The Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats by Liam Miller (review)

4U HOOK REVIEWS sentence, Cantor says incorrectly that Odets persuaded Cary Grant to act in None But the Lonely Hearl, that he declined screen credit for Blockade, and that Humoresque is a spinoff of Golden Boy. The next time a critic mounts a rescue operation for Clifford Octets, the playwright's admirers had better check the lifesaving equipment. GERALD WEALES University of Pennsylvania THE NOBLE DRAMA OF W. B. YEATS. by Liam Miller. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1977. xiv and 365 pp. In this century, we have had two examples of poets of genius who had very extensive experience of the practical theatre; who wrote many plays and collaborated actively with actors, musicians and designers; and who developed comprehensive theories of drama. In many ways, they were contrasting figures holding opposing aesthetic and political views, and wanting quite different kinds of theatres. Even their reputations have been opposite and contrary, in that Brecht's genius as a lyric poet was, for a long time, overshadowed by his work in the theatre, while Yeats's following in the theatre has been small and precious by contrast with his great popular esteem as a poet. As far as Yeats is concerned, there is perhaps no better measure of his greatness and limitations as a playwright and a man of the theatre than comparison with Brecht; though, at first sight, the limitations might seem overwhelmingly obvious. Unfortunately, Brechtians and Yeatsians have very little to do with each other, any more than their masters had; even less, since Brecht certainly admired Synge's work and knew Yeats's. Nobody, it appears, thought fit to introduce Yeats and Brecht on the one occasion on which they were in quite a small gathering together, and this was a pity, since Yeats, at the time, was very keen to keep up with (and of course transcend) the young "communist" poets and playwrights. He even wanted a theatrical season in which his plays would be produced alongside those of Eliot and Auden, to invite comparison. This idea failed because of Yeats's insistence on having a certain actress in a certain part, but he did write a counterblast to Auden's Dance of Death, showing himself in the Dealh of Cuchulain aware of the formal tendencies of the time, using them and opposing their implications. The song of the Harlot and the Beggarman is his response, as it were, to Mack-the-Knife. I touch on these virtually unknown aspects of Yeats's career in the theatre for two reasons. The first is to assert the need to look at Yeats in the context of the theatre of his time and without being restricted to the very deliberately delineated perspective that Yeats designed for posterity. Criticism of Yeats suffers acutely from a provincialism in outlook which was not Yeats's but which his persuasiveness has fostered. Yeats is a world but not 1he world. It would be salutary, to take two minor examples. for the commentators on Purga10ry to read Bottomley'S Towie Castle (which Yeats saw but does not mention) or to look at the first attempt (Masefield's) to adapt a Japanese play to English. Liam Miller's very valuable book is limited, like its predecessors, to looking at its subject wholly within the Yeatsian perspective. It is the work of a fan. a Joving and thorough compilation of Yeatsian words and memorabilia. BOOK REVIEWS 423 And, I would add, not to slight a good book, a very sensible and engaging narrative of Yeats's career as playwright and man of the theatre. A second reason for looking at Yeats in context is to assess the effects in the theatre of his fundamental conviction that life and art are the expression of personality. To do this, one has to escape from the dominance of the personal· ity he expressed and also come to terms with the apparent conflict in Yeats's work between the lyrical impulse and the discipline to objectivity required by the theatre. In more mundane ways, too, Yeats's work in the theatre was much affected by what he conceived as the art of life from which the art of art issued. Personal...