With publisher's prospectus tipped-in
The Playboy of the Western World. A Comedy in Three Acts.
Dublin: Maunsel & Co, 1907.
Price: $2,000.00
About the item
First edition. Frontisepiece portrait "Synge at Rehearsal / WB Yeats Jan 25 - 1907"; viii, 86, 4 pp. ads. 8vo. With publisher's prospectus tipped-in. Red cloth covered boards with tan cloth spine with red lettering, lean to spine, some soiling and rubbing around the edges, very good; ownership signature to verso of frontispiece; pages 6-7 are toned from the laid-in clipped photograph from a 1934 newspaper with Arthur Shields as Chiristy Mahon and a clipping from a 1927 Davis & Orioli catalogue with this title and Synge's The Aran Islands underlined. Connolly 100, 18.
Item #339508
The play that caused a riot at its premier at Dublin's Abbey Theatre on 26 January 1907 (and continued to do so while on tour in the United States starting in 1911, even after the offending lines had been excised). The lines that caused such a scandal are found on page 80: "It's Pegeen I'm seeking only and what'd I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself".
Publisher's prospectus tipped-in to the ffep, with a collection of press blurbs about the performance of the play.
