Yeats and European Drama (review)

In the introduction to his slim but dense study of Yeats’s drama, Michael McAteer promises to present Yeats’s dramatic writing “as the evolution of a vision of estrangement directed against the values of middle-class culture” (4). He also promises to portray Yeats as “a major figure in early twentieth-century European avant-garde theatre in ways that call for a reassessment of his political thought” (4). These two sentences lay out an ambitious agenda, one that the author does not altogether fulfil. Nonetheless, the book that follows proves to be, in both scope and attention to detail, one of the best studies of Yeats’s drama in recent years.

McAteer addresses three separate ongoing debates within Yeats scholarship, with varying levels of success. First and foremost, there is the issue of whether or not Yeats’s drama deserves further analysis at all. Though Yeats himself considered his dramatic work an essential part of his artistic identity, his plays generally received lukewarm receptions in his lifetime. Today, they are rarely staged outside of Yeats festivals, and many scholars dismiss them altogether. Nonetheless, McAteer solidly demonstrates the importance of the plays to the development of Yeats’s artistic identity and successfully defends some of the author’s more difficult pieces as worthy dramatic experiments undertaken in the spirit of more well-regarded avant-garde playwrights.

However, McAteer falls well short of his goal of establishing Yeats as “a major figure” in European theatre. Although he repeatedly points out places where Yeats “anticipated” theatrical innovations made by more prominent playwrights, he never convincingly argues that Yeats’s dramatic work influenced anyone or, indeed, that the plays do anything that wasn’t done more skilfully and effectively by others.

The second, and somewhat less contentious, issue that McAteer addresses is that of Yeats’s international influences and ambitions. Recent scholarship has framed Yeats’s dramatic projects primarily in Irish terms, examining the author’s work in the context of the Celtic Revival and his ideological clashes with the hard-liners of Irish nationalism. McAteer traces a much broader set of European influences in Yeats’s dramatic work, convincingly spotting the fingerprints of authors like Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Pirandello on Yeats’s stylistic development. This is overwhelmingly the most successful element of the book. McAteer skilfully balances close reading with broad contextual analysis and provides a fresh and provocative assessment of Yeats’s relationship to some of the major dramatic movements of his time, particularly naturalism, surrealism, and absurdism.

McAteer is least successful, however, on the third front of his argument: the debate over Yeats’s political ideology. Challenging recent claims about the author’s elitism and racism, McAteer argues that Yeats’s drama reveals a consistently egalitarian vision consistent with Marxist ideology. It sounds very noble, and McAteer makes a reasonable enough case as long as he stays focused on individual plays. But as soon as he pans back to look at the overall public identity of the author, the argument flounders. For instance, McAteer essentially sweeps the aristocratic undertones of The King’s Threshold under the rug, insisting rather lamely, “This has to be evaluated in its historical context . . . and the kinds of pressures he faced in Dublin and London” (43). Similarly, McAteer ignores Yeats’s flirtation with fascism until the last five pages of the book, where he dismisses it as an unfortunate extension of his more altruistic political interests. These moments place McAteer in the untenable position of Yeats’s apologist, and they reflect very little of the insight and nuance displayed in his analysis of Yeats’s artistic identity.

Structurally, the book is a bit odd in ways that don’t particularly serve the author’s argument. McAteer sets up a chronological survey of Yeats’s major plays, promising to chart the author’s artistic and political development over the course of his career. However, he takes on the five Cuchulain plays as a group in the third chapter, thus placing his analysis of Yeats’s final play...