Thematic Contexts in Four of Yeats's Plays

Thematic Contexts in Four of Yeats's PlaysI ANCA VLASOPOLOS As the twentieth century unfolded, Yeats met with a number of disappointments , first in love and politics, then in his cherished hope for Unity ofCulture through a national theatre ofIreland. He had expected to revive and direct Irish culture by creating a drama devoted to the life of the imagination and rooted in the myths and legends of the people. As director of the Abbey Theatre, he discovered economic and political realities of the "management of men," as well as of audience expectations and demands, which made him profoundly disenchanted with his age. Between 1912 and 1916 when he wrote At the Hawk's Well, Yeats met Pound and through him came in contact with the Noh drama ofJapan, which provided him not so much with a dramatic model as with an aesthetic and cultural justification for his playwrighting tendencies, as well as for the themes that he explored in his poetry. The positive aspect ofthis influence is the simplicity gained by his plays. The action, setting, characters, and speech acquire strength through suggestive but bold delineation rather than description. The plays become unabashedly lyrical - here Yeats goes very much against the grain of most modern drama, which remains realistic. Not desiring to hold the masses' interest and attention, Yeats emphasized the uncanny, thus creating wonder and ideally filling the poetic viewer with "emotions." His dramatic means are the masks, the musical instruments, the cloths folding and unfolding as settings, the dance, and the chanted verse. The greatest pitfall in Yeats's infatuation with the Noh is the hardening of his line against the commoners as he advanced in age. He liked to fancy himself allied to aristocracy because ofhis craft, and this disdain for the everyday made him occasionally lose touch with reality and the times, as he walled himself inside his tower and began supporting and advancing fascist positions. The Noh drama is characterized by several features which appealed powerfully to Yeats: it is highly ritualized and stylized so that gesture, the hint of 68 ANCA VLASOPOLOS certain objects in scenery, and dance all have symbolic import; its language and action center upon a prevailing metaphor (grass in the lovers' playas noticed by Yeats in "Certain Noble Plays of Japan"?; and it is an art developed for the aristocrats who are instructed in its symbols and ritual so that exposition becomes unnecessary and action, gesture, and language are stripped bare of any explanatory burden. Yeats was not good at writing plays for a mass audience, and the kind ofbrotherhood of the initiated on which the Noh drama depended conformed after all to the aesthetic ideals of the Nineties, which Yeats never entirely abandoned. While he recognized that he must renounce hermetism in poetry, that he must include the market-cart (nature, ordinary life) as well as the bird (soul) in his poetic CEuvre, Yeats embraced wholeheartedly for his plays a small, aristocratic audience willing to follow "the way ofthe bird until common eyes have lost us ... "3. Because of Yeats's choice in favor of the bird rather than the market-cart, nature and ordinary life are virtually excluded from four important plays which span his career. When they do appear, they seem bleak, desolate, and hopeless. The "salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas," the vitality of generation which forces attention in Yeats's great lyrics, is absent from the plays. The hazel tree (symbol of wisdom) and the Old Man in At the Hawk's Well are both "stripped by the wind ... "4, bare boughs and speckled shin. The Old Man is "doubled up with age" (1. 42, p. 401), as are the thorn-trees. The landscape is desolate. In Purgatory the bare tree is all that remains ofthe "fat, greasy" (1. 23, p. 1042) leaves of life and generation, the Old Man all that remains of an equally distasteful carnal union. In all four plays only the embrace of the supernatural, an embrace which the mortal being must choose, gives immortality, raises the being from generation and death into the regenerate, the Imagination. So Cuchulain's choice to follow the Guardian ofthe Well in At the...