Spreading the News

by Lady Gregory

Genre: Comedy, Drama
Setting: England
Format of Original Source: Play
Recommended Adaptation Length:

Candidate for Adaptation? Promising

EXCERPT:

(Voice of JACK SMITH heard singing)

The sea shall be dry,

The earth under mourning and ban!

Then loud shall he cry

For the wife of the red-haired man!

BARTLEY. It’s Jack Smith’s voice–I never knew a ghost to sing before. It is after myself and the fork he is coming! (Goes back. Enter JACK SMITH.) Let one of you give him the fork and I will be clear of him now and for eternity!

MRS. TARPEY. The Lord have mercy on us! Red Jack Smith! The man that was going to be waked!

JAMES RYAN. Is it back from the grave you are come?

SHAWN EARLY. Is it alive you are, or is it dead you are?

TIM CASEY. Is it yourself at all that’s in it?

MRS. TULLY. Is it letting on you were to be dead?

MRS. FALLON. Dead or alive, let you stop Kitty Keary, your wife, from bringing my man away with her to America!

JACK SMITH. It is what I think, the wits are gone astray on the whole of you. What would my wife want bringing Bartley Fallon to America?

MRS. FALLON. To leave yourself, and to get quit of you she wants, Jack Smith, and to bring him away from myself. That’s what the two of them had settled together.

JACK SMITH. I’ll break the head of any man that says that! Who is it says it? (To TIM CASEY) Was it you said it? (To SHAWN EARLY) Was it you?

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