play we find out more about the kind of the gender dynamics and the politics of the court. We find out that Fergus, is in fact, plotting against Maeve. And even the harper, Nera, who appears with spring flowers in his hair at the opening of the play-- spring flowers that have come from Tir na nog, where he had spent a year.
His descriptions of that land and the she appear to be maybe designed in order to tempt Maeve into thinking about conquering that realm. Certainly Meave's responses to what Nera describes about the wonders of Tir na nog make her think that this is a much more wondrous land than any she has conquered or annexed previously. And so she does, in fact, make a siege on the land of the she.
Of course, she fails. She falls into an enchanted sleep having drunk from a stream at the entrance to Tir na nog. And she is visited in her dream by the spirit of Deirdre, a very important figure to Maeve. Maeve evokes Deirdre many times in the play.
Deirdre lets Maeve know that force is not the way into Tir na nog. And it's not long after that The Death of Fionavar begins. And it begins, as you will notice, with a woman speaking, the Druidess who is prophesying the death of Fionavar. Fionavar being the much beloved 16-year-old daughter of Maeve.
Now the love between daughter and mother is very beautifully portrayed in the play. And it may be seen as the weak spot or the soft spot in the otherwise very marshal, strong-willed Maeve who is in perfect control of all of her warriors and courtiers, except when it comes to her daughter. And this is typical of Gore-Booth's plays, which tend to feature relationships between women, and also strong women. And you can see how using myth and legend can really lend itself to the representation of emotionally and physically powerful warrior queens and goddesses.
In addition to the poems and dedications that preface the play, there is a three page prose piece about the way in which Eva Gore-Booth has taken liberties, and that is her own phrase, taken liberties with these myths. Now she's anticipating what she knows is the criticism she is in for, for deploying this kind of national mythic iconography in a way very different from the ways in which her male contemporaries were using it.
Maeve's grief at the death of Fionavar is very touching, very effective. It's one of the really most powerful passages in the performance. It's especially moving if we realize that while Eva Gore-Booth was preparing this commemorative edition of the play, her sister was under sentence of death.
The sisters were very close. They had an exceptionally close relationship. Constance did not long survive the death of her younger sister Eva. While Constance was in prison, wherever she was in prison, they would set aside, the sisters would set aside an hour every day, usually kind of around dawn or dusk, one of those transitional times of day, in which they would think of nothing but each other in the hopes of establishing a telepathic connection.
So when Maeve is begging the corpse of her daughter Fionavar to open the gates of Tir na nog to her, it's impossible not to think of Eva Gore-Booth at the same time as she is preparing this manuscript wildly grieving for the impending death of her sister. She would say things at the time such as, "I wish she were killed in the heat and glory of battle rather than so coldly executed." It was a very painful time for her.
However, even in this depth of despair, Gore-Booth was able to entertain some kind of hope. And I think, in many ways, this publication is an expression of that. Gore-Booth was somebody who was interested in theosophy.
She was particularly invested in the idea of reincarnation. And she saw it as important not only spiritually, but philosophically, and even aesthetically. This idea of eternal return and the cyclical structure of time, it's something that we see in Yeats, also interested in theosophy. And his "widening gyer" is a representation, a poetic representation of that spinning way that time works in this cosmic context.
And in fact, that design of the helixing, spinning shape is something that we see throughout the text in Markievicz's design. She incorporates many theosophical symbols, such as the caduceus, the ouroboros, even primroses were important in various hermetic groups at the time, including theosophy. And so we have then the sisters possibly using this text as a way of expressing their hope that they never be parted.
Though Maeve's feeling at the end of the play that she will now be able to enter Tir na nog. It's not that she's going to commit suicide, but that she has kind of come to peace with her life. And she is now ready for this kind of reunion with her daughter, clearly reflects the sisters' feelings that even in the depths of despair, they would be reunited.
So not only the plot, but the illustrations of the play really gesture towards this idea of transcendence of pain and of war. Often, really almost all the time, this play is read as anti-war. And I think that that's an overly simplistic way of looking at the text, especially if you read other writings of Gore-Booth's about both the Rising and in general, this idea that peace is only possible through pain.
She shared her sister's belief in the Rising. Utopia is achievable. But it requires sacrifice, including war, suffering. So even at their darkest moment, I think both sisters believed they would see each other again somewhere, sometime.
We missed the opportunity to perform the play closer to that date of its actual publication. The actual temporal setting was as evocative as the physical setting, because we were able to put it on on All Souls Day. And the play is actually set on Samhain. So we were in that mystical time when the division between this world and the next is at its thinnest, which is important to the play.
The piece was performed by a combination of professional actors and students from the drama and theater studies department here in UCC under the direction of Dr. Marie Kelly. We also had some alumni students in the performance. And it was directed by Julie Kelleher, who is the artistic director at the Everyman. The performance was made possible by the Irish Research Council from a fund for commemorative activities.
Now the play The Death of Fionavar was in fact a commemorative publication that appeared in May 1916, just a few weeks after the Rising. And it was decorated for this particular publication with drawings. And "decoration" is the word that Markievicz used. Markievicz herself did the illustrations while in jail. As we know, she was sentenced to death for her part in the Rising. She claimed to have done these beautiful black and white drawings using quills that she fashioned out of rook's feathers that she found in the prison yard.
The play is dedicated to the martyrs of the Rising. There's a poem that prefaces the play in which Gore-Booth refers to those participants in the Rising as "poets, utopians, bravest of the brave, dreamers turned fighters, but to find a grave." Now that word "utopia" associated with Eva Gore-Booth recurs in 1927 in a better known text by Yeats, the poem "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz."
And the poem opens, "Light of evening, Lissadell, great windows open to the south. Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle." The gazelle being Eva Gore-Booth, for whom apparently Yeats nurtured a little bit of an infatuation. He never acted on it, however. The poem goes on to regret the grown beautiful girls' engagement with various political activities, including what he refers to in connection with Eva Gore- Booth, "vague utopia," presumably the dream of the 1916 rebels.
Now the sisters met Yeats while they were still young women in Lissadell. And Yeats, to his great credit, recognized Gore-Booth's considerable literary powers, and he was influential in helping her get started in her very successful literary career. She published nine well-received volumes of poetry. Her poetry and prose appeared in magazines, journals, newspapers all around the English speaking world.
She was extremely well known, though we have forgotten her, a very popular poet. She also published seven plays that would sometimes be published alongside poems. However, her success in getting the plays actually onto the stage was not as great as her publication record. In fact, there was one rather unfortunate back and forth between herself and the National Theater about staging Unseen Kings, which they decided to pass on in the end.
Nearly all of Gore-Booth's plays take Irish myth and legend as their source material. And she was very conscious of growing up in a kind of heroic landscape there in and around Sligo. She was particularly taken with the figure of Maeve, and who was supposedly buried at Knocknarea, not too far from Lissadell House.
In fact, Gore-Booth used Maeve more than once as subject of her writing. And you will notice in the performance that Knocknarea is mentioned many times. Other physical landmarks from in and around Sligo such as Rosses Point are also identified. Clearly the play is set very concretely in that Sligo landscape.
The Death of Fionavar is taken from a longer play about Maeve called The Triumph of Maeve, which was originally published in 1905. In that longer play we find out more about the kind of the gender dynamics and the politics of the court. We find out that Fergus, is in fact, plotting against Maeve. And even the harper, Nera, who appears with spring flowers in his hair at the opening of the play-- spring flowers that have come from Tir na nog, where he had spent a year.
His descriptions of that land and the she appear to be maybe designed in order to tempt Maeve into thinking about conquering that realm. Certainly Meave's responses to what Nera describes about the wonders of Tir na nog make her think that this is a much more wondrous land than any she has conquered or annexed previously. And so she does, in fact, make a siege on the land of the she.
Of course, she fails. She falls into an enchanted sleep having drunk from a stream at the entrance to Tir na nog. And she is visited in her dream by the spirit of Deirdre, a very important figure to Maeve. Maeve evokes Deirdre many times in the play.
Deirdre lets Maeve know that force is not the way into Tir na nog. And it's not long after that The Death of Fionavar begins. And it begins, as you will notice, with a woman speaking, the Druidess who is prophesying the death of Fionavar. Fionavar being the much beloved 16-year-old daughter of Maeve.
Now the love between daughter and mother is very beautifully portrayed in the play. And it may be seen as the weak spot or the soft spot in the otherwise very marshal, strong-willed Maeve who is in perfect control of all of her warriors and courtiers, except when it comes to her daughter. And this is typical of Gore-Booth's plays, which tend to feature relationships between women, and also strong women. And you can see how using myth and legend can really lend itself to the representation of emotionally and physically powerful warrior queens and goddesses.
In addition to the poems and dedications that preface the play, there is a three page prose piece about the way in which Eva Gore-Booth has taken liberties, and that is her own phrase, taken liberties with these myths. Now she's anticipating what she knows is the criticism she is in for, for deploying this kind of national mythic iconography in a way very different from the ways in which her male contemporaries were using it.
Maeve's grief at the death of Fionavar is very touching, very effective. It's one of the really most powerful passages in the performance. It's especially moving if we realize that while Eva Gore-Booth was preparing this commemorative edition of the play, her sister was under sentence of death.
The sisters were very close. They had an exceptionally close relationship. Constance did not long survive the death of her younger sister Eva. While Constance was in prison, wherever she was in prison, they would set aside, the sisters would set aside an hour every day, usually kind of around dawn or dusk, one of those transitional times of day, in which they would think of nothing but each other in the hopes of establishing a telepathic connection.
So when Maeve is begging the corpse of her daughter Fionavar to open the gates of Tir na nog to her, it's impossible not to think of Eva Gore-Booth at the same time as she is preparing this manuscript wildly grieving for the impending death of her sister. She would say things at the time such as, "I wish she were killed in the heat and glory of battle rather than so coldly executed." It was a very painful time for her.
However, even in this depth of despair, Gore-Booth was able to entertain some kind of hope. And I think, in many ways, this publication is an expression of that. Gore-Booth was somebody who was interested in theosophy.
She was particularly invested in the idea of reincarnation. And she saw it as important not only spiritually, but philosophically, and even aesthetically. This idea of eternal return and the cyclical structure of time, it's something that we see in Yeats, also interested in theosophy. And his "widening gyer" is a representation, a poetic representation of that spinning way that time works in this cosmic context.
And in fact, that design of the helixing, spinning shape is something that we see throughout the text in Markievicz's design. She incorporates many theosophical symbols, such as the caduceus, the ouroboros, even primroses were important in various hermetic groups at the time, including theosophy. And so we have then the sisters possibly using this text as a way of expressing their hope that they never be parted.
Though Maeve's feeling at the end of the play that she will now be able to enter Tir na nog. It's not that she's going to commit suicide, but that she has kind of come to peace with her life. And she is now ready for this kind of reunion with her daughter, clearly reflects the sisters' feelings that even in the depths of despair, they would be reunited.
So not only the plot, but the illustrations of the play really gesture towards this idea of transcendence of pain and of war. Often, really almost all the time, this play is read as anti-war. And I think that that's an overly simplistic way of looking at the text, especially if you read other writings of Gore-Booth's about both the Rising and in general, this idea that peace is only possible through pain.
She shared her sister's belief in the Rising. Utopia is achievable. But it requires sacrifice, including war, suffering. So even at their darkest moment, I think both sisters believed they would see each other again somewhere, sometime.