Spreading the News is a short one-act comic play by Lady Gregory, which she wrote for the opening night of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, 27 Dec. 1904. It was performed as part of a triple bill alongside William Butler Yeats's On Baile's Strand and a revival of the Yeats and Gregory collaborative one-act Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902). Audiences may have dozed through Yeats's play,[1] but Spreading the News was very successful and it is still acted at the Abbey Theatre as late as 1961.[2] Lady Gregory remarked after seeing an early performance of the play that "the audience would laugh so much at 'Spreading the News' that they lost about half the dialogue. I mustn't be so amusing again!" [3]