In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

YEATS'S PURGATORIAL PLAYS THREE OF YEATS'S PLAYS, The Dreaming of the Bones) The Words Upon the Window-Pane) and Purgatory) have a peculiar interest for the student of his dramaturgy. All three are ghost plays, of course, and as such form a convenient group, though this is not the primary reason why they claim our attention. Moreover, all three are unusual in that they are more pointedly occasional and more direct in their representation of recent history than are most of Yeats's other plays. Most significant, however, is the fact that it is fruitful to think of the three plays as constituting a series of experiments in the course of which a set of dramaturgical conventions is transmuted into a completely personal vehicle. The Dreaming of the Bones is one kind of Japanese Noh play, allowing for the limited nature of Yeats's understanding of the Noh. (The Words Upon the WindowPane may be regarded as a transitional stage in Yeats's treatment of the soul in purgatory.) The dramatic strategy of Purgatory is substantially different from that of the Noh, and yet Purgatory grows out of Yeats's experiences with it. The story of Yeats's interest in the Noh has been told more than once, and need only be sketched here. We know that he originally hoped to resurrect poetic drama when he established the Irish Literary Theatre in the late nineties; we know of his disappointment when he found that the Abbey Theatre could attract only an audience for the kind of realistic play that he disliked; we know how his struggle to defend Synge's plays against the aggressions of Irish patriots and Catholics embittered him and finally led him to look for a much smaller and more select audience for his own plays. If the cultivation of the Noh form was in part the result of such a series of disappointments, it also provided a particularly suitable vehicle for the expression of his "subjective" genius. He could at once liberate himself from an antagonistic audience, from the burden of the Elizabethan achievement, and could, of course,even more completely turn his back on contemporary realism. In "Certain Noble Plays of Japan" (1916) he proclaimed the advantages of the new form. In place of scenery he could use a chorus of three musicians, who had no part in the action, and who could "describe place and weather, and at moments action, and accompany it all by drum and gong or flute and dulcimer." Instead of the violent climax of earlier tragedies, "the music, the beauty of form and voice all come 1964 YEATS'S PURGATORIAL PLAYS 279 to climax in pantomimic dance." Instead of "the face of some commonplace player, or that face repainted to suit his own vulgar fancy," he had the mask, "the fine invention of a sculptor," that enabled him "to bring the audience close enough to the play to hear every inflection of the voice." Even "slight variations upon old cadences and customary words" could be conveyed to an audience effectively by a relatively slow and rhythmic chant accompanied by the restrained rhythmic movements of the protagonists. Yeats knew that the form would support not only a subtle language, but also that it would "make credible strange events." Indeed, he seems originally to have been attracted to the Japanese plays because they dramatized legends and beliefs that seemed to him to corroborate his faith in spiritualism, to judge from his comments in "Swedenborg , Mediums, and the Desolate Places" (1914). The Noh play would allow him to dramatize the supernatural in a credible manner. One would expect the earliest experiments with the form to be closest in form and spirit to the Japanese originals. One indication of Yeats's approximation to this is suggested by the fact that At the Hawk's Well, the first of his dance plays, "was translated, altered and converted into an old Noh play proper by Mr. Yokomichi Mario and that it was produced in Tokyo in 1949, 1950, and 1952 on the Noh stage," according to John G. Mills. The Dreaming of the Bones bears an even closer relationship to the spirit and the...

pdf

Share