Theatre as Dream: Yeats's Stagecraft

Abstract

YEATS WAS A LYRIC POET who desired to return poetry to the stage. Consequently his own plays-and in particular his attempts to stage them-are the result of the same motive which lay behind his poetry: an attempt to reduce the accidents of character and surface reality to their proper place in relation to the unchanging reality of the soul (or, to use a term central to the plays, personality). This is a commonplace which one should not lose sight of in discussing the specifics of his stagecraft, for it determined from the beginning that Yeats would never succeed in mastering the demands of a popular theatre. His earliest plays, though of little interest in regard to the development of modern drama, are important in that they exhibit his desire to make action barely more than an ornament for the poetry, a desire he never really abandoned. In both The Land of Heart's Desire and The Countess Cathleen the action, because it is hardly more than a metaphor for a personal conflict, is undramatic. And the history of the various drafts of The Shadowy Waters' gives us the best record of Yeats's early unsuccessful attempts to fuse the emotionalism of lyric poetry and drama into a convincing unity.