The Resurrection

Abstract

Yeats began to write this play in 1925 or 1926. See Hone (WBY 417) for a reading of the play in 1925; see Lady Gregory (J 263) for the second stanza of the ‘Song for the unfolding and folding of the curtains’ being written on 24 May 1926. The first printed version appeared in The Adelphi, June 1927. It was not reprinted until it was included in Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends, Dublin, 1931. Subsequently it was published in Wheels and Butterflies, London, 1934; New York, 1935; The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, London, 1934; New York, 1935; and in The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, London, 1952; New York, 1953 (repr. London 1953, 1960, 1963, and 1966). It is included in Selected Play (Papermac edition, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, London, 1964 and Eleven Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, New York, 1964. The first printed version in The Adelphi is different from all the other versions; its text is supplied in the Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Alspach, London, 1966, pp. 901–31. Yeats in a letter of 27 December 1930 to Olivia Shakespear remarked that he ‘wrote a chaotic dialogue on this theme some years ago. But now I have dramatic tension throughout’. (L 780)