Ubu Roi in W.B. Yeats’s The Green Helmet and The Player Queen

Abstract

W.B. Yeats’s presence at the December 1896 Paris performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi has become well known for the famous phrase that it inspired: “After us the Savage God.” Yet the significance of Jarry’s play to Yeats’s drama has been almost entirely overlooked. Expanding on my previous work in Yeats and European Drama, this article illustrates the profundity and the significance of Jarry’s revolutionary avant-garde play for two of Yeats’s plays: The Green Helmet (1910) and The Player Queen (1922). Following a discussion of the connections between Ubu Roi, The Green Helmet, and the disturbances at the Abbey Theatre during the performance of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, I address the deep affinities that Jarry’s play also has with another later play by Yeats: The Player Queen. Although it was first performed long after the Symbolist movement in literature and drama had passed, The Player Queen carries strongly Symbolist features. Like Ubu Roi, however, Yeats’s play disturbs the religious ideals of Symbolism through a tension that it sustains between mysticism and animality, a tension that I explore through the medieval aspects of both plays. Taken together, The Green Helmet and The Player Queen demonstrate the continuing influence that the European avant-garde in general, and Jarry’s work in particular, had on Yeats’s dramaturgy throughout his career.