The Rising Of The Moon By Lady Gregory Analysis

The Rising of the Moon by Lady Gregory was a play published on March 9th, 1907 at the Abbey Theatre. The theatre being known for Irish literature and drama, the majority of Gregory’s plays were performed there. Different literary critic have slightly different suggestions on what they consider the main theme of this play to be. Two analysis of Lady Gregory and her one-act play that will be presented in this paper are by Elaine T. Partnow and Edward A. Kopper Jr. Two people who can be considered credible sources considering they are both authors of books on women playwrights in the time of Lady Gregory. The different analysis that each critics gives, gives readers a deeper understanding of the the theme of this play, therefore being able to …show more content…
Kopper Jr., who’s a part of the Department of English at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, as well as the author of Lady Gregory’s autobiography, Lady Isabella Persse Gregory. His analysis of the one-act play consists of a mixture of the anticolonialism in Irish history as well as the characteristic of the Irishmen, “Lady Gregory is not primarily interested in extolling the escape of a convict, however much of a picaro he might have been. Rather, she is presenting on the stage the overriding sense of Irish hospitality, seen here in the sergeant’s residual goodness and love for a fellow Irishman: no true Western Islander would ever turn away a fugitive from the British establishment. . .” (Kopper). In his analysis, he mentions how Lady Gregory connects a real Irish nationalist with the criminal in the play, who uses the name Jimmy Walshe as a cover. The real Jimmy Walshe was a convicted criminal on the run from the British government similar to the man in the play. However he used the alias James Lynchehaun and escaped to America. This is an example of the detail and attention to history she puts into her plays, even the small ones. Lady Gregory helped founded the Irish Literary Theater with William Butler Yeats, which focused on the rise of the Irish national movement. Later on it became known as the Abbey Theatre. She was also deeply involved in the fight for Irish independence from Britain. Taking her background into consideration, readers can understand her prominent theme of Irish history in the majority her literary work. Historical perspectives can help shed light on the reasoning behind a work of literature. Furthermore, a history background in literature gives it a chance to live on for generations upon generations for those who read