Yeats and the French Drama

Abstract

THERE IS A FITNESS in considering Yeats and the French drama at this particular moment in the history of the theater. For it is only now, more than fifty years after he had explored its possibilities, that the English speaking theater has become fully aware of the drama of ritual, is applauding Beckett and hastening to sit at the feet of Artaud. The idea of a theater of cruelty, working through symbols and violent physical effects, was completely realised by Yeats in such plays as A Full Moon in March (1935) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939).1 He anticipated some of Beckett's central themes, perfected in a play like Purgatory (1939) a dramatic form which ideally reflects them, and must indeed, through his own work and the exceptionally rich corpus of his dramatic theory, have stimulated a good deal of Beckett's thinking about drama.