Living with Ghosts: Re-inventing the Easter Rising in The Dreaming of the Bones and Calvary

Abstract

This article looks at two plays written after Easter, 1916 ; I argue that these plays revise the earlier poem's claim that all [is] changed and dramatise instead the persistence of past wounds and blemishes in the post-revolutionary present. In The Dreaming of the Bones, a young rebel who has just been fighting in the Rising is hiding from the police on the West coast of Ireland, where he encounters the ghosts of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla, whose betrayal, he says, brought the Norman in and thus started the colonisation of Ireland. Calvary (written in 1920, but never performed in Yeats's lifetime) is an unorthodox Passion play, dramatising Christ's dreaming back of his own Passion on Good Friday, as he is confronted by the ghosts of Lazarus, Judas and the three Roman soldiers who nailed him to the Cross. Although it is ostensibly unrelated to the Easter Rising, it reads as an ironic yet compassionate comment on the Passion play that the Easter Rising, at one level, replayed.