Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays by Helen Hennessy Vendler (review)

464 MODERN DRAMA February a playwright. The plays are often mentioned by students of Yeats for the light they shed upon his verse or his philosophy, and Yeats's plays have been considered in a historical way as products of the Irish national theater movement. Before Yeats the Playwright, only F. A. C. Wilson's twobooklength studies have dealt with' the canon of the plays in detail, and Wilson's interest focuses on the philosophical and occult sources and hints through which the reader may be led to the esoteric meanings of the plays-an important and interesting pursuit, but one in which the plays tend to be static things, laboratory specimens. In Yeats the Playwright Ure's essays deal with the plays in their dramatic dimensions of "plot, characterization, and the handling of morals and ideas," and the major contribution of the ,book to Yeats studies might well be in its (usually successful) refusal to examine the plays as poems. It is time Yeats were treated as a playwright, not as a poet taking his brief hour upon the stage, and it is to be hoped that Ure's ,book may encourage other students of Yeats to desist from the kind of apologetics involved in reading playas poem or as residual philosophical statement. There is a certain iconoclasm in Ure's treatment of Yeats, a breaking away from the usual modes and concerns which have directed attention in the past away from a consideration of the plays as drama. In his chapter "From Grave to Cradle," a discussion of three plays unified by Yeats's notion of the dreaming back of the dead, Ure makes a careful separation between philosophical information and dramatic result. The plays can mostly be discussed independently of the various discourses in which Yeats worked out his philosophy of death. These discourses belong to a genre different from the theatrical one. Yeats himself was careful not to confuse the two modes; there is nothing in the three plays which is not intelligible even to the uninstructed theatrical spectator.... It is perhaps an iconoclastic gesture which causes the author of Yeats the Playwright to omit the lengthy and eclectic bibliography which inevitably follows Yeats studies these days, but whatever disappointment the reader may feel as he searches for the nonexistent 'bibliography will be amply compensated for by an appended chronology of useful information about the plays. And certainly, in his pursuit of Yeats as playwright, Ure has, throughout the work, admirably accepted responsibility for showing, through an examination of the various versions of the plays, the development of Yeats's consciousness of himself as a maker for the stage. Ure's emphasis upon the plays as the rightful property of the theatergoer may be responsible for his general avoidance in the book (there are exceptions, as in the treatment of The Dreaming of the Bones) of concern with the language of the plays. the meaning of imagery. the implications of rhythm-an omission to be regretted, for these aspects are, inextricably, part of the total dramatic substance of the plays. by which they must stand or fall as drama. DONNA GERSTENBERGER University of Washington YEATS'S VISION AND THE LATER PLAYS, by Helen Hennessy Vendler. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1963. 286 pp. Price $6.00. Mrs.Vendler's study may seem of only peripheral interest to readers of Modem Drama, since she is not really concerned with the plays as plays. In fact, she doesn't really think they are plays, at least, not properly "dramatic" ones. Her 1964 BOOK REVIEWS 465 intention is to explain them in the light of A Vision, 'because, "until they are understood, the fine poetry in the late plays will go unappreciated." Such misunderstanding has been impossible, theoretically, since 1948, when Ronald Peacock and Eric Bentley had both published their essays on Yeats as a dramatist. Where Bentley practically dismisses the poetry in favor of the strikingly dramatic unity of conception and technique, Mrs. Vendler says: "It is clear that the plays are dramatic neither in conception nor in end, but are rather devices within which to embody lyrics." Nevertheless the book is useful. It provides enough illumination, not only...