Switching the Yeats Gestalt

W. B. Yeats first encountered William Morris in 1887 just before mass protests in Trafalgar Square over the imprisonment of Irish MP William O'Brien were put down violently by the police, injuring hundreds and giving thousands of protesters an enduring example of state brutality. A number of the socialists and anarchists Yeats would later meet through "Sunday Nights" at Morris's home—such as Bernard Shaw and Annie Besant—were among the protesters, and as Michael McAteer notes, for Morris, "the behavior of the police confirmed . . . the necessity for a revolutionary transformation in the social order if his utopian aspirations were to be effected" (23). Morris's socialist lectures and anti-industrialist writings provided a compelling social vision behind the immersive world of handcrafted textiles, tapestries, wallpapers, and stained glass produced by Morris's company and the earlier pre-Raphaelites. After the events of 1887, called "Bloody Sunday" by a horrified London public, the social transformations required to realize the spirit of Morris's Hammersmith home beyond its walls struck many, including Yeats, as impeded by an increasingly compact set of middle-class conventions and state institutions.

Yeats and European Drama offers a strong reading of Yeats's lifelong engagement with the theater as a crucial dimension of his political thinking, showing how Morris's socialism leads Yeats to confront the processes of commodification that appear in public rhetoric and popular arts as well as industrial working conditions. Mediated by Morris, Ibsen's revolutionary criticisms of the "compact majority" and their institutional power become a much more significant factor in Yeats's early encounters with symbolist drama than is usually appreciated. Although Yeats was suspicious of the outright materialism evident in the naturalist movement (especially as it appeared in literary journalism), his attitude toward Ibsen and naturalist theater was more complex than his later sniping would suggest. McAteer's first chapters document the many alliances between dramatists like Ibsen and Wedekind and the estranging moods and anxieties created by symbolist theater. Early plays like The Land of Heart's Desire, The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan respond to a general crisis in value, and, more surprisingly, bear out McAteer's argument that they extend "Marx's accounts of family as an economic structure and of the fetishism of the commodity," and anticipate "the ways in which Freud's notion of unheimlich would come to characterize a growing sense of dislocation in the society of modern industrial Europe" (14). Turning to The King's Threshold and Deirdre, McAteer's second chapter recasts Yeats's interest in Maeterlinck's Egyptian mysticism as a means of projecting the social criticism he found in Ibsen into theatrical space itself. Seanchan's suspension on the stairs in The King's Threshold is "not so much a representation as an enactment of power" (52). Yeats's sketch for a lighting plan for the play and Edward Gordon Craig's design drawing for "The Steps" illustrate threshold space realizing the struggle between starving poet and king.

The uncertain generic nature of the Cuchulain plays makes grouping them together as a coherent cycle difficult, but McAteer argues that this was not a failure to imagine a more workable framework for mythological drama. Rather, "it testified to a deliberate interrogation of such power through the medium of farce" (68). Building on Marjorie Howes's connections between Gustave le Bon's The Crowd (1895) and Yeats's increasingly obsessive focus on crowd mentality, McAteer's third chapter explores the relationship between the figure of the deranged, irrational leader and mesmerized, reified masses.¹ Connected to his responses to the Playboy riots in 1907, Yeats's attitudes toward mass movements have been read as an expression of reactionary Anglo-Irish colonialism, but McAteer suggests that plays like...