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YEATS'S DRAMA AND THE NO A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN DRAMATIC THEORIES IT IS A WELL KNOWN FACT TO STUDENTS OF William Butler Yeats that the Japanese No Drama had some influence upon his later plays, beginning with Four Plays for Dancers published in 1921. On numerous occasions, the similarities of his dramatic theory and practice to the No have been brought to our attention, such as various theatrical devices in mask, dance, chorus, and musicians, or such ideas as ritual, spiritualism, "anti-naturalism" in the No which Yeats seems to have found congenial to his own idea of drama.1 Not only the studies, but also Yeats's introductory essay itself, which he wrote for a collection of No plays translated by Ernest Fenollosa and refined by Ezra Pound, consider his principal beliefs about drama as essentially similar to some of the major characteristics of the Japanese dramatic tradition. These similarities, however, would tend to mislead us into a superficial association of Yeats's dramas and the No, since they are after all the products of different times and places. This study attempts to examine the concepts and contents involved in both dramas, so as to see beyond the terms commonly describing the characteristics of the Japanese dramatic traditiop and Yeats's plays. By doing this, I hope to focus upon a more meaningful relation between the two dramas than has been taken for granted. 1 Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (London, 1957), pp. 77.80; Earl Miner. The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, 1958). pp. 260-264: The unpub!' diss. (Columbia. 1948) by Lawrence E. Shaffer. Jr•• "Yeats and the Noh Drama"; Anthony Thwaite, "Yeats and the Noh," The 20th Century (Sept. 1957). pp. 235-242; Gerald Moore, "The Noh and the Dance Plays of Yeats:' Japan Quarterly, VII, No. 2 (1g60), 177-183; F.A.C. Wilson, W. B. Yeats and Tradition (London, 1958), pp. 40-46; F.A.C. Wilson, Yeats's Iconography (London, 1960), pp. 27-33: Tadaichi Hidaka, "Ietsu no BuyO Shigeki to NilIon no Nogaku," RisshiJ Daigaku Bungaku-bu Ronso, I, No. 1 (1953), 9-27: JirO Nan-e, ND nQ Tenkai (TOkyo, 1954), pp. 8-51. 101 102 MODERN DRAMA May I A basic similarity exists in a link between Yeats's dramatic concept and the medieval idea of the No, a link which Yeats himself did not seem to be clearly aware of. The most fundamental attitude toward drama-the nature and purpose of art-seems to be vitally related in both cases to the symbolic world view. In other words, Yeats's dramas and the No uphold the similar world view and objective of art. The occult tradition which permeated the medieval aesthetic attitude of Japan is also at the root of Yeats's theory of poetry and drama, as stated by Mr. John Senior: The chief symbolists [including Yeats] were to some extent occultists, that insofar as their work contains "philosophy" it is occult philosophy, and more important, that the purpose of their poetry is in a sense the communication and evocation of occult experience.2 As well, in the writings of Zeami (1363-1443), one of the chief founders of the No, we are able to note the Buddhistic world view on which he bases his aesthetic ideas. What are some of the major ideas Yeats and the medieval followers of the No share? (1) There are two orders of reality, visible and invisible; they are two sides of one reality. This dualistic view results from the two kinds of consciousness, the individual mind and the Mind. The former sees the illusory, while the latter sees the reality in the illusory realm. (2) The artist stands in a special relation to the ultimate reality. His task, according to Yeats, is to capture the light beyond the illusory, so that his expression may not be an isolated voice but the immortal voice of the Great Mind or Memory. Yeats's "Great Mind" seems to be fundamentally similar to the Unconscious Mind of the Universe which Zeami refers to as "Emptiness": The vessel (Emptiness) is the universe which gives birth to all things, depending upon the season...

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