Singular Voices: Monologue and Monodrama in the Plays of W.B. Yeats

Singular Voices: Monologue and Monodrama in the Plays ofW.B. Yeats ANDREW PARKIN • THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN MONOLOGUE in the oral and epic traditions of poetry, in the novel, in music hall and its widespread appearance in modern drama are too copious for treatment in a short essay; suffice it to say that monologue, used so abundantly by the epic poets and the dramatists of the ancient world, persisted in masterful form in Shakespeare ; it seems French par excellence in Corneille and Racine; it is brilliantly theatrical in Cyrano. Though the very untheatrical conventions of stage naturalism tended to hide the long speech, the soliloquy and the aside, the monologue endured. It continued a little while in music hall. It popped up irrepressibly in the modern novel, where it found its masters in Joyce and Woolf and Beckett. It provided a major device for dramatizing ideas in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. It is a fascinating weapon for satirists, tragedians and even sentimentalists. It has been faithful to such diverse talents as those of Cocteau and Pinter. That such an important and persistent stage device, a basic building block of dramatic and poetic structures, with a vast and significant history reaching into the ancient oral traditions of Greeks and Celts, should have so little written about it, is a matter for regret and astonishment. A history of the form needs its own volume, but here we shall instead distinguish briefly between the dramatic monologue as used in poetry and the performed stage monologue, before proceeding to discuss the use of stage monologue and monodrama as major structural devices in the plays of Yeats. The dramatic monologue in poetry is presented to a reader as a selfcontained unit, often introspective, sometimes as one side of a conver141 142 ANDREW PARKIN sation, but always maintaining the fiction of an audience. The character of the supposed speaker is often obliquely revealed by a variety of techniques . A scene or situation is rapidly and economically evoked, secondary characters are only minimally implied, and though the linguistic texture is often deliberately dramatic in the sense of being directly appropriate to character and situation, the special demands ofpoetic technique are always present, clamouring for the reader's attention. The stage monologue is different because of the special conditions existing in the theatre. Here the audience is not a fiction; it is a group presence with quick and vocal responses, another factor in the performance , and another instrument for the performer. Furthermore, other characters may well be on the stage responding to the monologuist. The speaker is not a voice in a lone reader's head, but a person, living through the monologue as if for the first time in the time present of theatre performance, modulating what is said and done in response not only to the text, but also to its effects on that particular occasion. Where the poet who gives a live reading of poems to an audience tends to stress music, preferring to leave interpretation to each listener, the actor tends to seek one interpretation among several and perform that single set of possibilities .! The actor sometimes pretends that the audience is not in the theatre, sometimes steps in and out of this pretence with asides and direct address, and sometimes frankly accepts the audience as confidant or confessor by directly addressing it from beginning to end. The text of a truly theatrical monologue will thus offer opportunities for the performer to bring off carefully planned effects, may suggest stage business, and may well demand a specific type of costuming, setting and lighting. The stage monologue, even within the convention offourth wall drama, always aims at a transaction with a real, not imagined audience, and is always a group experience rather than a solitary one. Finally, on the stage there is always the possibility of dialogue and the intervention of another character. Tension and suspense are therefore possible through the manipulation of such expectations. These distinguishing features of the stage monologue remain, whether it is merely delivered as part of a larger dramatic work, or whether it is, in itself, an entire drama. The term monodrama is then often applied to it, though...