Jealousy Of Emer Research Articles

A Letter from Eugene O'Neill to Patrick McCartan (June 11, 1934); or, Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, and Days Without End (April 16, 1934)

A Letter from Eugene O'Neill to Patrick McCartan (June 11, 1934); or, Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, and <i>Days Without End</i> (April 16, 1934)

W.B. Yeats the Choreographer: Composition in the Manuscripts of At the Hawk's Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer

This article investigates how William Butler Yeats's interest in, and professional engagement with, modern dance affected the dramaturgical composition of his plays. Instead of focusing on individual dancers' contributions to the dance plays' previous performances, the analysis discusses compositional features that have hitherto gained little critical attention: the plays' use of performance space and stage movement. The main argument of the article is that resulting from his practical experimentation with dance and movement in performance, Yeats's dramaturgical technique changed substantially, and acquired a choreographic quality, which made stage movement and corporeality just as important in his plays' composition as verbal expression. To demonstrate how Yeats's compositional technique evolved between the years of 1916 and 1919, the essay discusses the textual development of two of his early dance plays, At the Hawk's Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer, based on the scrutiny of their extant manuscript materials and performance scripts.

Encounter between the Irish and Japanese Spiritual Traditions in At the Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, Yōrō, and Awoi no Ue

Encounter between the Irish and Japanese Spiritual Traditions in At the Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, Yōrō, and Awoi no Ue

The Mystical Experience of Dream in W. B. Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer

The Mystical Experience of Dream in W. B. Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer

The Influences of the Noh Drama on W. B. Yeats’s Play The Only Jealousy of Emer

The Influences of the Noh Drama on W. B. Yeats’s Play The Only Jealousy of Emer

Reviving and Revising Cuchulain: W B. Yeats's Struggle to Create a Postcolonial Culture Hero

Reviving and Revising Cuchulain:W B. Yeats's Struggle to Create a Postcolonial Culture Hero Heather McCracken (bio) W.B. Yeats is perhaps more often remembered as a poet than a playwright, but his work in the theater was a central part of his artistic identity during his lifetime. The form, style, and accessibility of his plays varied over his career, but the theme was consistent: Irish mythology. The myths to which he frequently returned dealt with the Ulster cycle hero Cuchulain. In addition to several poems, Yeats wrote five plays addressing different episodes in the hero's life with the purpose of shaping Cuchulain as a new culture hero for Ireland. These play's—On Bailes Strand (1904), The Green Helmet (1910), At the Hawk's Well (1917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939)—are imaginative revisions promoting an Irish culture separate from that of England's, and they reflect the struggles of an author and a nation fighting for independence. Irish decolonization was not a simple, unitary effort, and Yeats believed that he could be a voice to guide the nation, whether the nation wanted his guidance or not. These struggles—defining Irish identity, moving toward independence, and Yeats's role in the formation of a postcolonial Ireland—are all on display in the Cuchulain plays. That Yeats wanted to create an Irish national identity from precolonial myths and legends is not a new discovery,1 but [End Page 147] his deliberate shaping of Cuchulain as an Irish culture hero warrants more exploration. My analysis provides a deeper reading of Yeats's plays by focusing on the shifting, uncertain relations between Yeats, Cuchulain, and postcolonial Ireland, where Cuchulain is a cultural "superhero" stand-in for Irish national identity and a metonymical representation of Yeats's political frustrations. Because Yeats authored his public identity in these plays in unique and complicated ways—raising questions about his role as an artist/citizen—examining Cuchulain as a culture hero and role model for the nation illuminates the personal and political struggles that Yeats faced as a postcolonial author. Postcolonial theorists have suggested that culture heroes such as Cuchulain function as significant metonymic figures for colonized nations struggling for a sense of identity. In Calibrations, Ato Quayson explains how culture heroes contribute to national identities as an invaluable part of cultural decolonization. "How," Quayson asks, "do we isolate a particular social, cultural, or political phenomenon for analysis while retaining a view of its relationship to complex and contradictory historical processes that allow it to be perceived as an object or objective field in the first place?" (31). His solution centers on the culture hero. Quayson defines the trope of cultural heroism as a "mode of characterization of agency." whose typology involves some of the heroic associations of priests, traditional rulers, medicine men, hunters, politicians, and even thieves and popular rogues" (36). In other words, a culture hero emerges as a socially recognizable figure capable of exhibiting some degree of agency. In the case of a colonized nation, Quayson explains that the native population looks to these culture heroes as models for the formation of an anticolonial national identity because culture heroism "is a threshold that reveals important structural ideas about the nation-state form" (33). I believe it is important to attend to this threshold by examining heroic characterizations of agency for Irish decolonization efforts. As Quayson notes, culture heroism "provides a peculiar intersection of the discourses of literature, politics and civil society" (Postcolonialism 76). Examining culture heroes such as Cuchulain in Ireland—a nation with a well-documented unique relationship between art and politics—can help to shape an understanding of the kinds of anticolonial resistance narratives used by the Irish and to expand our understanding of postcolonial culture heroes generally. Although Quayson drew his examples of culture heroes from [End Page 148] what he called "the everyday genres" of West Africa, I believe that this critical apparatus has great value in colonial settings like Ireland because of the shared concern with shaping a national identity. Understanding the image of the culture hero metonymically, we can see that this figure would serve as a valuable...

Yeats and the Sublime: The Dreaming of the Bones and The Only Jealousy of Emer

본 논문은 『꿈꾸는 뼈들』과 『이머의 유일한 질투』에서 유령의 시학과 어떻게 유령들이 숭고함의 감각과 관련이 있는지 살펴본다. 주인공들은 갈등의 감정으로 가득 찬 꿈과 같은 상태로 극의 결말에서 깨달음을 얻는다. 본 논문은 에드먼드 버크의 고통과 공포의 개념을 활용하여 예이츠 극에서의 숭고함을 설명하고자 한다.

Shakespeare and Yeats: The Supernatural in Macbeth and The Only Jealousy of Emer

예이츠와 셰익스피어는 극작품에서 유령이나 요정과 같은 초자연적인 존재를 많이 사용했는데 작품에서의 활용은 목적이 다를 뿐만 아니라 접근 방법이 다르다고 할 수 있다. 셰익스피어는 초자연적인 존재들을 인물들의 인간성을 부각시키는 데 사용된다. 특히 마음속에 숨겨진 욕구나 감정 또는 무의식을 드러내는데 사용한다 는 것을 주목해 볼 수 있다. 셰익스피어의 유령은 인간들과 닮아 있고 인물들의 반응 을 적극적으로 끌어낸다. 예이츠의 유령들은 추상적이고 동떨어진 느낌을 주는데 이런 방식의 표현은 셰익스피어와 다른 목적을 가지고 있기 때문이다. 본 논문은 유령 이야 기를 다룬 대표적인 드라마 셰익스피어의 『맥베스』와 예이츠의 『에머의 유일한 질투』를 중심으로 살펴본다.

Writing Modern Ireland, ed. by Catherine E. Paul

Reviewed by: Writing Modern Ireland, ed. by Catherine E. Paul Martha C. Carpentier (bio) WRITING MODERN IRELAND, edited by Catherine E. Paul. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2015. 268 pp. $120.00. In an era when publishers are imposing stricter limits on the number of previously printed essays they will allow to be included in essay collections, one has to wonder about the decision-making behind Writing Modern Ireland, published by the Clemson University Press and edited by Catherine E. Paul. Sixteen of the nineteen essays in the collection have been previously published, also by the Clemson University Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, in a special issue of the South Carolina Review, "Ireland in the Arts and Humanities."1 This is a colloquia issue, derived from papers given at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Southern Regional American Conference for Irish Studies, held at Clemson University. In addition, the complete issue is available online, since the South Carolina Review is digitized, through the EBSCO subscription service. So why a book? There is nothing thematically or theoretically linking these essays cohesively together, other than that they are all about Irish literature. To apply the term "modern" is a bit disingenuous for essays covering the work of W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Kate O'Brien, Mary O'Donnell, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Seamus Heaney, Michael Coady, Keith Ridgway, Anne Enright, the Cuala Press, and the challenges of editing Irish poetry in America. It is not [End Page 722] enough to state that all of the essays are about twentieth-century Irish literature, nor is it convincing to claim, as Paul does in her introduction, that the "volume takes up questions of what it means to write modern Ireland" or that the essays are united by themes of nationhood or national identity (vii). Virtually all twentieth-century Irish literature deals with national identity in some form, either explicitly or implicitly, constructively or deconstructively, so as an organizing principle it means little at this point. Paul more accurately concludes that "even as we identify thematic strands among the contributions, it becomes clear that no one essay belongs to a single strand" (vii). In other words, the volume is a hodge-podge. Nevertheless, there are many fine essays here that deserve reprinting. In particular, there are eight strong discussions of Yeats, not organized in any apparent order but mostly focusing on his late work, beginning with Ronald Schuchard's beautifully written "Yeats in Extremis," in which the author considers Yeats's lifelong association of death with "tragic joy and ecstasy," from his earliest essays on magic through his elegiac ennobling of "Pearse and Connolly … Robert Gregory, and others" to his final "dream visions of Cuchulain" (4, 11). We also learn much about the aged Yeats from Jonathan Allison's "'The Old Moon-Phaser': Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice." After a brief biographical opening, Allison explicates several late poems before turning to Auden's and MacNeice's evolving attitudes toward the master from the 1930s to the end of their lives. Wim Van Mierlo challenges several critical truisms about Joyce and Yeats, first by separating the historical facts from the iconic fictions of their first meeting, then by examining the prosody and diction of Chamber Music and minimizing the perceived Yeatsian influences; Van Mierlo concludes that the true "affinity" between Joyce and Yeats lies in "their conceptions of art and artist" (55). Two essays discuss Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer from different critical approaches, both contributing in interesting ways to an understanding of that play.2 Alexandra Poulain analyzes the theatrical strategies Yeats employs to embody Cuchulain's absence onstage: the doubling of his mask, his representation through Emer's speech, and his restoration by Bricriu, who ironically turns Emer into a "spectator" as well as a specter, a "tragic heroine whose renouncement means a kind of death" (103). On the other hand, Ken Monteith uses disability studies to explore how Bricriu's withered arm represents not so much his evil nature but "his alterity, and his role as a bringer of truth" (105). Monteith's attempt to establish Emer's sacrifice as a form of disability is less convincing; however, he concludes with the...

Love and self-sacrifice: A Study on W. B. Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer

Love and self-sacrifice: A Study on W. B. Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer

The only jealousy of Emer: and, Fighting the waves: manuscript materials

The only jealousy of Emer: and, Fighting the waves: manuscript materials

Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer: Dialectic of Memory and Hope

Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer: Dialectic of Memory and Hope

Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer: Dialectic of Memory and Hope

『에머의 유일한 질투』에서의 쿠쿨레인은 예이츠의 다른 극에서 보여주는 두려움 없는 신화적 영웅이 아니다. 그는 자연계와 초자연계 사이에서 분열되어 있으며 자신의 운명 또한 에머의 손에 달려있는 전적으로 수동적인 인물로 그려진다. 이러한 쿠쿨레인의 속수무책과 그를 둘러싸고 일어나는 세 여인 및 브로크리우가 보여주는 욕망의 파노라마는 그의 영웅적 모습이 단순히 그들이 갖고있는 그의 경험적 종합으로는 설명할 수 없는 어떤 면이 있음을 암시한다. 즉 이들의 욕망을 고려해야만 경험적 종합으로 환원되지 않은 그의 영웅적 이미지를 이해할 수 있다. 본고에서는 이들 욕망사이의 갈등을 기억과 희망의 변증법을 중심으로 고찰한다. 에머가 에이스니로 하여금 쿠쿨레인의 이름를 부르고 그에게 키스를 하도록 하는 제의적인 모습은 그의 영웅적 정체성과 이름과 욕망간에 밀접한 관계가 있음을 보여준다. 한편 에머에게 주어진 잔인한 선택은 확정되지 않은 미래를 이미 확정된 것으로 가정함으로써, 에머는 미래의 희망을 희생한 것이 단순히 비극으로 끝나지 않고 그녀의 욕망을 비밀스럽게 실현시킨다. 시디의 여인(the woman of sidhe)의 욕망은 쿠쿨레인과의 결합을 통해 자신의 영혼의 완전히 실현하려는 것이다. 쿠쿨레인이 비통한 과거의 기억으로 인해 자신과의 결합에 머뭇거리는 것을 알고 그 기억을 자신과의 키스로 지우도록 유혹한다. 그런데 이 초자연적인 세계에 살고 있는 이 여인은 결코 자신의 욕망을 실현할 수 없는 운명에 놓여있는데 이는 모든 기억을 지운다는 그 세계조차 이미 언어와 기억으로 물들어 있기 때문이다. 이 극에서 에머와 시디의 여인의 욕망이 좌절되는 것에 비해 브로크리우만은 자신의 욕망을 실현하는 것처럼 보인다. 하지만 그 실현을 위해서는 자신과 철저히 동일시했던 쿠쿨레인의 모습을 포기해야하는 대가를 치루어야 가능하다. 이러한 점에서 그의 욕망은 애매한 실현으로 그친다. 이렇게 욕망은 결코 실현되지 않으며 항상 대체되고 환치된다는 점은 이 극의 초두의 두 노래에서 이미 암시되어 있다. 이 노래는 여인의 미와 이를 묘사하는 비유사이의 긴장, 특히 지나간 비유에 대한 기억과 다가올 비유에 대한 기대 사이의 긴장을 잘 보여준다. 이 긴장은 욕망을 둘러싸고 진행되는 기억과 희망의 변증법을 상징적으로 예시해 준다

An Alchemical Brew: From "Separatio" to "Coagulatio" in Yeats's "The Only Jealousy of Emer"

An Alchemical Brew: From "Separatio" to "Coagulatio" in Yeats's "The Only Jealousy of Emer"

Curing Oneself of the Work of Time: W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory

Curing Oneself of the Work of Time: W. B. Yeats’s P u rg a to ry Natalie Crohn Schmitt In a world overcome with realism and the logic of science Yeats wrote religious drama. He wrote for people who had no communal mythology and for those for whom mythology had lost its religious significance. Christianity, Yeats believed, had be­ come a doctrine of the church, not an affirmation of religiousness. Yeats’s history as a playwright is one of tireless confrontation with the fact that there were no terms given to him in which he might convincingly write dramas conveying the religious ex­ perience. His continuing effort was to invent them and to try to infuse conventional dramatic forms with the dynamism of re­ ligious experience. This was no easy task; to accomplish it Yeats had to overcome the logical reasoning processes of his audience. Yeats wrote a dance play about a swineherd who, after being be­ headed, sang—and reason leads us to assume that Yeats did not believe that beheaded men can sing and that the story is purely fanciful, at best emblematic. 1 Yeats wrote a more realistic prose play about Christ’s resurrection—and reason provokes us to ask whether Yeats did or did not accept the Resurrection as fact.2 In both instances Yeats was trying to give account of and to pro­ vide his audience with a religious experience; to assume that he intended the one story as merely symbolic and to ask whether he believed the other to be objectively true is to misunderstand both stories in equal but opposite ways. With both stories Yeats wanted to express a state in which thought and reality become one. Seeing the resurrected Christ, a character in The Resurrection expresses the mystery in these words: “The heart of a phantom is beating.” In The Only Jeal­ ousy of Enter it is expressed thus: “A dream is body.” Natural and supernatural, living and dead, image and reality come to310 Natalie Crohn Schmitt 311 gether as one. The experience of that confluence is for Yeats, in the later years, the religious experience. His central dramatic problem was not to argue the truth of the religious perception— that truth defies argument—or even, as in The Resurrection, to show characters having the religious experience, but to provide that experience for his audience. “Man,” he said, “can embody truth but he cannot know it. . . . You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.” Poetry “is a revelation of a hidden life, and . . . painting, poetry, and music the only means of conversing with eternity left to man on earth.”3 With his plays Yeats sought always for the dramatic correlative: the song—or rather, the action—that could provide the religious experience.4 Generally the central figure in the plays is in his person an ex­ pression of the religious experience: Cuchulain is half god, half man, natural-supernatural. The central figure is also generally exemplary: he has an experience of the unity of being and this experience concludes the play’s action. But not always: some of Yeats’s most successful religious plays are those in which the central figures fail to experience this unity: The Dreaming of the Bones, Calvary, and Purgatory. The Only Jealousy of Emer, The Player Queen, The Herne’s Egg, and The Words Upon the Window-Pane can also be understood to take this form. Purgatory is a religious drama, a ritual of rebirth—which fails—expressed wholly in terms of the archetypal images and actions for that rite. At the same time it is a play written wholly in the vernacular: the action is accessible to us in psychological terms and the language, it is often observed, while set on the page as poetry, gives the effect of natural speech.5 The play functions on the levels of both the sacred and the profane, and by bringing together these two realms, which he had so often in earlier plays shown in unresolvable conflict, Yeats most dramati­ cally expressed his later understanding that the religious experi­ ence is the experience of all contraries come together as one. On the anniversary...

The Sustained Metaphor in &lt;i&gt;The Only Jealousy of Emer&lt;/i&gt;

The Sustained Metaphor in &lt;i&gt;The Only Jealousy of Emer&lt;/i&gt;

The Lyric and the Philosophic in Yeats' Calvary

THE LYRIC AND THE PHILOSOPHIC IN YEATS' CALVARY WHILE THE greatness of William Butler Yeats as a poet is seldom disputed today, his position as a playwright is more open to question. Despite enthusiastic acclaim of his dramatic technique by Archibald MacLeish and Eric Bentley, Yeats' plays are'little performed in this country outside of the universities. Actually, Yeats himself was well aware of certain qualities which he purposefully built into his plays and which he knew would diminish the chances of their success on the conventional, commercial stage. One such quality is, of course, their poetic diction and construction, although it would be unfair to imply that the connection between his poetry and his drama is that simple. For it is fairly obvious, in retrospect, that Yeats' immersion in the drama, beginning slightly before the turn of the century, was at first perhaps a symptom of his desire to alter his style and later a cause of the change toward a more colloquial diction in his poetry. This influence of dramatic technique on poetry has been well demonstrated by Thomas Parkinson in his study, W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic (1951). The difference between Yeats' earlier and later poems does not, however , lie merely in an improved technique; Yeats was the kind of writer who needed a philosophic system; and beginning in 1917 he gradually came into possession of one. The first fruit of that system was included in his Plays and Controversies (1923). Calvary, the last of "Four Plays for Dancers" in that volume, was probably written between The Only Jealousy of Emer (finished in 1918) and the preface to the plays (dated July, 1920). In a note to The Only Jealousy of Emer, Yeats described the kind of drama that he was writing: ". . . intended for some fifty people in a drawing room or a studio," it could "only fully succeed in a civilization very unlike ours." Ideally plays of this sort "should be written for some country where all classes share in a half-mythological, halfphilosophical folk-belief which the writer and his small audience lift into a new subtlety." Not only had Yeats long wished for such beliefs, but, he concluded, "I have now found all the mythology and philosophy I need."l What Yeats had found was published two years later in A Vision. 1. I do not mean to imply that the mythology which Yeats had found was totally responsible for the form of these plays. He had been influenced bY Gordon Craig and the Japanese No drama, to which he had been introduced by Ezra Pound. See Chapter XIV of Richard Ellman's biography, Yeats, The Man and the Masks (1948). 370 1960 Lnuc AND PmLosopmc IN YEATS' CALVARY 371 He had made the discovery, four days after his marriage in 1917, that his wife, the former Georgie Hyde-Lees, could act as a medium through automatic writing. From this source Yeats received a very complicated theory of history, personality, and the soul. The theory was based on a Platonic dualism, replete with what he called the Great Memory, a storehouse ·of archetypal images occasionally available to finite minds, if they are guided by appropriate symbols and rituals. We can therefore understand why he would "desire a mysterious art, . . . doing its work by suggestion, not by direct statement, a complexity of rhythm, colour, gesture, not space-pervading like intellect but a memory and a prophecy." What he was after in fact was "not a theatre, but the theatre's anti-self," a subjective rather than an objective art. In addition to providing him with an aesthetic, Yeats'. philosophy often determined the ideas which he embodied in his plays. As a result, Yeats was able to harmonize content and technique, as the dancer sways to the dance. The sad, dreamy poetry of his youth had this same harmony, of course, and it too aimed to "work by suggestion ." But by means of his direct line to the spirit world, Yeats gained a "mythology and philosophy" which gave to his later work the important qualities of precision and continuity, and made it more worldly , self-assured, and convincing than the earlier often was. In the following...

W. B. Yeats: A Poet Not in the Theatre

Yeats’ difficulty in becoming a successful playwright is not surprising or unexpected. His own views on the public theatre precluded success, and it would have surprised Yeats as much as anyone if at any time in his career he had achieved much widespread popularity. His growth as a playwright was always away from the “pit” and the appearance of Four Plays for Dancers, The Only Jealousy of Emer, At the Hawk's Well, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Calvary (the first of which was produced in 1916), is in many ways a predictable outcome of much of his opinion of what drama should be. In a note to At the Hawk's Well in 1916 he had written: