A Ritual Drama: Yeats's Plays for Dancers

A Ritual Drama: Yeats's Plays for Dancers SUSAN R. GORSKY • "{ NEED A THEATRE; I believe myself to be a dramatist"; "I have always felt that my work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith."! Thus Yeats asserts a conflict inherent in his dramatic theory and in his plays. He moved in his plays increasingly further from dramatic realism, yet he did not wish to diminish dramatic intensity; he desired popular acceptance and acclaim, although he knew that his experiment would alienate his audience; he increasingly felt that drama should be distanced and strange, and still he hoped that by presenting fundamental human needs and conflicts, he could appeal directly to the fundamental and human in all of us. Poetic drama held an exalted position for him: it could (if properly approached by playwright and audience) recapture hidden or forgotten truths, reawaken its audience to the dignity and value of the past heroic world, remind its spectators of basic and unchanging values; that is, drama could - and should - renew a "faith" which man (especially his contemporary countrymen) had "lost." As Yeats wrote and rewrote his plays, making major revisions in plays already performed and constantly experimenting with new forms for new plays, he was attempting both to define and to write a new kind of drama: he was reaching towards the ritual drama which could fulfill his basic demands. The dance plays raise the problems connected with the new drama, and at the same time they show how it can succeed. Yeats knew full well that these plays would appeal, at least at first, only to an initiated elite, that they were "something which could only fully succeed in a civilization very unlike ours," for these are plays "written for some country where all classes share in a half-mythological, half-psychological folk-belief.,,2 However much Yeats may "have longed for such a country" (as he goes on to say) he was not of course to fmd it. Yeats's plays are the ritual of a faith which is indeed lost: 165 166 SUSAN R. GORSKY the "great memolY" which (according to Yeats) all men share does not contain within it the specific figures of his dramas or the symbols of his imagination, although to him these embodied archetypal behaviors, needs, and truths.3 Yeats believed part of the dramatist's role to be the reconstruction of the myths and legends which reveal timeless truths and heroic values. Though he wanted an audience naturally initiated into the "half-mythological, half-psychological" ideas which lie behind and are presented in his plays, Yeats knew he could not depend on this; thus in time he came to write for an elite audience, to produce an "unpopular" theater. This was not always bothersome to Yeats; in fact he proudly proclaims that the "distinguished, indirect, and symbolic" drama which he has "invented" is "an aristocratic fOlTIl.,,4 He accepted the necessity of training his audience, of creating an audience to match his newly created art: "All art is, indeed ... a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects.... But this new art, new in modern life, I mean [because it is derived from the Japanese Noh drama], will have to train its hearers as well as its speakers, for it takes time to surrender gladly the gross effects one is accustomed to, and one may well find mere monotony at first where one soon learns to find a variety as incalculable as in the outline of faces or in the expression of eyes."s Still at other times the playwright suggests not only the necessity but the possibility of universality. At the center of each play is a moment of supreme choice, a climactic, impassioned, and sometimes heroic moment of timeless passions and universal conflicts. The focus of the play is on an internal action which reflects and symbolizes what Yeats, in "Certain Noble Plays of Japan" (p. 224), calls the "deeps ofthe mind" of the characters; thus it should appeal to the "deeps" of the readers' or spectators' minds. While an audience desiring traditional drama will be both disappointed and confused (as the reception of the dance plays at the...