The Censor in Each of Us ,” by Colm Tóibín. In any discussion of censorship in an emerging or changing or fragile society, this story is instructive and salutary.

This piece is drawn from the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, given by Colm Tóibín as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

It began, as many things do, with a dream. In the summer of 1901, while staying at Coole Park, the house that had belonged to Lady Gregory’s husband and now belonged to her son, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats had a dream that was “almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak” who was “Ireland herself,” personified as Cathleen ni Houlihan, “for whom so many songs have been sung, and about whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death.”

The play that came from the dream was performed as “Cathleen ni Houlihan” in Dublin, in April, 1902. In the text, which is in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, there is a note in Lady Gregory’s handwriting: “All this mine alone.” And then, toward the end, “This with WBY.” It was clear to some even when it was first performed that most of the play was written by Lady Gregory, who was a playwright and translator, but the official author on the program was W. B. Yeats. Now, more than a hundred years later, it is in both his and her collected works.

The play had, on its first performance, an enormous impact. This was helped by the vivid sense of domestic space and the naturalistic dialogue, and by the talk of money and marriage. But the impact was itself caused by the sudden and mysterious transformation of an old woman into a young woman, a young woman “with the walk of a Queen,” the transformation caused by the arrival of French forces in the west of Ireland, in 1798, to assist in the struggle for Irish freedom. The audience understood that this change in the woman represented Ireland and what could happen to Ireland, were they to devote themselves to its cause. The hall was packed every night. The woman, both young and old, played by Yeats’s muse, Maud Gonne, seemed to lure the imagination away from everyday materialism and toward the heroic, from ordinary speech toward the poetic, the suggestive. The play showed how important and, indeed, how disturbing images of transformation could be in a society in which there was repression, paralysis, political stagnation, a strange vacuum. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play “which might lead a man to do something foolish.” In the way it affected the audience, “Cathleen ni Houlihan” made clear how powerful words, poetry, and pure and risky theatrical images could be in a place where people had learned to distrust political speeches and the language of the official world, a place in which there was a hunger for something in the public realm that was new and could be trusted and almost believed.

It was left to writers to create the dream, and soon the dream of transformation became the dream of revolution. Years later, in a poem, W. B. Yeats would ask the stark question: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?”

This would then be an easy story to tell if Yeats and Lady Gregory themselves had been revolutionaries, ready only to use art to create political change, ready only to use their work in the theatre to inspire an audience to undermine the civil power. The story is more complicated because the play was merely one of their moods. Like the moods of most artists, their moods came in many guises. They believed in the glittering imagination, the image as something unstable and free, something without limits. They did not toe any party line. But, in the work they would do in Ireland over the next twenty-five years, they would have to navigate in waters where others believed that art had a single purpose, or who had solid aims, or who believed in setting limits to what a writer could say or what images the theatre could portray.

In any discussion of censorship in an emerging or changing or fragile society, this story is instructive and salutary.

The play helped the reputation of W. B. Yeats with the growing number of Irish Catholic patriots, some of whom had been disturbed by the less-than-flattering image of the Irish peasant and by the use of superstition in a previous play of his. In every society where there is an urge to censor, there is always already in place some rawness, some grievance, a fear of the outside world, a hunger for images that are comforting and comfortable, images that cover the national or social or religious wound, or attempt to heal it. And there is a deep and often visceral resistance to images that expose the wound or throw salt on it. This is what makes the battle against censorship in religious societies or developing societies so difficult to manage.

Thus, the real trouble began when Yeats and Lady Gregory and the Abbey Theatre, which would dedicate itself to present new Irish plays to an Irish audience in Dublin, began to produce the work of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge. It mattered, of course, that all three were Protestants in a country where the majority were Catholic, and all three were cosmopolitan in a country that was becoming increasingly insular. James Joyce, in an encounter in his great story “The Dead,” would dramatize the clash between the protagonist, Gabriel, who writes for an English newspaper and takes his holidays in Europe, and Miss Ivors, who tells him that Irish is his language, not English, and that he should go to the west of Ireland on his holidays rather than to Europe.

Synge wrote his plays about Irish peasant life with wit and complexity at a time when many people wanted solemnity and simplicity, when they wanted the theatre to protect rather than provoke. When his play “The Shadow of the Glen,” in which Nora Burke, a married woman, runs away with a tramp, was performed, in 1903, the attacks on Synge began. And they did not come from England, or from any government, but from Irish patriots who were attempting to idealize and recreate a new Ireland. Arthur Griffith, for example, the founder of the nationalist party Sinn Fein, wrote, “Mr Synge’s Nora Burke is not an Irish Nora Burke, his play is not a work of genius—Irish or otherwise—it is a foul echo from degenerate Greece.” Maud Gonne joined the attacks: “Mr Yeats asks for freedom for the theatre … I would ask for freedom for it from one thing more deadly than all else—freedom from the insidious and destructive tyranny of foreign influence.”