Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: Manuscript Materials by W.B. Yeats, and: The Golden Helmet and The Green Helmet: Manuscript Materials by W.B. Yeats (review)

In the early years of the twentieth century, Yeats took an interest in classical drama, which he hoped to add to the repertory of the newly established Abbey Theatre. In his opinion, a good, speakable translation of a Greek play could be useful not only to introduce new themes onto the Irish stage but also to help renovate the language of drama, which he felt was too restricted to Shakespearean verse speaking. Oedipus the King came immediately to mind, partly because the Lord Chamberlain's office had repeatedly banned it from the English stage. Yeats did not know Greek, so he set about finding a good translation that might prove suitable to his requirements. The best he could find in English was R.C. Jebb's nineteenth-century translation, which was very accurate technically but rather cold emotionally, so he decided to do his own by smoothing out Jebb's with the help of Paul Masqueray's French translation, which he found freer and more lyrical. His draft was completed in 1912. But he did not revise it, the play was not staged, and the project was apparently forgotten until 1926, when his wife, finding his typescript among some letters, urged him to resume work. It went through five revisions before it was finally performed at the Abbey Theatre on 7 December 1926. It was a success, and this success convinced him to translate Sophocles's other two Theban plays: Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. He started working on Oedipus at Colonus in late December 1926 and revised for almost a year. The play finally opened at the Abbey on 12 September 1927, with F.J. McCormick in the lead role.

After the performance, there were plans for a private, single-play edition in the United States, which were abandoned in favour of a deluxe edition of his complete works, to be published by Macmillan, which was also abandoned. Several sets of proof were produced over a long period of time. They do not appear in this volume, which is bulky enough without them; but the reading text of Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1934) is included, with collations from these and other editions. No holograph copies of the text have been found. We are left with a few typescripts of the prose dialogues, a few drafts, and a prompt copy, some of them strongly revised by Yeats in his nervous and, at times, illegible handwriting. He was seldom satisfied with his own corrections, and it is surprising to discover that, after many trials–some of them heaped confusedly upon one another–the final result was an almost complete restoration of the original copy. Some clues in the early typescript suggest that Yeats was possibly dictating his translation to a typist with Jebb's copy before him. He deliberately omitted the choruses from this first draft, as he knew they would give him the greatest challenge.

The photographs and transcriptions of Yeats's manuscripts, which reveal the progress of composition for some of these choruses, constitute the most interesting section of the book. Yeats's use of every single inch of the sheet as he worked and reworked a line–as he tried to fix an idea, a phrase, or a single word–provides a visual representation of his mind; collectively, these pages give the reader a glimpse, at least, of the creative process in progress. The editor, Jared Curtis, must have been fascinated by these documents himself, as he has devoted several pages of his introduction to an analysis of the playwright's multiple drafts of the same lines, often comparing Yeats's efforts with Jebb's and...