Cathleen Ní Houlihan

"Cathleen Ní Houlihan" is a one act play written by Irish playwright William Butler Yeats in collaboration with Lady Gregory in 1902 and first performed on April 2, 1902. The play is startlingly nationalistic, encouraging in its last pages that young men sacrifice their lives for the heroine Cathleen Ní Houlihan, who represents an independent and separate Irish state. The title character first appears as an old woman, at the door of a family celebrating their son's wedding. She describes her four "beautiful green fields," representing the four provinces, that have been unjustly taken from her. With little subtlety, she requests a blood sacrifice, declaring that "many a child will be born and there will be no father at the christening". When the youth agrees and leaves the safety of his home to fight for her, she appears as an image of youth with "the walk of a queen," professing that of those who fight for her: "They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever." [W. B. Yeats, "Nine One-Act Plays (1937), p. 36] This call to immortality through martyrdom is not unique to the Irish struggle for independence.

References

External links

* [http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6142 Literary Encyclopedia: Cathleen ni Houlihan]
* [http://www.gmu.edu/org/ireland32/houlihan_essay.html Ireland 32 Journal Essay]
* [http://www.nli.ie/yeats/ The National Library of Ireland's exhibition on Yeats features many manuscript drafts of this play and photographs from the 1902 production featuring M Gonne.]