CONTENTS: Yeats [Cathleen Ni Houlihan; On Baile’s Strand; Purgatory]; Lady Gregory [Spreading of the News; The Rising of the Moon]; J. M. Synge [Riders to the Sea; The Playboy of the Western World]; Bernard Shaw [John Bull’s Other Island]; Sean O’Casey [Juno and the Paycock]; Brendan Behan [The Quare Fellow]; Samuel Beckett [Krapp’s Last Tape]; Brian Friel [Translations].

Selection of ‘Background & Criticism’ [375ff.] incls. Lady Gregory [Our Irish Theatre; Journal 1923-24]; John Eglinton [‘What Should be the Subjects of a National Drama?’]; W. B. Yeats [‘An Irish National Theatre’; ‘An Introduction to My Plays’; pref. to 1st Edn. of Synge’s The Well of the Saints, and extract on the controversy over Synge’s Playboy of the Western World]; Frank J. Fay [‘An Irish National Theatre’]; Ernest Boyd [The Dramatic Movement]; Phillip L. Marcus [Yeats and the Irish Renaissance]; Lady Gregory [on Spreading of the News]; J. M. Synge [Pref. to The Playboy of the Western World]; Joseph Holloway [Journal 1907; Journal 1923-24]; Bernard Shaw [‘Preface for Politicians’], and other passages from latter-day critics. Selected Bibliography.