Many Gaelic societies throughout the country put on Gaelic plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, Pierce Beasley, Thomas Haynes, Canon Peter O'Leary, and others; and the _Oireachtas_ (the Gaelic musical and literary festival) held each year in Dublin usually presents several Irish plays and offers prizes for new ones at each festival. Of all the Irish playwrights who have arisen in recent years, Lady Gregory has produced most and W.B. Yeats is the most poetic. He is more a lyric poet than a dramatist, and is never satisfied with his work for the stage, but keeps eternally chopping and changing it. His _Kathleen-Ni-Houlihan_, though a dream-play, always appeals to an audience of Irish people. Perhaps his one-act _Deirdre_ is the nearest approach to real drama he has done. Some of Lady Gregory's earlier one-act farces, such as _The Workhouse-Ward_, are very amusing; _The Rising of the Moon_ is a little dramatic gem, and _The Gaol Gate_ is touched with genuine tragedy. Synge wrote only one play--_Riders to the Sea_--that acts well. The others are admired by critics for the strangeness of their diction and the beauty of the nature-pictures scattered through them. His much-discussed _Playboy of the Western World_ has become famous for the rows it has created at home and abroad from its very first production on January 26, 1907. William Boyle, who gets to the heart of those he writes about, has produced the most popular play of the movement in _The Eloquent Dempsey_, and a perfectly constructed one in _The Building Fund_. W.F. Casey's two plays--_The Man Who Missed the Tide_ and _The Suburban Groove_--are both popular and actable. Padraic Colum's plays--_The Land_ and _Broken Soil_ (the latter rewritten and renamed _The Fiddler's House_)--are almost idyllic scenes of country life. Lennox Robinson's plays are harsh in tone, but dramatically effective, and T.C. Murray's _Birthright_ and _Maurice Harte_ are fine dramas, well constructed and full of true knowledge of the people he writes about. Seumas O'Kelly has written two strong dramas in _The Shuiler's Child_ and _The Bribe_, and Seumas O'Brien one of the funniest Irish farces ever staged in _Duty_. R.J. Ray's play, _The Casting Out of Martin Whelan_, is the best this dramatist has as yet given us, and George Fitzmaurice's _The Country Dressmaker_ has the elements of good drama in it. St. John G. Ervine has written a very human drama in _Mixed Marriage_. He hails from the north of Ireland; but Rutherford Mayne is the best of the Northern playwrights, and his plays, _The Drone_ and _The Turn of the Road_, are splendid homely county Down comedies.