Life
1900-1968, playwright; b. 10 July, Blackrock [Carraig Dubh], nr. Dundalk,
Co. Louth, son of teacher who educated him before he entered St Mary’s
College, Dundalk, going on to St. Patrick’s Training College, Drumcondra,
Dublin, to 1920; via Abbey Theatre; refused to teach ‘under
the unbearable clerical yoke’ and settled as teacher in Glasgow,
1921-37; m. Helena Reilly, 1923, with whom three dgs.; retired following
success of Shadow and Substance in 1937; writes for Ireland’s
Own; lived in England from 1945, writing for television and cinema;
dramatic work incls. The Watched Pot (Peacock 1930), one-act experimental
play; The Things that Are Caesar’s (Abbey 1932), Things
That are Caesar’s (Abbey 1932), an attack on clerical power,
and winner of Abbey Award; Coggerers (Abbey 1937, later renamed
The Conspirators); Shadow and Substance (Abbey 1937), winner
of Casement Award of IAL and NY Drama Critics’ Circle Award; The
White Steed (1939), four-act play featuring Canon Skerritt, a character
based on Swift; rejected by Abbey and premiered New York, where it won
Drama Critics’ Circle Award; Kindred (Abbey 1939, rev. as
The Secret Kindred); The Strings My Lord Are False (1942);
remarried after death of first wife, 1944, with whom a son; The Old
Foolishness (1944); The Wise Have Not Spoken (1944); settled
in Bromley, Kent; The Chuckeyhead Story (Pavilion, Bournemouth,
1950), rev. as The Border Be Damned (1951), and further revised
as The Devil Came from Dublin (John Drew Mem. Th., NY, 1951), a
‘rollicking extravaganza’; wrote for film and tv, his scripts
including Saints and Sinners (Korda 1949) and Farewell to Greatness,
based on Swift; Green Cars Go East (1951); The Wayward Saint
(1955), centred on Canon McCooey; d. 20 Oct., Bromley, Kent [var.
London]. IF2 DIB DIW DIL KUN OCIL FDA
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Works
The Watched Pot [unpublished]; Things that Are Caesar’s
(London: Rich & Cowan 1934); Shadow and Substance: A Play
in Four Acts (NY: Random House 1937; London: Macmillan 1938); Plays
for Children (NY: Messner 1939); The White Steed and Coggerers
(NY: Random House 1939); The Old Foolishness (London: Samuel French
1944); Three Plays: The white Steed; Things That are Caesar’s
[rev.]; The Strings, My Lord, are False (London: Macmillan 1944);
Conspirators [formerly Coggerers] (London: Samuel French 1944);
The Wise Have Not Spoken (London: Samuel French 1947); The Wayward
Saint (NY: Dramatist Play Service 1955); Irish Stories and Plays
(1956) [incl. The Devil Came From Dublin]; Robert Hogan, ed.,
Farewell to Greatness (Proscenium 1966); Goodbye to the Summer
[formerly Weep for Tomorrow] (Proscenium 1970); We have
Ceased to Live, in Robert Hogan, ed., Journal of Irish Literature,
2, 1 (Jan. 1972). IF2 lists Irish Short Stories and Plays (1958).
QRY, Shadow and Substance (NY 1939).
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Criticism
Paul Doyle, Paul Vincent Carroll (Bucknell UP 1971).
Journal of Irish Literature, ‘A Paul Vincent Carroll Number’, Vol. I (Jan. 1972).
Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance (Minn. 1967), pp.52-63.
George Jean Nathan, ‘The Devil Came from Dublin’, in Theatre Arts, 35 (1951), pp.66-67.
Ann G. Colman, ‘Paul Vincent Carroll’s View of Irish Life’, in Catholic World, 192 (1960), pp.87-93.
Drew B. Pallette, ‘Paul vincent Carroll: since The White Steed’, in Modern Drama, 7 (19656), pp.375-81.
Paul A. Doyle, Paul Vincent Carroll (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP 1971).
John D. Conway, ‘Satires of Paul Vincent Carroll’, in Eire-Ireland, 8, 3 (1972), pp.12-23.
Conway, ‘Paul Vincent Carroll and Theatre in Scotland’, in Eire-Ireland, 12, 4 (1977), pp.125-32; see also D. E. S. Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama (1980).
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George J. Nathan, ed., Five Great Modern Irish Plays (NY: Modern Library n.d.), contains Shadow and Substance, along with ‘The Playboy of the Western World; Juno and the Paycock; Riders to the Sea; Spreading the News. FDA3 selects Shadow and Substance [191-200].
Irish Stories, and Plays (NY: Devin-Adair
Company 1958), 278pp.; STORIES, Home Sweet Home [3]; She Went by Gently
[13] Dark Glory [22] Maisie Was a Lady [32] The Stepmother [43] My Learned
Friend, Hogan [68] Me Da Went Off the Bottle! [76] The Virgin and the Woman
[86]; ONE ACT PLAYS, The Conspirators [109], Beauty is Fled: Interlude [155];
THREE ACT PLAY, The Devil Came from Dublin [179].
The White Steed rejected by the Abbey in 1938 for fear of offending the clergy (see Maxwell, p. 135); ‘In the line of descent from Colum and Murray, looking at his new Ireland as did they, theirs changing, his consolidating post-revolutionary orthodoxies. ... The White Steed has scenes of an ugly intensity, bringing to life the passionate contentions of the characters ... Fr. Shaughnessy, without rant, has a sinister credulity ... The disappointment is that Carroll does not realise the latent suggestiveness of these figures in the Europe of 1939’ (Maxwell, op. cit., 139).
Paul Vincent Carroll, ‘Ibsen took a sure and disciplined hand in my development and the addition of Synge, whose work taught me colour and rhythm, I began to visualise more sanely the strengths and weaknesses of human characters’ [cited in Doyle’s Paul Vincent Carroll (Bucknell UP 1971), p.19, ed. Terence Brown], 174; discussion-summary of Things That Are Caesar’s [an Irish Doll’s House] and Shadows and Substance [reality discovering its own limitations, ibid.]; transcends Yeats’s "external reality"; in modelling his parish priest Canon Skerritt on Jonathan Swift, Carroll wished - in his own words - to make Swift ‘not only a Catholic but a learned interpreter of Catholicism, and throw him into the modern mental turmoil in Ireland’; the play concerns a quarrel between the Canon and the schoolmaster, Dermot Francis O’Flingsby, author of an anti-clerical book, who is being hounded from his post by the jealous teaching colleague, the Canon’s niece Thomasina Concannon, in cahoots with Francis Ignatius O’Connor, a newly trained teacher whom she will marry, and some Ibsenite local bigots; Brigdet, the saintly servant girl, has conversations with St. Brigid, and eventually dies; epigraph, Keats, "Oh, what power has white Simplicity"’, 175; BIOG 232 [as above].
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)