The uneasy relationship between Irish writing and Irish myth a half-century ago may be seen in a controversy carried on by some leading Irish writers in 1899. It was concerned with the question of what the subjects of a national drama should be. To get the setting right one should recall that the year of the controversy was the year of the foundation of the Irish Literary Society, that the Abbey Theatre was still unborn and that a discussion about what directions an Irish dramatic movement might take must have seemed to most people outside the literary circle which had conceived it rather like a discussion between a newly-married couple about what profession their son would follow, if they had a child and if it was a boy and if he lived to become a man.

By that time, of course, the stimulating power of Irish myth and legend had been shown in the early work of Yeats and other poets of the Irish Literary Revival. The controversy began when John Eglinton, one of the best critics of the movement, suggested that this might not be the case with dramatists. ‘The ancient legends of Ireland undoubtedly contain situations and characters as well suited for drama as most of those used in the Greek tragedies which have come down to us’, he wrote, ‘but these subjects obstinately refuse to be taken out of their old environment and be transplanted into the world of modem sympathies. The proper mode of treating them is a secret lost with the subjects themselves.’