A Re-Reading of Yeats’s Calvary

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to re-read and re-evaluate Calvary, though so many scholars have already read it in one way or another. In fact most readings are not satisfactory to us, as they have not read it as one of Yeats’s major works and as they treat this play as part of other works, discussing something else, for instance, such as the dramatic form in general, not the play itself. Helen Vendler. one of the most important scholars of Yeats, may have influenced later readings of the play; she concludes her reading of Calvary, saying, “[a]s a piece of work, it is negligible.” This essay attempts to re-read and re-assess this work as closely as possible, not just going through it quickly and superficially. This is the greatest play in his middle period, it seems to us. Few have in fact read it closely; therefore, they could not understand and appreciate the play, as it is, fully, whether it’s an introduction to and a thematic study of it. The starting point is Vendler’s brief discussion of this play, which is summed up in one word, “negligible.” It seems that she had a plan of a whole thesis (Ph.D. dissertation) with a general purpose of finishing a book-length study of Yeats’s plays, her discussion of Calvary being a brief thematic discussion, in her book’s Chapter 8 “Plays of Death, Purgation, and Resurrection” (The other play treated in this chapter is The Resurrection).