Player Queen Research Articles

“A player, a playwright, and the most famous poet in the world”: Highs and Lows in The Player Queen

Yeats published The Player Queen, a play he had struggled with for more than a decade, in 1922, just a year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. This article argues despite its appearance of complete wackiness, The Player Queen constitutes a significant landmark in Yeats’s elaboration of his own theatrical aesthetics, as well as a meditation on artistic responsibility—or failure thereof. Why does the poet Septimus fail to communicate his beautiful vision of the Unicorn to anyone, and why does no-one in the play listen to him? On the one hand, the citizens in the play are figures of the incompetent spectators, reminiscent of the audience who rejected Synge at the Abbey. On the other hand, Septimus himself is an incompetent spectator, who is so engrossed in his poetic vision that he fails to pay attention to the momentous change that is really going on before his eyes, although this concerns his own wife Decima, the eponymous Player Queen who comes to replace the real queen. Septimus fails to make himself heard because he is not paying attention to what really matters, he is not fulfilling his duty, as a playwright and a poet, of translating the shapeless chaos of reality into intelligible forms.

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

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.

The Origins of the Player King and Player Queen Speech Prefixes in Hamlet

The Origins of the Player King and Player Queen Speech Prefixes in <i>Hamlet</i>

The Play Within a Play’s the Thing

The play within a play has long been understood as Hamlet’s attempt to catch the conscience of the King. But is that all it is? Perhaps there’s more to the Murder of Gonzago than either Hamlet or even Shakespeare, himself, intended? While the narrative of the Player King and Player Queen clearly works to tap into the private guilt of King Claudius, it also does much to reveal the hidden psychology of Gertrude, a woman whose motives and psychological underpinnings are often concealed to the audience. The purpose of this article is to use the play within a play as a meta-text through which the reader can learn to decode, first, who Gertrude was, both as a wife and a person, prior to Hamlet Sr’s death, and, second, offer an explanation for why she remarries so quickly in the wake of her first husband’s murder. In this sense, though Hamlet designs the play within a play to gain ocular proof of Claudius’ crime, he may unconsciously also do so to catch the conscience of his mother, and thereby better understand himself. The play within a play within a play’s the thing.

The Conflict between Poet and Heroine in Yeats’s Plays: Focusing on The Countess Cathleen and The Player Queen*1

This essay explores the conflict between poet and heroine in Yeats’s plays through a comparative analysis of the two plays The Countess Cathleen (1892) and The Player Queen (1922). It figures out how different the conflict is between poet and heroine in both plays. First, this essay analyzes the opposition between Aleel and Cathleen in The Countess Cathleen in order to find out how the poet is in contrast with the heroine. On the basis of the results, the opposing relation between Septimus and Decima in The Player Queen is investigated. This essay argues that Yeats still manifests the supremacy of subjectivity over objectivity through the conflict between poet and heroine even if the poet described in the conflict may seem different from the antithetical man in Yeats’s system.

Yeats’s “The Player Queen”: Taking on (or Laughing off) Modernism

The Player Queen est une des pièces les moins estimées de l’œuvre de W.B. Yeats tant à cause de son obscurité que de son originalité au sein de son corpus théâtral. Souvent étudiée à travers le seul prisme des idées ésotériques développées plus tard dans A Vision , la dimension esthétique et théâtrale de la pièce est négligée. Cet article se propose de lire la pièce comme une illustration de l’ambivalence de Yeats face à la rupture moderniste, un bouleversement esthétique qu’il a anticipé et intégré à son écriture à travers en particulier une veine comique, qu’il a longtemps refusé de faire sienne.

A Vision and Reading The Player Queen

A Vision and Reading The Player Queen

Introduction

Considering the title page of the Second Quarto, which reads Tragedy of Prince of Denmark, (2) claims to be an enlargement and correction of the First Quarto, it is curious to note that the main role that plays throughout the play is in keeping with the description of his childhood mentor, Yorick, the court jester. When the gravedigger unearths Yorick's skull immediately recalls how Yorick poured a flagon of Rhenish on [someone] once and refers to the old jester as a mad fellow and mad rogue(V.i.155-159). (3) In this respect, antic disposition or mask of madness seems to be a 'chip off the old block.' More specifically, considering the fact that the jester made a profession of playing with, poking at, and exposing others peoples' vices, errors, mistakes, faults and general human foibles, biting wit continues in this tradition. In fact, the central plot of the play consists in trying to reveal what others, whether it be his mother, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and of course, Claudius, wish to hide away. also balances his polemical attacks against everyone, by including himself, not unlike the medieval court jester. For example, during the Play scene, after indicting the king via the dumb play, and his mother via the Player Queen who will keep her word(III.ii.219), like a jester who does not wish to cause the royal family to feel that the jester feels superior to them, indicts himself with his reference to Lucianus; thus rounding out his claim that the players do merely poison in jest(III.ii.221). In this respect, like many medieval and Renaissance jesters who learned the hard way, often becoming a meal for the king's hungry dogs after offending their royal and cankerous master, must carefully monitor his behavior, juggling/judging when to 'let go' and 'hold on' to his satirical thoughts. In relation to this jester like aspect of behavior there have been two recent pieces of scholarship, namely, Hamlet, Without (2007) by Margreta de Grazia and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003) by Harold Bloom. Curiously, both explore playfulness but in two divergent ways. On the one hand, Bloom re-addresses Shakespeare's most enigmatic and memorable character by qualifying in the preface that the present volume is a postlude to his earlier work Shakespeare: Invention of the Human. In deriving the present thematic title, Bloom cleverly quotes Polonius, The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy or poem unlimited; and asserts that There is no end to or to because there is no end to Shakespeare. (4) Accordingly, Bloom ends his new volume by noting: We want to hear on everything, as we hear Montaigne, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud. Shakespeare, having broken into the mode of the poem unlimited, closed it so that always we would go on needing to hear more. (5) Essentially, Bloom asserts that meaning for the hero of consciousness, (6) who also that he knows more (7) than his audience, is that Hamlet discovers that his life has been a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity. (8) In contrast, Margreta de Grazia argues that the icon of consciousness, has been mis-read and over-stated within the context of the overall play. (9) In fact, whereas Bloom exalts in subjectivity, De Grazia asserts that it is virtually non-existent, a mere addendum supplanted onto the character by modern criticism. In response to de Grazia's earlier essay titled, Hamlet's Thoughts and Antics, Juliet Fleming writes: This is a critical move that many will resist, for it severs in one blow the axiom according to which much Shakespearean criticism currently proceeds. (10) She adds: ... in contemporary Shakespearean criticism it is often developed according to a process of historical inversion that attributes to Shakespeare's plays the capacity to speak to--indeed to originate a conversation with-the present moment. …

&lt;i&gt;Titus Redux&lt;/i&gt;, and: &lt;i&gt;Hamlet, Prince of Darkness&lt;/i&gt;, and: &lt;i&gt;Pulp Shakespeare&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Titus Redux, and: Hamlet, Prince of Darkness, and: Pulp Shakespeare Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. Titus ReduxPresented by the New American Theatre and Not Man Apart-Physical Theatre Ensemble at Los Angeles Theatre Center, Los Angeles, California, as part of the Radar L.A. Festival. June 16-19, 2011. Conceived, choreographed and directed by John Farmanesh-Bocca. Set by Jeffrey Eisenmann. Costumes by Allison Leach. Effects by Jason Collins. Lighting by Jessica Kohn. Sound by John Farmanesh-Bocca and Adam Phalen. With Jack Stehlin (Titus Andronicus), Belinda Strong (Tamora), Jennifer Landon (Lavinia), Dash Peppin (Demetrius), Vincent Cardinale (Chiron), Nicholas Hormann (Marcus Andronicus), John F. Bocca (Aaron), and Deus Xavier (Soldier). Hamlet, Prince of DarknessPresented by Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre Group at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre, North Hollywood, California. May 20-June 24, 2011. Directed by Denise Devin. Costumes by Jeri Batzdorff. With Robert Walters (Hamlet), Amy Bartlett (Horatio, Rosencrantz), Jim Cox (Claudius), Frank Leone (Polonius), Melissa Okey (Gertrude), Clare Wess Yauss (Ophelia), Patrick O'Neill (Laertes), Rebecca Silberman (Bernardo, Guidenstern, Fortinbras), Evan Boelsen (Ghost, Player King, Grave Robber), and Irene Conde (Marcellus, Voltemand, Player Queen, Satan, Osric). Pulp ShakespearePresented by Her Majesty's Secret Players at the Theatre Asylum, Los Angeles, California. June 11-28, October 14-November 13, 2011, and ongoing. Directed by Jordan Monsell. Costumes by Kelly Bailey. Lighting by Aaron Lyons. Sounds by Brian Weiss. Fights by Aaron Lyons. With Dan White (Julius Winfield), Aaron Lyons (Vincent de la Vega), Nathaniel Freeman (Lord Marcellus Washburn), Sierra Fisk (Lady Mia Washburn), Christian Levatino (Sir "Butch" Coolidge), Brian Weiss (PumpkinPie), Liza deWeerd (Meadsweet), Justine Woodford (Fabianne), et al.. [End Page 207] As with any major metropolitan area, Los Angeles sees a good deal of summer Shakespeare. In 2011 alone, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Hamlet, Love's Labors Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Learwere among the two dozen straightforward presentations. Los Angeles also features many adaptations, often infused with the local culture (in our case, Hollywood), and the film and television influence could be seen clearly in several Shakespeare offshoots: besides the three reviewed here, there was As You Like It: The Musical!and the Troubadour Theatre Company's remounting of Fleetwood Macbeth, a blend of the Shakespearean tragedy and the eponymous band. The latter was an inspired bit of silliness that saw Macbeth sing "World Turning" during the banquet scene, "You Can Go Your Own Way" as a duet with Macduff during the final duel, and a remorseful yet wistful "Landslide" to close the show. The Royal Shakespeare Company this was not. Clearly alluding to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Titus Reduxpresented General Andronicus, returned from active duty in the empire's service and now "retired like an old tank." This adaptation reduced the scope of Shakespeare's play down to a single family's experience of posttraumatic stress syndrome. Throughout much of the play it was ambiguous whether the events were actually taking place or whether they were the imaginings of a soldier who has seen too much combat and whose government and family no longer values him. Titus's brother Marcus was presented as a conservative senator still in government service (a commercial for his re-election, ending with "I'm Marcus Andronicus, and I approve this message" ran several times during the show). As the family sat down to dinner, Titus cleared the plates and encouraged his sons Demetrius and Chiron to engage in bare-knuckle boxing on the dinner table. Tamora was presented as a Washington/military housewife, seething with anger at the death of her and Titus's eldest son in combat and at her husband's prolonged absence at war. Lavinia, their daughter doted on her father, and resented her mother during his long absence and the family collapsed into violence against one another. Aaron the Moor became a Muslim-American neighbor who may or may not be a terrorist and who may or may not be having an affair with Tamora. Titus repeatedly flashed back to moments of combat and, after leading his family in an extended dance number with American flags and patriotic...

Hamlet (review)

Reviewed by: Hamlet Adrienne L. Eastwood Hamlet Presented by the We Players on Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, California, October 2-November 21, 2010. Directed by Ava Roy. Assistant Direction by Steve Boss. Costumes by Julia Rose Meeks. Lighting by Alehandro Acosta. Fight Choreography by Tim Brown. Music by Jenna Brace, Danny Cao, Eric Drake, Todd Grady, Henry Hung, Sam Hernandez, Josh Tower, Thomas Trono, and Rob Woodcock. With Andrus Nichols (Hamlet), Misti Boettiger (Ophelia), Carly Cioffi (Gertrude), Scott D. Phillips (Claudius), Jack Halton (Polonius), Steve Boss (Player King, Guide, Fortinbras), Benjamin [End Page 463] Stowe (Laertes), Nicholas Trengove (Horatio), Kevin Singer (Barnardo, Rosencrantz), Ross Travis (Marcellus, Guildenstern), Rebecca Longworth (Player Queen, Player), Sallie Romer (Player), and Cara Zeisloft (Player). Alcatraz Island—known familiarly as "The Rock"—is a unique place. Historically, it has served as an army fortress and military prison, but it is most well known as the maximum-security federal penitentiary from which very few prisoners ever managed to escape. Although the prison closed in 1963, many of the buildings and structures remain, in various stages of decay. Now, it is a nationally protected park that serves as the breeding ground for flocks of endangered birds. Because of its history, Alcatraz has an eerie atmosphere. The empty cell-blocks and towers, the morgue and recreation yard, seem haunted by the ghosts of the men who lived out their dismal and desperate lives there. The air smells of bird excrement and the bay. It is a place that seems halfway between this living world and one that exists somehow beyond death. What better setting for Hamlet, Shakespeare's brooding meditation on death, madness, grief, and revenge? Early in the play, Hamlet tells Guildenstern, "Denmark's a prison." It seems that he means this metaphorically, as he goes on to explain, " . . . there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me, it's a prison." This notion, that the mind can imprison itself, is one of the central themes in Hamlet. But in a play that constantly oscillates between conviction and un-decidability, larger questions about humanity loom: What are the contours of these dungeons of the mind? How much do we ourselves control our own enslavement? Ava Roy's idea to stage a Hamlet using the ruined prison buildings on Alcatraz—and the island itself—as its set, enlivened and invigorated such questions. On a blustery, rainy day in late October, the ferry pulled into Sally Port and a Shakespearean adventure began. Before we had disembarked from the boat, the frantic opening scene of Hamlet unfolded. Led by docents and strolling musicians, the audience followed the players off the ferry and around the island, pausing at various sites (including some areas normally off-limits to regular visitors) to experience the performance. We craned our necks to glimpse the ghost, which was eerily rendered by several actors identically dressed in dark suits with white stockings over their faces. The audience's attention constantly shifted from one ghost to another as they seemed to appear and disappear around the railings of the decrepit cell-blocks and guard towers, creating the supernatural [End Page 464] effect that the ghost could materialize at will. "After Hamlet!" the docent cried. And the audience of about 60 members eagerly trotted along behind the character as he chased the ghost. At one point, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played exuberantly by Kevin Singer and Ross Travis, made their entrances by bounding through the crowd, greeting the audience. All of this infused the play with excitement—the audience eager to see what would happen next and thinking about how they might best position themselves to enjoy whatever that would be. Through much of the play, actors and audience alike contended not only with wind and occasional rain, but the curious stench of this island—populated now only by flocks of cormorants and terns. Something was indeed "rotten" in this Denmark. Visitors not expecting to walk into a Shakespeare play also proved a minor distraction. But these challenges and distractions were braved phenomenally well by the actors—particularly Andrus Nichols, who played the Danish Prince. Appropriately, the graveyard scene was rendered in a soaking rain, the...

Hamlet Between the Lines

Hamlet Presented by The Public Theater at Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, New York. May 27-June 29, 2008. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Scenic design by David Korins. Costume design by Ann Hould-Ward. Puppetry by Basil Twist. With Michael Stuhlbarg (Hamlet), Sam Waterson (Polonius), Andre Braugher (Claudius), Margaret Colin (Gertrude), Lauren Ambrose (Ophelia), David Harbour (Laertes), Kevin Carroll (Horatio), Hoon Lee (Rosencrantz), Greg McFadden (Guildenstern),Jay O. Sanders (Player King), Miriam Silverman (Player Queen), and others. The most, and almost only, moving scene in The Public Theatre's Hamlet in Central Park this year was the play-within-the-play. Performed by highly skilled puppeteers, it featured three life-sized marionettes designed by Basil Twist with what one might call rough magic; each puppet was made to look as though it were only colorful sheet (of satiny burgundy, white, or blue and green) wrapped over simple marionette frame with stuffed headpiece and coiled fabric for arms. The movements were equally simple, but also remarkably subtle and expressive, and brought the puppets alive in hauntingly poignant way that made the mic'd voice-overs resonate with genuine emotion. For the first time I can remember, the Player King and Queen did indeed come across as couple that shared thirty years of love in the sacred bands of marriage. Thus it felt real that the Player Queen would protest so much; and the Player King's blunt predictions about how her vows will fare after his death felt as though he spoke, not out of cynical distrust, but selfless care for his wife's happiness in the future. Unfortunately, this moment stood virtually alone, and did not become an emblem for the magic of theatre when make-believe takes on living quality and actors become personages we care about. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I should note that I was not alone in feeling that the production, directed by the Public's Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis, was uninspired. First, I happened to see the show with my mother, who had last read Hamlet well over sixty years ago in Korean translation of Japanese translation (as was the practice in colonial times). Her knowledge of the play came more from bits and pieces picked up over the years (melancholy brooding, To be or not to be) and assembled around the image of Hamlet holding skull. On top of this, because her English is still far from perfect, her impressions were necessarily broad. Nonetheless, her reactions to the production generally matched the most common complaints of the reviewers. She found Gertrude to be characterless and bland (NY Post, June 18, 2008), if not so lifeless as a well-maintained mannequin (Daily News, June 22, 2008). Nothing illuminated my mother's most pressing question about Gertrude: is it frailty or guts, or something else, that drives woman to marry her brother-in-law so soon after her husband's death? My mother also couldn't see how Andre Braugher's Claudius could murder, seduce and engineer coup, since there was little in the way of specific characterization (NY Times, June 18, 2008); had she been familiar with Braugher's other work, she would no doubt have added that he uncharacteristically left little impression (New York Magazine, June 19, 2008) at all. Ophelia was at least pitiable as the pained, dutiful daughter in an elegant pink frock, but her transformation into disheveled punk-chick (New York Sun, June 18, 2008), or Courtney Love look-alike (NY Post) in the mad scene left my mother thinking that Ophelia had suddenly walked in from another play. But most of all, Michael Stuhlbarg's Hamlet left her feeling emotionally disengaged, and as the show teetered into its fourth hour, numbness [became] the overriding response (Variety, June 17, 2008). By that time, the character that both the New York Times reviewer and my mother found most interesting--Sam Waterston's eager and bluster-filled but vulnerable and gently comic Polonius--was long dead and offstage. …

Yeats : les principaux jalons dans la recherche de l'identité

Yeats defines his identity in his life and work and elaborates his own theory. The germs of his conception are found in the three stories of 1897 : Rosa Alchemica, The Tables of the Law, The Adoration of the Magi, and in the Autobiography. Then the theory takes shape in The Player Queen. Growing richer by contact with the Noh plays, it matures in the essay "Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places" which leads to Per Arnica, men to the first version of A Vision. At the same time it provides the pattern for some of the most beautiful poems. The fulfilment of personality implies the of contraries, that of self and anti-self or mask. Rose, dance, wheel, zodiac are the symbols of re-united contraries, Unity and perfection. Yeats follows the evolution of personality through history and through the successive lives. Besides, the conflict of self and anti-self is an aspect of this quarrel with ourselves which is a source of poetry. Granted the many metamorphoses, where is our true identity ? Among School-Children tries to give an answer. By assuming his identity, Yeats has made the unconscious conscious and expressed the universal self.

Of Flood and Fire: A Study of "The Player Queen"

Of Flood and Fire: A Study of "The Player Queen"

W. B. Yeats: The Writing of The Player Queen

W. B. Yeats: The Writing of The Player Queen

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access W. B. YEATS: THE WRITING OF “THE PLAYER QUEEN” , Manuscripts of W. B. Yeats transcribed, edited and with a commentary by Curtis Baker Bradford . DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press , 1977 ; pp. xxiv, 483 ; $30.00. PATRICK DISKIN PATRICK DISKIN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 26, Issue 4, August 1979, Pages 368–369, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/26-4-368 Published: 01 August 1979

“Body’s Image”: Yerma, The Player Queen, and the Upright Posture

“Body’s Image”: Yerma, The Player Queen, and the Upright Posture Murray Baumgarten Francis Fergusson has reminded us of the ways in which Lorca’s theatre, of a piece with his poetry, brings the latent memory of the rich Andalusian folk-tradition to dramatic vivid life. Writing out of the revival of a national culture, which he in part helped to bring about, Lorca creates “significant art forms, filled with immediately relevant moral and spiritual content”; his poetic theatre responds to rather than evades “the crucial labor of the dramatic poet, faced with the modem stage and the mod­ em crowd,” by discovering and articulating his poetic vision as myth, ritual, and ceremony.1 Like Yeats, Lorca “felt the need of a story and form which should make the play itself (as distinguished from the language) poetic,” seeking these “elements in myth and ritual. Yeats pro­ ceeded from Irish myths, to an English version of Oedipus, to forms based on the No play”; Lorca found the possibilities he sought among the gypsies and the (mythic) landscape of his native Andalusia. Yeats labored “to reincarnate a myth in our time,” struggling to release “the suggestion of deep poetic in­ sight” that tempted him in his reading into the dramatic life of his plays. Just as self-conscious a poet, Lorca found his own way into myth. Lorca persuades us to suspend our modem disbelief in cere­ mony; making believe with him, we participate in the evocation of ancient stories, exploring and articulating their nonrealistic meanings. His magic lifts us out of our everyday world; his ritual becomes ours. If the story of Don Perlimplin is “not strictly a myth, it has the qualities our poets seek in myth: It seems much older and much more generally significant than any history which is literally true,” Ferguson points out, “yet Lorca does not seem 290 Murray Baumgarten 291 to have thought it up, but rather to have perceived it, or heard it, in the most intimate chamber of his sensibility. In embodying it on the stage he is careful to preserve this oft-told feeling, like a song, or a tale told by a grandmother. This he does with the utmost confidence and simplicity,” in a manner Yeats came to understand through his theoretical study of the theatre and struggled to embody in his own plays and theatrical company.2 Both men discover or invent versions of traditional tales which, rooted in their respective locales, come to form the struc­ ture of their theatrical practice. Like the stories of folklore, legend, and ballad, they are quick with a tragic intensity. These simple plots of desperation and love’s loss are the vehicles by whose means Yeats and Lorca explore fundamental human questions. In examining an issue like the body’s image—the center of The Player Queen and Yerma—both artists create works that in their dramatic fullness articulate a philosophical anthropology. As the protagonists of these plays encounter each other in theatrical dialectic, they realize their human destiny as beings determined by their upright posture, and work through a perspective similar to the one Erwin Straus has outlined in his famous essay.3 “I have long wanted to go there to lose my name and disap­ pear,’^ the real, but anonymous, Queen says at the crisis of The Player Queen as she dresses Decima for the royal part and makes her exit. Mild and meek, living a fantasy life, the Queen has visions of martyrdom. At the beck and call of the Prime Minister, she has closeted herself with her mystic visions for the seven years of her rule, striving to deny her body’s call to love in order to be martyred like her patroness, Saint Octema. Her encounter with Decima makes it possible for this real Queen to slip away to the convent and disappear. She fulfills her deepest wish just as Decima, the player queen, now has granted the fulfillment of Septimus’ poetic prophecy. As her body ac­ cedes to the image of royalty and as she plays the royal part, Decima becomes in fact the queen her changeling was in name alone. “Man is nothing till he is...

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...

Yeats's Symbolic Farce: The Player Queen

ONLY AFTER A DOZEN YEARS OF difficult travail-with Ezra Pound acting as a midwife-did Yeats permit himself to be delivered of The Player Queen. According to Richard Ellmann's account, it was Pound, acting as advisor and personal secretary to Yeats during the winters of 1913- 1916, who first suggested that the play might be written as a comedy. Intermittently, Yeats had spent six or seven years trying to write the playas tragedy, but the manuscript continually displeased him. Then, having accepted Pound's proposal, he subjected the play to a series of massive revisions, and gradually the work evolved into its present form. Yeats's own account of his struggle with The Player Queen (while omitting mention of Pound's influence) records this story and in an important way contributes to our understanding of the play's intent.

Yeats's Symbolic Farce: The Player Queen

Yeats's Symbolic Farce: The Player Queen

In Defense Of Yeats As A Dramatist

Thus spake W. B. Yeats after some forty-five years of seeing his plays produced and often directing them himself. Perhaps the last phrases quoted are all the answer some critics of his plays deserve. Certainly he has no need of any defense from me or from a lady who wrote "I would like to redeem both A Vision and the [later] plays…” It was the same lady who remarked that "In spite of its appeal, The Player Queen, like most of Yeats's plays, is not really stageworthy." Granted such a redeemer, Yeats hardly needs a betrayer. What he does need are directors who are intelligent and humble enough to read all that he has written about the kind of production he wanted for a particular play or type of play and then to carry out these instructions as faithfully as possible.