O'Casey And Yeats And The Druid

Abstract

SEAN O'CASEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN RIPE FOR REVENGE after W. B. Yeats rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928. His first three plays had rescued the declining Abbey Theatre from artistic and financial disaster, and his new Expressionistic play had been written in precisely the experimental spirit which Yeats had described in founding an Irish Theatre dedicated to "that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres in England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed." But Yeats and his fellow directors said no-the final decision was Yeats's, the worst blunder in the history of the Abbey Theatre-and the bewildered, outraged O'Casey, his career as a dramatist disrupted and endangered, was cut off from his theater and his country. Nevertheless, in the years following the rejection, O'Casey, a man who seldom forgave an injustice, defended and celebrated the genius of Yeats, though he was understandably slow in forgetting Yeats's role in the rejection. And this refusal to seek revenge tells us something about the genius of O'Casey.