In Defense of Yeats as a Dramatist

IN DEFENSE OF YEATS AS A DRAMATIST ... I wanted an audience of fifty or a hundred, and if there are more, I beg them not to shuHle their feet or talk when the actors are speaking. . . . If there are more than a hundred I won't be able to escape people who are educating themselves out of the Book Societies and the like, sciolists all, pickpockets and opinionated bitches. (The Death of Cuchulain) 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. 0 0 0" 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. A quotation from the 1934 Preface to the Collected Plays will illustrate Yeats's sense of the possible when speaking as one director to another: Those who think of producing any particular play should seek for it in Plays and Controversies, Plays, and Wheels and Butterflies. . . . The version of The Hour-Glass in the present book has been but once played at the Abbey Theatre and once elsewhere, whereas the prose version in Plays has been played many times; speakers of verse are rare. I do not include in the present book Fighting the Waves, a prose version of The Only Jealousy of Emer so arranged as to admit of many dancers and to be immediately intelligible to an average theatrical audience; it can be found in Wheels and Butterflies. A man who can write as matter-of-factly as that knows not merely what is "stageworthy" but what can in practice be staged in a semicommercial theater like the Abbey. He should be listened to with particular care when, as in "Certain Noble Plays of Japan," he speaks of the noncommercial form of theater for which so many of his later plays were written. Yeats also needs, where possible, producers with money. The (161) 162 MODERN DRAMA September "Noh" or dance plays, for all the smallness of their casts and ideal audiences, require good musicians, good dancers, good choreographers, good. verse-speakers-all of whom cost money unless they can be persuaded to work for love. One reason why Yeats's plays are so often misjudged is that when seen at all they are usually performed and directed by amateurs. I won't easily forget my chagrin over a performance of The Only Jealously of Emer and The Player Queen at the YMHA in New York. I had coaxed a number of my colleagues to attend on the grounds that they had nothing to lose because admission was free, but by the time the evening was over, we all felt we ought to have been paid for our pains. Only the presence of the late Marilyn Monroe in the audience saved the day for my male colleagues and myself, as it would have for Yeats. One must always remember that the later plays of Yeats, no matter how closely they are related to the theories of A Vision-a relationship whose existence is undeniable, although critics like F.A.C. Wilson and Helen Hennessy Vendler can dispute endlessly about the details-were not written for an audience of adepts in those theories. The Old Man who acts as prologue in The Death of Cuchulain may demand an audience of no more than a hundred, but he does not require even these select few to have read A Vision: "... they must know the old [Irish] epics and Mr. Yeats's plays about them; such people, however poor, have libraries of their...