Yeats the Playwright: A Commentary on Character and Design in the Major Plays by Peter Ure (review)

1964 BOOK REVIEWS 463 that mastery is notably apparent in the delicately wry The Rising of the Moon and in that tight and poignant tragedy The Gaol Gate, which is surely one of the few plays which does not wither by a comparison to Riders to the Sea. This selection also serves as a reminder that Lady Gregory's range was startlingly wide-from comedy to tragedy, from farce to melodrama, from lyricism to history . Indeed, Miss Coxhead could have indicated an even wider range had she space to include Sancho's Master or one of the Wonder Plays or one of the fluent translations of Moliere or Goldoni. I am not quarrelling with the editor's selections , but only pointing out that Lady Gregory's work is wide enough in range and rich enough in texture, for this selection not to be exhaustive. Like any first-rate writer, Lady Gregory has not merely quality but quantity, and rather than a definitive selection we have here a rich sampling. This selection also suggests Lady Gregory's chief fault as well as her abundantly evident merit. That fault I take to be an occcasional tedium in the piling-up of super-abundant detail. In her spare and effective history play, The W.hite Cockade, there is little excess matter, but her discrimination was not always so sure. One might have wished for a little less material in Grania and Dervorgilla and even Hyacinth Halvey, and a great deal less in The Canavans, which appears not here but in that determinedly original Signet volume, The Genius of the Irish Theatre. Nevertheless, Lady Gregory was a canny, practical and experienced woman of the theater, and it was not often that her love for her material led her into excess. For the pure stage effect, she had an eye enormously more sure than Yeats did, and to my mind even better than Synge's. This point seems attested to by the greater popularity of her plays than theirs, but one may also see it in the descriptions in Joseph Holloway's voluminous journal that show how effectively and adroitly she handled rehearsals, how diffidently Synge did, and with what delicious idiocy Yeats did. Yeats was only rarely able to overcome his love for his material by sheer luck and genius; Lady Gregory very frequently overcame hers by intelligent insight into the necessities of practical theater. There is one further reason for our attention being redirected to these plays. It is the kind of reason that is too usually ignored altogether, for it has little immediate bearing on the theatrical merit of a particular play, and it is very difficult to talk about in specific terms. That reason is Lady Gregory's own beautiful personality. It appears in her indomitable and selfless practical work for the theater and for Ireland, and in a less tangible way it permeates and beautifies her work just as O'Casey's spirit is ever present in his plays or Dickens' spirit in his novels. Lady Gregory's was a kind and perceptive spirit, capable of empathy, discernment and compassion. She was not only a first-rate writer but a first-rate woman, and the modern drama can only ignore her and her plays to its own impoverishment . ROBERT HOGAN Purdue University YEATS THE PLAYWRIGHT: A COMMENTARY ON CHARACTER AND DESIGN IN THE MAJOR PLAYS, by Peter Ure, Barnes Be Noble, Inc., New York, 1963, 182 pp. Price $5.75. In Peter Ure's new volume, Yeats the Playwright, the author of Toward a Mythology turns his attention to Yeats as a maker of dramas. Although books abound about Yeats as poet, thinker, Irishman-few have yet considered Yeats as 464 MODERN DRAMA February a playwright. The plays are often mentioned by students of Yeats for the light they shed upon his verse or his philosophy, and Yeats's plays have been considered in a historical way as products of the Irish national theater movement. Before Yeats the Playwright, only F. A. C. Wilson's twobooklength studies have dealt with' the canon of the plays in detail, and Wilson's interest focuses on the philosophical and occult sources and hints...