The Anti-Theater of W.B. Yeats

THE ANTI-THEATER OF W.B. YEATS AT THE CORE of the poetic and dramatic achievement of William Butler Yeats lies the search for the opposite. As he conceived of this search, it was essentially the pursuit of, an image which was most unlike himself and, at the same time, his double. The full realization of the image of the opposite was not only a means of escape from the realism of every day and from his own personality, but a means of achieving a higher unity. The search for the image of the opposite became the means through which an ideal art could be attained. It led not only to the adoption of poetic masks through the use of such legendary figures as Michael Robartes and Cuchulain, but to the final achievement of his career as a playwright, the Four Plays f01' Dancers. The Four Plays f01' Dancers realize the opposite of the traditional, conventional theater, the opposite of the realistic theater of Ibsen and Shaw, the opposite of the theater which attempted to render life objectively . His early use of Irish legend had not only expressed the nationalistic sentiments of tlle Irish Literary Theatre, but had also provided a means through which he could most successfully dramatize the subjective elements in human experience. The Countess Kathleen (1892) and The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), which are heavily based upon the narrative elements of Irish legend, contain also elements of dream and fantasy. However, in spite of the tendencies of the time, the presentation is in terms of allegory rather than symbolism, as has been pointed out by Priscilla Thouless in Modern Poetic Drama. However , in the course of Yeats' development, his use of legend becomes progressively more symbolic, until one finds, in the culminating Four Plays for Dancers, that the legends are significant for their universal implications rather than their specific narrative detail. Yeats' final plays, with their highly expressionistic content, were not intended for public consumption. They were written for the few initiates who could appreciate poetic symbolic drama. With their elements of dream and fantasy, with their symbols which expressed primarily subconscious emotion, tllese plays represented a return to the origins of the drama, to the religious ritual and the initiation ceremony; they were also fortified by Yeats' life-long interest in mysticism and occult speculation. Yeats' final achievement in the drama utilized the chief devices of religious ceremonies of primitive societies, the mask and the dance. In primitive ritual, the mask objectified the religious mystery. It symbolized tlle relationship of man to spirit and of man to God, as well as 131 132 MODERN DRAMA September the heritage of generations, and as the mask and the dance function in Yeats' final plays, these connotations remain. The use of the dance in these plays was closely allied to its more primitive function as an expression of religious ecstasy. Yeats' final achievement represents actually a theater for those who sought religion in art, a common goal of the artists of·this period who had allied themselves with the art-forart 's sake movement. Yeats' search for a more adequately expressive form of drama led to his use of the Noh plays of Japan. In this form of drama he found the technique by which to make the action and the characters of Irish legend more universally significant. When Yeats was introduced to the Noh plays by the imagist Ezra Pound, he saw in this type of drama the possibility of realizing himseH the poetic image in action. Influenced by Pound's emphasis upon the bare image, Yeats' verse had already been stripped of romantic floweriness and vagueness, but Yeats, who was more interested in the symbolic possibilities of the image than was Pound, carried the former's interest even further. Though Yeats adapted the Noh drama to his own purposes, it is evident that the Japanese form was more than an "excuse for departing from the deeply entrenched Western pattern ... a moral analysis of character within a framework of more or less logical appearances," a point well made by Eric Bentley in The Permanence of Yeats. The Noh plays undoubtedly enabled Yeats to make the transition...