Yeats's Symbolic Farce: The Player Queen

YEATS'S SYMBOLIC FARCE: THE PLAYER QUEEN ONLY AFTER A DOZEN YEARS OF difficult travail-with Ezra Pound acting as a midwife-did Yeats permit himself to be delivered of The Player Queen. According to Richard Ellmann's account, it was Pound, acting as advisor and personal secretary to Yeats during the winters of 19131916 , who first suggested that the play might be written as a comedy. Intermittently, Yeats had spent six or seven years trying to write the playas tragedy, but the manuscript continually displeased him. Then, having accepted Pound's proposal, he subjected the play to a series of massive revisions, and gradually the work evolved into its present form.1 Yeats's own account of his struggle with The Player Queen (while omitting mention of Pound's influence) records this story and in an important way contributes to our understanding of the play's intent. I began In, I think, 1907, a verse tragedy, but at that time the thought I have set forth in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae was coming into my head, and I found examples of it everywhere. I wasted the best working months of several years in an attempt to write a poetical play where every character became an example of the finding or not finding of what I have called the Antithetical Self; and because passion and not thought makes tragedy, what I had made had neither simplicity nor life. I knew precisely what was wrong and yet could neither escape from thought nor give up my play. At last it came into my head all of a sudden that I could get rid of the play if I turned it into a farce; and never did I do anything so easily, for I think I wrote the present play in about a month.2 The corroborative passage in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae is the following : When I had this thought I could see nothing else in life. I could not write. the play I planned, for all became allegorical, and though I tore up hundreds of pages in my endeavor to escape from allegory, my imagination became sterile for nearly five years and I only escaped at last when I had mocked in a comedy my own thought.s 1 Richard EHmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: 1948), p. 212. See also Alan Wade, ed., The Letters of w. B. Yeats (New York: 1955), p. 52l. 2 W. B. Yeats, Plays in Prose and Verse Written for an Irish Theatre (New York: 1924), pp. 437·438. 3 W. B. Yeats, Essays (London: 1924), p. 496. 441 442 MODERN DRAMA February Everything that we know concerning the play's origin, then, suggests that Yeats did not intend The' Player Queen to be read as a sober philosophic advancement of his doctrines. Yet his critics, fascinated perhaps by the possibilities of symbolic exegesis, have been reluctant to take the poet at his word. It has been the general view that Yeats's final version can be likened to a palimpsest, a compilation of different texts composed at different times upon a single parchment . The analogy is suggested by the practice of ancient biblical scholars whose duty it was to alter and amend older and obviously faulty texts. These scribes assumed a sacred obligation to eradicate inconsistencies, balance facts, supply new truths rendered by latterday visions and revelations; yet tradition held that those who had written before them similarly had been inspired by divine truth. Thus they were loath to destroy what had been recorded and solved their dilemma simply by writing in the new over the old. A similar process is believed to have obtained in Yeats's writing of The Player Queen. For example, Peter Ure, the critic most alive to farcical elements in the play, doubts whether Yeats actually allowed himself to mock his own ideas. Ure feels that the play's comic transformation , "since it is only a comicalizing of the image, leaves the basic tone and temper of the thought unaffected...."4 Other prominent interpreters of Yeats have accepted the view that although comic in appearance the play attempts a serious dramatization of abstract principles. Complex...