Emily took time to consider. To be cast as a ‘Lady of silences’ meant a role without a script. Her prime gift was a resonant onstage voice; her own purpose was to pursue a theatre career. In Milwaukee she had put on about five productions a year, including Shakespeare each summer in the woods behind the college. In 1929 she had staged the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, playing Juliet herself, in one of these outdoor productions. After resigning her post at the end of that academic year, she’d resolved to lecture on American and European theatre, and to give dramatic recitals and programmes of American and foreign poetry while living for extended periods in Back Bay as a companion to a benevolent and wealthy Bostonian called Mary Lee Ware.
During the preceding summer, she had travelled abroad with Margaret Farrand, taking in theatre developments in Germany, France and England. Emily was especially taken with Irish drama in reaction against the dominance of the Abbey Theatre. She was alerted to Seán O’Casey, to a new experimental theatre in Limerick, and to the Gate Theatre in Dublin, newly set up in 1928 to put on modern plays. Her most stimulating experience was to speak to the Gate’s founder, Micheál Mac Liammóir, in his dressing-room. J. J. Hayes, theatre critic for the Irish Times and New York Times, urged her to put on Irish plays in the US.
When Emily re-encountered Eliot in the late summer of 1930, she was not short of parts for the following year, and not really in need of a silent role as a poet’s muse. And like his mother and brother, she was not all that taken with his poems. Her notes for a lecture characterise his work as ‘bitter’. She respected him as an authority on Modernism and pitied his unhappiness.
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