Dramatic Values, Yeats, and The Countess Cathleen

Abstract

DRAMATIC VALUES, YEATS,' AND THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN THE VIEW THAT WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS was never much of a playwright has been expounded so often that it is now a truisIl) of the theater. Eric Bentley, for one, deplores Yeats's fascination with the literary language of the nineteenth century, "the feeblest language in all modem literature." It is possible, as Bentley suggests, that blank verse has long since exhausted its dramatic possibilities. "One cannot quote from his plays any passage of indubitable greatness or many of indubitable brilliance."1 Bentley's praise is hedged with reservations, despite the statement that Yeats "is a considerable playwright, the only considerable verse playwright in English for several hundred years." It acknowledges the fact that Yeats knew what he wanted, and that he created both the theater and the tradition necessary for communication. It speaks of Yeats as a classic dramatist who cuts everything away from the dramatic situation. There exists in each play "a single knot, a rather loose one, which is untied in a single movement." Each play comes from a first-hand acquaintance with the theater, and from a desire to subordinate music, dance, and stage design to language. But the thesis praises Yeats at Eliot's expense; Yeats, it turns out, is doing something that Eliot cannot do. The former writes for actors, the latter for elocutionists. The praise of Yeats sounds weakly, as from an echo chamber. To claim that drama results from the overlapping of literature and theater is to repeat another truism, one no less deadly to an understanding of what Yeats really accomplished than the reference to an "undramatic tendency that is more or less evident in all Mr. Yeat's dramatic work. ... The plot counts for nothing, and the characters have but the outer semblance of men. They are mere symbols that enclose a mood, and lack the vital blend of action, thought, and emotion that belong to complete and complex humanity."2 Another objection to Mr. Bentley's analysis lies in the emphasis upon structure. In the one-act plays that began with Four Plays for Dancers, Yeats did his most serious thinking about the contribution that formthe way in which drama moves to its resolution-makes to the theater. These plays are organically whole; they say what the theme demands must be said; and then they conclude. They do not ramble in the 1. Eric Bentley, "Yeats as a Playwright," The Permanence of Yeats, eds. James Hall and Martin Steinmann (New York, 1950), p. 238. 2. H. S. Krans, William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival (London, 1915), p. 132. 8 1959 YEATS AND DRAMATIC VALUES 9 byroads of Irish eloquence. They benefit from the tight, coherent shaping that Yeats has provided. All this is worth saying. But structure is only one element of a play, and it is at least controversial whether firm structure is intrinsic to the success of a dramatic work. The real issue rests with the dramatic qualities of the plays. Do they contribute to modern drama more than the historical curiosity (the plays of the man who directed the Abbey Theatre)? Are they more than the by-product of a brilliant career (the plays of a poet who, only incidently, wrote for the theater)? Are they more than the dramatic meditations that Bentley admires? In short, are they truly plays? Great drama deals with conflict, and its universal implications arise from the specific actions of characters who are confronted by specific situations. A dramatist courageous enough to have convictions cannot afford to talk about tl1em. The draTlUltis personae who populate his mind must be significantly involved in the moments of time that he chooses for them. The measure of their significant involvement is the appeal that the dramatist simultaneously makes to his audience's sense of conduct and sense of beauty (Matthew Arnold's phrase comes inevitably to mind). Yeats wrote many plays, and kept rewriting them to the end of his life. They are uneven in quality and in the popularity that they achieved. Some are overwritten (The Shadowy Waters); some succeed through understatement (The Words Upon the Window-Pane). But none of them deal with...