"In a letter to Lady Gregory (playwright behind Spreading the News), fellow Irish writer W.B. Yeats concluded that, along with their counterparts, they were “the first to create a true ‘People’s Theatre’ … making articulate of all the dumb classes each with its own knowledge of the world, its own dignity, but all objective … of the office and the workshop, of the newspaper and the street, of mechanism and of politics.” The voice of drama in Ireland was changing from the poetic to the realistic, and Joyce’s hand in this can be seen in his very own Dubliners; a work which, despite (or more accurately because of) its realism, went nearly unpublished due to content. A theatregoer himself, Joyce could be found in the audience of Yeats’ plays (produced in Dublin), usually cheering because of their thematic challenge of moral standards. By today’s standards, Joyce’s material may seem tame, but in 1914 it was challenging the norm to speak for the “dumb” – for those who were without a platform to speak. Amongst the throng of those without a voice, we find the women of Ireland." (from the introduction by Matthew S. Hinton
