The bibiographical question posed in this note - which developed of its own accord into something of an essay - concerns the textual history of a dialogue that formed the substance of a play performed under the title of The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth in 1911 and a story included in the collection called Here Are Ladies, published in 1913. Two theories regarding it have been aired by different critics (and in one case by the same critic writing on different occasions): either the play was preceded by a story with the same material published in a Dublin journal at an unknown earlier date and afterwards republished in the collection of 1913 again in story-form or the latter was simply derived from the play to suit the format of that collection. Which came first, the story or the play, we ask ourselves today?

Unquestionably the conundrum could be conclusively resolved by searching through copies of United Irishman and Sinn Féin, the latter launched and edited both by Arthur Griffith after the former was suppressed and to which Stephens contributed virtually all his early pieces. Indeed, most of the corpus of the 1913 collection is comprised of these excepting, by common critical consent, the five new stories her added afer his pubiished requested additional material to bulk out his original manuscript. Those older sources were fully catalogued by Birgit Bramsbäck in her Bibliography of James Stephens (1957) and, since then, by Richard Finneran in an appendix in his edition of the Letters of James Stephens (1974) which scrupulously lists every instance when Stephens either incorporated or reprinted earlier writings in later ones, be it poetry collections, novels or - crucially in this case - as items in Here Are Women. [1] In sum, no actual trace of the “Julia Elizabeth” plot and character has been discovered among the journal writings yet the supposition has been made and oft-repeated that it was first a short story and afterwards a play, before reappearing as a story in Here Are Ladies. [2]

Julia Elizabeth is a young Dubliner who appals her parents (and her suitor) by spontaneously marrying an unlikely paramour called “Christie Rorke”. At the end of the piece a telegram arrives from her to say so, while a certain O'Grady is stupidly making his bid for her hand on a visit to her parents. At this point some comparison with Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge inevitably leaps to mind for anyone who knows the latter. Which came first - Stephens’s Christie or Synge’s Christy? - that is the question. Could it be that Synge pilfered his most sonorous dramatic idea from a light piece by James Stephens - or was it the other way around? In addressing this question the whole thrust of Stephens’s well-loved story-play (or play-story) comes into focus in a searching criticial light. I cannot say that I have undertaken a first-hand search of the journal-sources but the available evidence in critical studies and editions of the works of James Stephens makes it possible to surmise with near certainty that those who think a printed story preceded the production of The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth in 1911 have been misled by the method used to compile the elements of that collection in every case excepting only the five new stories added at the publisher’s request. In reality there is no sign of a short-story or a sketch answering to the matter of that play nor to its fiction-from likeness in Here Are Ladies for the most likely reason that there was none. In reality, the story had already been developed from the play for good economical reasons and incorporated in the manuscript that Stephens sent to Sir Frederick Macmillan, director of the eponymous publisher, before receiving a request for more material to meet the requirement for 60,000 needed to make a book. [3]

With this new notion of the chronology in hand, it is possible to rethink Stephen’s whole relation to the cognate play by J. M. Synge with its notorious potential for offending the sensibilities of delicate Irish-Catholic nationalists, and a tendency towards ‘coarseness’ in itself which Hilary Pyle found it necessary to remark on as late as 1965. [4] Stephen’s play is notably less coarse - no one’s leg is scorched with a burning sod of turf - but his unlucky suitor is just as inept as Sean Keough in Synge’s Playboy and his Julia Elizabeth is certainly as liberated, if not more so, than Pegeen Mike. But these are present-day perceptions. The real question is surely how can we access the perceptions of contemporary Dubliners to Stephens's strategic revisitation of the substance of The Playboy which had proven unacceptable and even distasteful to so many ‘irish Irelanders’ of the day (in D. P. Moran’s phrase). After all, Synge’s play had occasioned a famous theatrical riot when it was first staged in 1907, while Stephens’s was liked well enough in 1911 to move on from its initial role as a curtain-raiser for a production of The Eloquent Dempsey by William Boyle at Hardwicke St. to the same office for Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw at the Abbey Theatre.

What is involved here is really an inner history of the Irish Literary Revival considered as a movement embedded in the wider context of the contemporary nationalist drive towards Irish independence - a goal involving as an indispensable way-station a massive renewal of Irish self-respect and cultural pride as a necessary basis for the political claims to self-government that were soon to be made under arms. Together with that, as many historians have shown, the revolutionary period provided fertile soil for a burgeoning feminism which was later to be quashed by the conservative temper of a predominantly Catholic Free State established at the Treaty in 1922 and perpetuated for several decades in the Republic which ensued constitutionally in 1949. What was sought by the contemporary audience was a show of sexual liberation suited to the polite ideas of national virtue which J. M. Synge had notoriously besmirched in his peasant play - in fact a very different estimate of his Playboy than the one which critics have arrived at in our own time. [5]

Supposing, then, that the play of 1911 was the first version of the tale of Julia Elizabeth and the little story in Here Are Ladies of 1913 was the second, what did Stephens believe he was doing when he wrote his play in the wake of Synge’s treatment of the subject of a sudden romantic intervention in a seemingly settled case of an Irish arranged marriage? Was he retracing the steps of James Joyce - whose Dubliners was still a year away from publication - in diagnosing the ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the Irish people and their slavery to convention? [6] Was he correcting the Anglo-Irish misapprehension of the spirit and character of truly Irish womanhood disasterously aired in Synge’s scandlous play? Was he merely pilfering a good plot for his own début as playwright? Or was he bursting with Olympian laughter at the prospect of literary aristocratics and plebian nationalists squabbling over the social contingencies of Irish liberation? And where does contemporary feminism fit into the pattern? In the foregoing I simply attempt to present the literary facts and to suggest some of the cultural implications.

In her introduction to the only two stage-pieces composed by James Stephens, which occupy a separate section in her edition of the Uncollected Works (2 vols., Macmillan 1983), Patricia McFate writes thus about a one-act comic stage-piece which was a huge success for James Stephens in 1911 and returned to the Dublin stage with equal sucess on several occasions in the ensuring two decades while providing the bulk of material for a short-story that he incorporated in the scheme of Here Are Ladies - itself a verse and prose collection of 1913 which sucked up a great deal of his earlier journalistic sketches, as well as some new items necessitated by the publisher’s demand for a book-length collection. But first, Patricia McFate:

Under the title, The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth, the play was first performed on 17-18 November 1911 by the Theatre of Ireland Company; it was also produced on 26-28 June 1913 as part of a charity show at the Hardwicke Street Theatre. Another version, The Wooing of Julia Elizabeth, was presented from 31 May to 5 June 1920 at the Abbey Theatre. First on a theatrical bill with Eloquent Dempsey, the Stephens play was continued by popular demand as an added attraction to the next Abbey programme, Arms and the Man. It was then seen as part of a variety show at the Empire Theatre. (Uncoll. Works, 1983, p.253.)

Yet elsewhere, in her earlier study The Writings of James Stephens: Variations on a Theme of Love (1979), she writes:

Two of the short stories in Here Are Ladies found their way into other works. The delightful tale of the three-penny piece is retold in The Demi-Gods. “Three Lovers Who Lost - I” was re-written as a play, The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth, and performed by the Theatre of Ireland Group in [129] 17 November 1907 and by a group producing a charity show at the Hardwicke Street Theatre on 29-28 June 1913.’ (McFate, Writings of James Stephens, pp.129-30.)

”Rewritten as a play”: this is in flat contradiction with the sentence that follows on from the earlier account (as quoted above) in which she goes on to say:

Audiences enjoyed the play immensely; and so, apparently, did Stephens, for he rewrote The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth as a short story and included it, as the first part of “Three Lovers Who Lost”, in Here Are Ladies. (Uncollected Works, p.253.)

Now, these two versions of the chronology of composition render starkly opposite accounts of the temporal and genetic connection between the play which premiered in 1911 and the short-story to be found in the omivorous collection of 1913 both of which share the same dialogue elements and the same central character - if an absent person can be called a character in the full literary sense.

Which came first - story or play? Is may look like a chicken-and-egg question but there is certainly a correct answer in biographical as well as bibliographical terms. And that answer has some bearing on the cultural history of the Irish Literary Revival too. In what follows I argue that the play preceded the story, and that its materialisation in both genre chiefly reflects Stephens’s knack of recycling older material to meet newer literary exigencies. Whether this knack be considered a tawdry trick on the part of an author or a genuinely creative effort to exploit the value of the original to better effect in its new and more highly-developed literary context is a point to be considered here - but not, by any means, the chief one. Suffice to say, at the outset, that Here Are Ladies contains five new stories that exhibit anything but imaginative exhaustion and which are, in Martin’s view and that of many others, among his most morally and artistically mature works in which naturalism and a characteristic form of archetypal thinking combine with linguistic verve and psychological perspicacity to produce a literary achievement of permanent value.

Of McFate’s double-readings of the Stephens Chronology, the first-cited here (though written later in time) is at marked variance with the consensus among such leading students of Stephens writings as Pyle - who compiled a bibliography of his journal-publications at the end of her thesis-book James Stephens: His Work and an Account of His Life (1965) - and Martin in his Critical Study (1977) who closely follows Brigit Bramsbäck’s guidance in James Stephens: A Literary and Bibliographical Study (1959), and professes as much in the introduction to his book. Bramsbäck’s bibliography is itself a compendium of Stephens’s habitual re-use of earlier writings in composing later ones, a habit which Martin describes as ‘a dashing exercise in literary economy’ (op. cit., p.56). Both Pyle and Martin stoutly concur in stating that The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth, first staged in 1911 and later reworked as a short-story, itself derived from an older story or sketch which had been published in an Irish newspaper - presumably one of those counted by Pyle in her valuable listing of “Contributions by James Stephens to Periodicals” (Op. cit., Bibliography, Pt. II, p.184).

McFate herself offers a more detailed chronology in her two-volume edition of The Uncollected Prose of James Stephens (Macmillan 1983), where she lists first publication and subsequent deployment of all Stephens’s prose pieces in an appendix to Vol. II. However, neither Pyle nor MacFate identify a first appearance for the story of Julia Elizabeth in United irishman or Sinn Féin, &c., these being the papers where Stephen published nearly all of his early work. Nor does any title listed in Pyle or McFate correspond in any convincing way to the substance of the story or the play which can be co-identified as The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth. Like the author himself, this appears to be something of a literary orphan and the question remains open whether it was born as a play (produced in 1911), or a story composed in 1905-07 and later embodied with other contemporary sketches - and, like them, without a title - as a short story in Here Are Ladies (1913).

An additional consideration is the fact that the story in question is quite unique among those included in Here Are Ladies as containing (and even largely consisting in) dialogue, a distinction which clearly makes room for the speculation that it began as a piece written for the stage and was afterwards recuperated as a story to join the other “reprints” which Stephens submitted to his publisher as Here Are Ladies in 1912 or so. This last suggestion is a frank extrapolation from the germane information supplied by Augustine Martin to the effect that Stephens’s publisher asked for more material to meet the target of 60,000 words required for a book from his press (Critical Study, 1977, p.57). Yet, while Martin cites five stories by name which Stephens added at that time, Julia Elizabeth is not among them - and hence perhaps his supposition that it was published separately as a newspaper sketch before inclusion in the manuscript. It appears that in her first writing on Stephens, Patricia McFate also followed the line that it had originally been a journalistic sketch but that, on reflection, she decided that Stephens converted his recent play of 1911 into a short story when composing the volume Here Are Ladies in 1912-13. Hence she writes in the Uncollected Works: ‘While Stephens had taken a play, Julia Elizabeth, and reworked it as a short story, he followed the reverse process for his other drama, The Demi-Gods.’ (Op. cit., 1983, p.254.)

It is worth recalling that the composition of the little one-act play which was staged several times under slightly variant titles between 1911 and 1929 - first as The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth (1911), then as The Wooing of Julia Elizabeth (1920), and finally as The Marriage [.. &c.] in 1929 - followed shortly after Stephens’s appearance in minor roles in The Shuiler’s Child by Seumas O’Kelly in 1909 and Gerald Macnamara's The Spurious Sovereign in 1910 - both productions on The Theatre of Ireland, a rival to the Abbey Theatre governed by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. This may signify that his theatrical involvement precipitated the composition of an original piece in the same medium, making it likely that he would try his hand at playwrighting independently of his literary achievements as a newspaper columnist (i.e, ‘play first’). Correspondingly, we may infer that a play was something he had on hand when he conceived the collection to be publish as Here Are Ladies, requiring only to be converted into prose since no other plays appear in the collection. In that case, it would have already been part of the collection prior to the moment when the publisher requested additional materials to reach to 60,000-word mark - as related by Augustine Martin (Critical Study, 1977, p.57).

If so, no prose sketch anterior to the composition of the play needs to be postulated at all. Play-then-story is the correct answer to the textual riddle of Julia Elizabeth, and the very form of the prose piece declares it on almost every line. Who can suppose that a sentence reading, “I’m rather glad she’s out,” said the youth hastily, “for I wanted to speak to yourself and your husband before I said anything to her” could be converted into the stage-line: “I’m rather glad she’s out for I wanted to speak to yourself and your husband before I said anything to her” - or the ensuing sentence: “I knew it,” was the rapid and enthusiastic reply. “She’s a fine cook, Mr. O’Grady, and a head of hair that reaches down to her waist [...]” into “I knew it[! S]he’s a fine cook, Mr. O’Grady, and a head of hair that reaches down to her waist [...] without some sense of injury to the authorial voice, to say the least? No: turning plays into stories is a more amusing past-time than chopping conversational stories down to plays.

Augustine Martin may have been misled but he certainly did not mislead when he wrote that two of the stories which Stephens’s contributioned to Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin were later re-used in Here Are Ladies after the removal of the personal character-names originally associated with them. These were “Miss Arabella Hennessy” and “Old Mrs Hannigan” - with no mention of Julia Elizabeth at all. Again, we know that the second and third story which make up the triadic group called “Three Lovers Who Lost” in Here Are Ladies were respectively “xxxxx” and “xxxxxx” (Martin, op. cit., p.123.) Again, no mention of Julia Elizabeth. Both of these stories are to be found in a list of Stephens’ journal contributions compiled by McFate in her edition of the Uncollected Prose (2 vols., 1983) - each with its date of pubiication in Sinn Féin attached.

In her introductory remarks to two plays by Stephens reprinted in the second volume, she does however introduced another quite surprising chronological marker - and something of a challenge to admirers of John Millington Synge. Here she writes of the play which tells the tale of Julia Elizabeth’s jilting of her overly-conventional suitor O'Grady and her marriage without parental consent to the debonair - or rascally? - Christy Rorke. McFate here pauses to mention that the name of the new beau might be taken as a hint, if not an inspiration to for the creation of the hero of The Playboy of the Western World:

One comic allusion should not pass unnoticed: the first name of the young “playboy” who successfully woos Julia Elizabeth away from her more staid suitor is “Christie.” (Op. cit., p.253).

Having thrown out the hint, she leaves it there. It is obviously an attractive idea and one which gives greater credit than usual to Stephens as an inaugurator of the ‘brutal’ turn in Irish-revival writing which was famously notarised by Synge in his preface to The Playboy. As with Hilary Pyle, who compares Stephens’s first poetry collection, Insurrections, with the newly-demotic linguistic spirit of Synge (Pyle, op. cit., p.31) - there is a question of dates. Unfortunately the facts can be read in the obverse sense. Hilary Pyle remarks:

Synge had seriously considered a method of strengthening poetry, writing: ‘It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it mush learn to be brutal.’ But what he deemed to be brutality in his own work could appear as coarseness. His theories, too in the preface to his poems and translations, did not appear until after Insurrections had been published, so that though they may have been known indirectly to Stephens, they were completely unknown to the public. (James Stephens [... &c.], 1965, p.31.)

Unfortunately there are two points amiss with this. The first is that, while Synge did indeed write the sentence Pyle quotes in the Preface to Poems and Translations, he had already made a striking earliest deposition the necessity for the langage of his art in this case drama - to be ‘rich and copious in his words’ in order to ‘give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form’ in the Preface to The Playboy when it was first printed by Maunsel and Co. in 1907 - two years before the appearance of Insurrections in 1909. The second is that, if there be any question of influence between Stephens and Synge, it is easier to infer that the Julia Elizabeth play which was staged in 1911 was the work of a writer who was fully cognisant of the demotic tendency of Synge’s Hiberno-English style - albeit numerous critics have called it a peculiar invention of his own based on bilingualism rather than any actual habit of speech among people native to the West of Ireland.

There can be no doubt, I think, that McFate’s allusion to the ‘young playboy’ is intended to suggest a comparison with the hero of Synge’ namesake hero on the supposition that Stephen’s was the earlier of the two - albeit no corresponding title can be found in his early writings. (The preceeding remark that ‘“Three Lovers Who Lost - I” was re-written as a play, The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth,’ - is simply wrong since no such title can be discovered in the earlier writings. Indeed, this is the fatal weakness of the “story first - play after” theory: the story remains unfound and none of the titles so comprehensively bibliographised bear any relation to its content, especially given that characters in the early sketches such as “Miss Arabella Hennessy” and “Mrs Larry Tracy” (both 1907) are clearly marked by the character’s name.

Who can resist the conclusion that the search for a prose original of the play called The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth fails because it simply is not there? But Stephens’s roguish Christie has more to show than his appelative to suggest that he enjoys a West of Ireland provenance in common with Synge’s playboy Christy Mahon. Besides twinning with Synge’s hero in point of given name - or Christian name, to underscore a mythopoeic point - his family name is ‘Rorke’: that is, O’Rourke shaved down for the bustle of everyday life in the Anglophonic capital of British Ireland. In Gaelic days in Ireland, the O’Rourke (Ó Ruairc) clan held their lands in today’s Co. Leitrim bordering on the counties of Westmeath and Mayo. As a Gaelic noble family they enjoy resilient fame in Irish memory from the date when the Leinster King Dermot MacMurrough stole Dervorgilla from Tiernan O’Rourke, thus turning her into the Helen of Irish legend and reputedly triggering the Norman Invasion.

Besides the “Christy/Christie“ coincidence, there is also a clear analogy between Synge’s Sean Keough and hapless suitor (Someone) O'Grady who visits Julia Elizabeth’s parents to plead for her hand just as she is walking down the aisle with Christie Rorke. Considered in this light, Stephens play can plausibly be viewed as a Dublinised pastiche of The Playboy - or even, at the very best, a witty revision of Synge’s masterpiece for a nationalist audience who would have enjoyed a burlesque treatment of bourgeois social convention combined with an unseating of J. M. Synge’s near-monopoly on the literary image of liberated Irish womanhood. (How Julia Elizabeth could marry a young man in Dublin of that period entirely without her parents’ knowledge is never made quite clear, but her ballsy determination to follow the urgings of her own heart is the salient message of the play’s conclusion - unlike Pegeen Mike, who disgraces herself in the eyes of the community and loses the playboy in an attempt to redeem her character. (Not that she doesn’t regret it: "I've lost the only playboy of the western world!")

In summary, the critics have repeatedly claimed that the play of Julia Elizabeth was based on an earlier prose narrative, but have failed to identify the piece from which it was drawn. On a review of the available information it is much more likely to have been an original composition which Stephen’s easily converted into a short story in his collection Here Are Ladies. Considered in that light, the chronological difficulties disappear. A play of 1911 first performed almost five years after Synge’s Playboy was first staged, and was lying to hand when Stephens compiled the manuscript of Here Are Ladies which he sent to his publisher. He adapted it to its new fiction context by adding the usual introductory remarks and interspersing the dialogue with descriptive comments as to how the characters speak to one another and behave as the events unfolded. It is precisely for this reason that it is neither found in the earlier prose writings nor among the five additional pieces which Stephens wrote at his publisher’s behest. Happily for Stephens, its prose rendition did nothing to diminish its popularity as a stage production.

All of this is clear on the available evidence. It is possible that some prefatory remarks (if preface there is) to the edition of Julia Elizabeth printed in New York by Crosby Gaige in 1929 - the only publication of the script prior to modern scholarly editions - contain a definitive answer to the “play-first-or-story-first” question posed in this essay. As it happens, a copy of that limited edition bearing Stephens’s signature is right now winging its way to my address unless it has been mislaid between Los Angeles and Northern Ireland. (When last seen on the tracking system it was in Dublin where the trail dried up some two weeks ago.) Should it eventually arrive we may have more to say on the subject and this note can be emended. In the meantime I am acting on the supposition that a play by Stephens staged in 1911 was turned by him into a story for inclusion in Here Are Ladies and had no prior existence. “Julia Elizabeth” (to give it a name though it has none) was a prose redaction of a play staged four years after Synge’s Playboy, and not an anterior creation which Synge could have consulted and treated as the inspiration of The Playboy of the Western World. That being the case, it can only be regarded as a reaction on Stephen’s part to the latter and should be read in that light by cultural historians.

In its resting-place in Here Are Ladies, the tale of Julia Elizabeth’s sudden betrothal and the disappointment of her staider suitor occupies a coherent place at the front of a group of three stories collectively known as “Three Lovers Who Lost” - printed without separate titles irrespective of their provenance or original form. As the first of those it exhibits the folly of men who think they can conquer the beloved by negotiating the matter with her parents. Hence, in the play, the title-character - and hence the heroine of the piece - is notable for her absence. She is less a part of the dramatis personae than a topos and a topic of conversation. Hence, too, the curious flip-flop in the title of various productions, several times as The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth (1911, 1929, &c.) and once as The Wooing of Julia Elizabeth (1920).

Wooing: Here the telling point which dictates the title is that the ridiculous young man woos her parents instead of the object of his passion and rounds off with thanks for a “lovely evening” when the news arrives that she has married a blank stranger to the present company, as if nothing more than a cup of tea and a slice of bread had transpired in the interim between his arrival and his departure. The point of the play is that a young man who has fallen in love with a vivacious and attractive young woman is incapable of truly communicating with her and can not translate his desires and ambitions into an appeal to her parents to compel her to unite with him. Readers of The Charwoman’s Daughter may think of the dressing down of the policeman who woos Mary Makebelieve when her mother roundly pronouces, ‘I never liked you anyway.’ (It is well known that Stephens didn’t like policemen.)

Hence Marriage and Wooing on the billboard in variant renderings of the title between 1911 and 1929 refer to the pretext or occasion for the play’s action and not to the substance or content of the piece that was presented to a theatre audience. Julia Elizabeth - whose very name is an evocation of feisty young womanhood in the dawning moments of the age of female independence - is a force or agency rather than a dramatic character acted by some suitable ingenue - perhaps coming freshly from an engagement as Gwendolen in Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest; and comical allusions to her absent personage are enough to convey the kind of epiphany of changing Irish society that the piece has to offer where young ladies have the temerity to choose their own husbands. In an epigram often erroneously attributed to James Joyce, here absence is the highest form of presence.

Play or story, the piece in question takes a general form which might be regarded as a burlesque revision of The Playboy in which the rambunctious Christie finally weds the hopelessly romantic heroine - herself a delectable counter-image of the voracious man-eater Widow Quin. Viewed in this perspective, it can be considered as a criique of Synge’s dark idyll which so much irritated the Irish nationalists of the period - not least Stephens’s publisher and patron Arthur Griffith who called it ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform [...] the production of a moral degenerate who has dishonoured the women of Ireland before all Europe.’ (Sinn Féin, 27 Jan. 1907.)

Stephen’s play is no shocker. Here there is no question of parricide, though father’s authority is completely spurned, and he knows it; nor are God, the Pope, or any priest invoked in offensive ways and, finally, the beauties of Hiberno-English are presented to the audience in a style finely calculated to gratify their amour propre as an exceptionally gifted cohort of the English speaking people equally attuned to the idiom of seedy grandiloquence and demotic expletive. In this sense The Marriage of Julia Elizabeth is a riposte to the disappointment of Pegeen Mike: this is the primary and perhaps only significance of Stephen’s decision to call her beau “Christie” in a broad hint that the audience are to recall the very different treatment of feminine self-determination proffered in Synge’s poetically supercharged yet appallingly non-PC version of cultural nationalism.

On Stephens’s part, it was also a winning round in the battle to unhorse Synge (now dead) as the doyen of Anglo-Irish literature. James Stephens once said that his life began when he started to write but its beginning has equally been traced to the moment when George “AE” Russell sought him out behind a clerk’s desk in the solicitors offices of T. T. Mecredy, and introduced him to the literary-revival set as an alternative genius to Yeats’s great champion in the bilingual troubador and upper-class tramp of noble descent and pauperish habits who was John Millington Synge. Unthroning Synge was at least half the rationale of Stephen one-act comedy of 1911. [7]

In the tale of Julia Elizabeth - stage-play or short-story - Stephens sought to beat Synge at his own game, albeit in a spirit of jest and in the knowledge that his one-act comedy bore no comparison in its psychic dynamism or linguistic originality to Synge’s pirited and disturbing three-acter. At the same time it certainly did convey to Synge’s literary sponsors and admirers what the ordinary Dubliner thought of his anthropological blasphemy in the famous play - and how they actually stood on the challenging precept at the core of Synge’s dramatic imagination which finds its primary expression in the The Shadow of the Glen when the farmer’s wife Nora says to the tramp, “You’ve a fine bit of talk, stranger, and it’s with yourself I’ll go.”(Synge, Collected Works, “Plays, I”, ed. Ann Saddlemeyer, OUP 1968, p.57.)

Julia Elizabeth might frame that idea very differently but it is essentially what she means when she telegrams her parents with the message:

‘DEAR PA,’ he read, ‘this is to tell you that I got married to-day to Christie Rorke. We are going to open a little fried-fish shop near Amiens Street. Hoping this finds you as it leaves me at present. Your loving daughter, JULIA ELIZABETH. P.S. - Give Christie‘s love to Ma.’

It may or may not be worth enquiring if Julia’s mother has been in on the secret of the burgeoning relationship all along, but it is certain that the marriage comes as a surprise to all concerned and would have seemed to the audience like a wonderful flouting of social conventions. A marriage without informing the bride’s parents? Politics and literature are intertwining in many ways, effectual and otherwise, but it is not entirely preposterous to regard Julia Elizabeth’s missive as a homely draft of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic which Patrick Pearse read out under the pediment of the General Post Office five years later. It is an added bonus that Amien Street’s most important edifice would afterwards become known as Connolly Station at the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising.