As Above, So Below: Doubled Plots and Notions of Aristocracy in Two Plays by W. B. Yeats

Few have accused William Butler Yeats of being a friend to the Irish middle class that came to dominate the political scene following the struggle for independence and the upheavals of the Irish Civil War. In his poetry, he tends either to excoriate Dublin's petty bourgeoisie, as in "September 1913," or to ignore them and create utopian communities in which rural peasants and aristocrats mingle freely, as in "The Happy Townland." Yeats's idea of aristocracy is closely tied to that of his imaginary peasantry; both have an intimate relationship with the land from which they draw their living.

Given his admiration for those who occupy the highest and lowest rungs of the social ladder, it seems only natural that Yeats would have recourse to that old chestnut of Elizabethan drama, the double plot, in his own plays. In The Countess Cathleen (1892) and The Player Queen, (1919) Yeats illustrates the reciprocal relationships of service and sacrifice that he envisions between the upper and lower classes; in comparing the two plays, we can see the evolution and ultimate disappointment of his political ideals. The female aristocrat who sacrifices herself for her tenants in the earlier play has, by the time of The Player Queen, retreated into a private world of fantasy and delusion, divorced from the populace she is meant to serve.

Seamus Deane has written that "perhaps the most seductive of Yeats's historical fictions is his gift of dignity and coherence to the Irish Protestant Ascendancy tradition, "which Deane claims was essentially bourgeois but which Yeats mistook for a real aristocracy.¹ From an early point in his career as a poet and public figure, Yeats made a point of assiduously courting aristocrats of liberal opinions. He first visited Lissadell, the home of the Gore-Booth family, near Drumcliffe in Sligo in 1894.² He famously spent his summers at Coole Park with Lady Gregory from 1896 until her death in 1934.³ Ian Fletcher writes of Yeats's interest in aristocratic women, noting his conviction of "the responsibility they owed to the traditions of birth . . . as ritualizers of passion and inspirers of art."⁴ The heroines of The Countess Cathleen and The Player Queen certainly fit this description; both inspire the verses of poets who are in some way subordinate to them, and both rescue their respective kingdoms through participation in an act with ritual significance. In 1892, before he had met either the Gore-Booths or Gregory, Yeats gave voice to this idea in The Countess Cathleen, in which the titular countess is wooed in song by the minstrel Aleel and is so devoted to her subjects that she gives up her life and her soul in exchange for theirs. Decima, the wayward muse of her husband, the poet Septimus, is crowned queen in order to quell an uprising.

Innumerable critics and biographers have suggested that Yeats's model for the aristocratic woman who sacrifices all for the people was Maud Gonne, for whom he bore an unrequited love and to whom he dedicated The Countess Cathleen. T.R. Henn describes her activities as

a source of bewilderment and anxiety to Yeats; and his conflict found expression in a growing complexity of imagery when he wrote of her. She might be embodied in the Countess Cathleen, idealized in Cathleen-ni-Houlihan, or find a shadow ... in the pale, fierce queen of On Baile's Strand. She had beauty, wit, high birth and vigour of bone; a royal bearing and eccentricities of behaviour that marked her out wherever she went; at once the object of scandal to Dublin and of worship to the peasantry of the west.⁵

Henn argues that Yeats takes the behavior of Gonne, who frustrates and confuses him, and uses it as grist for poetry, and for drama. Roy F. Foster regards Yeats's first encounter with Gonne in 1889 as the genesis of The Countess Cathleen in particular, recording that his meeting with Gonne "helped inspire the image of an aristocratic beauty sacrificing herself for the love...