The Shaping Force in Yeats's Plays

THE SHAPING FORCE IN YEATS'S PLAYS My TWO-PRONGED THESIS IS THIS: that William Butler Yeats was one of the most conscious craftsmen the theater has ever known, and that he may well, in the long run, be one of its most successful artists. In making these claims I am, I realize, taking positions both unpopular and extreme. With the exception of the adaptations of Sophocles, Yeats's plays have never, so far as I know, achieved lon~ runs anywhere. And though such die-hards as Eric Bentley have praised Purgatory to the skies, most professional drama critics have neatly solved the problem of dealing with Yeats's plays either by ignoring them or by tucking them into the catch-all never-never-Iand of "experimental drama." Even among the admirers of Yeats's poetry, the plays seem to create a good deal of discomfort. F. A. C. Wilson, for instance, who deals with them extensively, seems happiest when he is able to extract from them allegorical messages. And Helen Vendler, who explicates them brilliantly-more brilliantly, to my mind, than any other critic-dismisses them flatly as plays written for a coterie theater, remarking of The Death of Cuchulain that "the play is no more compelling, dramatically speaking, than the other late plays, which is to say almost not at all." Purgatory, for her, is "thin and unsatisfying" largely because it ends, she feels, "on a tone of frustration and incomprehension." Only a handful of Yeats scholars-most conspicuously among them John Moore, David Clark, and Peter Ure-have made any serious attempt to see how the plays function both as drama and as poetry, how the poetry in a very literal way complements the drama, enriching and strengthening it, and how the drama in turn complements the poetry, providing a structure of essential action-the articulated bone, if you will, which is driven by Yeats's muscular verse. And yet, finally, it is this combination which makes Yeats's plays the powerful dramas that they are: a verse which at its best functions so inconspicuously as in production to be unnoticeable, integrates and supports a very carefully planned dramatic structure. It is a good deal easier to demonstrate how conscious Yeats was of his craftsmanship than it is to prove that Yeats's craftsmanship produced major dramas. For from the very beginning of his interest in the theater, we have records of Yeats's persistent examination of other 346 MODERN DRAMA December drama and of his analysis of its structure. We know of his experiments with his own dramas-his laborious writing and rewriting of plays until they had the potential of being theatrically effective works. And we are familiar with his efforts to train not only actors and technicians but directors as well in the special techniques he regarded as necessary for the production of a type of drama which, he realized, ran counter to naturalism, the principal dramatic pattern of his own time, and yet which, he also realized, could move audiences in different, more subtle, ways than naturalistic drama. The project Yeats set for himself when he decided that he wanted to write poetic drama was the discovery of a form which would combine the essential ingredient of drama-action-with what for Yeats was the essential ingredient of lyric poetry, a carefully controlled imagery. His struggle as dramatist was to find a way to get these two ingredients into some sort of harmony. Yeats's success was by no means an immediate one. In plays like The Shadowy Waters, for instance, Yeats felt that imagery got badly out of control, the plays seeming to him consequently "vague." But not until 1905, when he realized that this imagistic vagueness was responsible for the action of his dramas being almost completely blotted out, was Yeats really prepared for an orgy of cutting and revision from which, he hoped, "perfectly articulate" stage plays would emerge-articulate because the poetry and its necessary images would finally not be superimposed on the action but rather would come "logically out of the fundamental action." I stress this element of action in Yeats's plays not only because Yeats himself...