New Comedies — Background and Themes

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In Category - Fantasy Juvenile Worlds

Authors: Gregory, Lady, 1852-1932 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2004 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Comedy plays Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 37,917

Reading time 165 min

Text sections 4

The catalog record for New Comedies — Background and Themes provides practical reading context through 37,917 words, 2 hr 45 min estimated reading time, and 4 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 14.6 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Comedy plays,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #11749

Lady Gregory's five one-act comedies blend Irish dialect, rural wit, and shifts between idle chatter and sudden fortune. The plays hinge on mistaken identities, hidden money, and the gap between aspiration and reality, with dialogue that moves from meandering gossip to sharp, revealing exchanges.

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Text length15 pts
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File: pg11749

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Fiddane was my station; Cloon is my dwelling-place; And (I hope) heaven is my destination.

Mary Broderick is my name, Cloon was my--

_Cracked Mary:_ _(With a cackle of delight.)_ Give heed to them now, Davideen! That's the way the crazed people used to be going on in the place where I was, every one thinking the other to be cracked.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ _(To Tannian.)_ Look now at your great figuring! Argus with his hundred eyes wouldn't know is that a nought or is it a nine without a tail.

_Peter Tannian:_ Leave that blame on a little ridge that is in the nature of the chalk. Look now at Mary Broderick, that it has failed to word out her verse.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ Ah, what signifies? I'd never get light greatly. It wouldn't be worth while I to go mad.

_(Bartley Fallon gives a deep groan.)_

_Shawn Early:_ What is on you, Bartley?

_Bartley Fallon:_ I'm in dread it is I myself has got the venom into my blood.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What makes you think that?

_Bartley Fallon:_ It's a sort of a thing would be apt to happen me, and any malice to fall within the town at all.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ Give heed to him, Hyacinth Halvey; you are the most man we have to baffle any wrong thing coming in our midst!

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Is it that you are feeling any pain as of a wound or a sore?

_Bartley Fallon:_ Some sort of a little catch I'm thinking there is in under my knee. I would feel no pain unless I would turn it contrary.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ What class of feeling would you say you are feeling?

_Bartley Fallon:_ I am feeling as if the five fingers of my hand to be lessening from me, the same as five farthing dips the heat of the sun would be sweating the tallow from.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ That is a strange account.

_Bartley Fallon:_ And a sort of a megrim in my head, the same as a sheep would get a fit of staggers in a field.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ That is what I would look for. Is there some sort of a roaring in your ear?

_Bartley Fallon:_ There is, there is, as if I would hear voices would be talking.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ Would you feel any wish to go tearing and destroying?

_Bartley Fallon:_ I would indeed, and there to be an enemy upon my path. Would you say now, Widow Broderick, am I getting anyway flushy in the face?

_Mrs. Broderick:_ Don't leave your eye off him for pity's sake. He is reddening as red as a rose.

_Bartley Fallon:_ I could as if walk on the wind with lightness. Something that is rising in my veins the same as froth would be rising on a pint.

_Hyacinth Halvey:_ It is the doctor I'd best call for--and maybe the sergeant and the priest.

_Bartley Fallon:_ There are three thoughts going through my mind--to hang myself or to drown myself, or to cut my neck with a reaping-hook.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ It is the doctor will serve him best, where it is the mad blood that should be bled away. To break up eggs, the white of them, in a tin can, will put new blood in him, and whiskey, and to taste no food through twenty-one days.

_Bartley Fallon:_ I'm thinking so long a fast wouldn't serve me. I wouldn't wish the lads will bear my body to the grave, to lay down there was nothing within it but a grasshopper or a wisp of dry grass.

_Shawn Early:_ No, but to cut a piece out of his leg the doctor will, the way the poison will get no leave to work.

_Peter Tannian:_ Or to burn it with red-hot irons, the way it will not scatter itself and grow. There does a doctor do that out in foreign.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ It would be more natural to cut the leg off him in some sort of a Christian way.

_Shawn Early:_ If it was a pig was bit, or a sow or a bonav, it to show the signs, it would be shot, if it was a whole fleet of them was in it.

_Mrs. Broderick:_ I knew of a man that was butler in a big house was bit, and they tied him first and smothered him after, and his master shot the dog. A splendid shot he was; the thing he'd not see he'd hit it the same as the thing he'd see. I heard that from an outside neighbour of my own, a woman that told no lies.

Continue Reading →

Lady Gregory's New Comedies opens with two chimney sweeps trading boasts about imaginary relations and future wealth, their banter circling around a coach that never arrives. The dialogue moves in loops—Taig and Darby each claim a cousin with money, each hint at a scheme—until the talk itself becomes the action. Gregory lets the characters talk themselves into corners, then out again, using repetition and contradiction to build comic tension.

Across the five plays, the voice shifts from the sweeps' wary one-upmanship to the clipped, practical complaints of servants in The Full Moon, where Delia, Staffy, and Ralph size up a stranger's house and his neglected belongings. The pace changes with each scene: leisurely speculation gives way to brisk, purposeful dusting and potato-roasting as the characters prepare for an arrival that may or may not bring reward.

Dialogue as Delayed Action

In The Bogie Men, the entire first scene consists of two men talking about what they will do—ride in a coach, gamble, sleep in feathers—without any of it happening. Gregory delays physical action so long that the audience begins to suspect the talk itself is the performance. Darby's showy suit stays hidden in his bag; the coach never appears. The play's comedy depends on the gap between what the characters claim and what they actually do.

This pattern recurs in The Full Moon, where Delia, Staffy, and Ralph spend most of the scene discussing a man who has not yet arrived. They handle his coat, his hat, his pack of cards, and his dusty clock, but the man himself remains offstage. The action is all preparation and speculation. Gregory uses this delay to let the audience form expectations, then subverts them when the man finally appears—or does not.

Objects That Tell Stories

Gregory loads her stage with things that carry history. In The Full Moon, a coat and hat hanging on a nail are described as having been worn by a man riding a long-tailed pony to every racecourse from the area to the Curragh of Kildare. A pack of cards on a shelf is guessed to be the same one that brought him profit in his wild days. The dust on them, Delia says, might have been gathering since the time of the Hebrews' Flood.

These objects do not just sit there; they prompt memory and judgment. The characters read the coat, the cards, the clock, and the turf as evidence of a man's rise and fall. Gregory uses these props to compress backstory into a few lines, letting the audience infer a whole life from a worn hat or a lucky deck. The physical details anchor the dialogue in a specific, tangible world.

Shifts in Pace and Register

The plays move between two speeds: the slow, circling talk of people with time to waste, and the sudden, brisk activity when a goal appears. In The Bogie Men, the sweeps' conversation meanders through boasts and complaints until Taig mentions the coach, at which point the rhythm tightens. In The Full Moon, Delia shifts from lamenting the house's bareness to giving orders—stir the turf, dust the shoes, set the clock—as she decides to impress the absent owner.

Gregory also varies the register. The sweeps speak in long, conditional sentences: "If I came paddling along... it is likely I will have my choice way." The servants use shorter, more imperative phrases: "Stir yourself, Staffy," "Let you do it, Ralph so." These shifts in syntax mirror the characters' social positions and their changing moods, from idle dreaming to focused work.

Because the excerpts cover only the opening of two plays, the full shape of each comedy remains unknown. Readers should watch for how Gregory resolves the tension between talk and action—whether the coach arrives, whether the man appears, whether the hidden money or the lucky cards actually change anyone's fortune. The plays reward attention to small physical details and to the way characters use language to test, evade, and persuade.

Reading Lady Gregory's idle chatter turning suddenly sharp reminds me of evenings on my grandmother's porch, where loose talk about neighbors sometimes uncovered hidden truths. That same quiet pivot from drift to revelation stirred me in The Lady from the Sea — A Closer Reading, where longing floats beneath calm words until a single decision breaks the surface. Both feel like watching water change without warning.