Yeats’s Doll and Donkey: Alienating the Upanishads in The Herne’s Egg

The Herne’s Egg, like Yeats’s other late plays, is a great challenge for readers. In addition to putting forward an esoteric philosophy that evades coherent interpretation, the play is deliberately anti-heroic, grotesque, and sexually offensive. Yeats’s remark that the play is Purohit Swami’s “philosophy in a fable” has guided critics toward the Upanishads for clues. This essay questions longstanding assumptions about the Indian influence on the play, examining Yeats’s appropriation of the Upanishadic concept of the Self for his own vision of Unity of Being. Interpretations of the play that foreground the influence of the Sanskrit texts on Yeats’s dramaturgy often overlook the play’s form and genre. This essay aims to shed new light on the play by drawing attention to its style, which fuses several modernist aesthetics in a form of experimental farce. I argue that gaiety is Yeats’s way of dealing with the futility resulting from his determinist view of the universe. Yeats’s farcical style creates quasi-Brechtian alienation effects in The Herne’s Egg, sublimating existential dread to tragic joy.