III.

Irish Literary Revival

In 1891 Yeats was one of the founding members of the London Irish Literary Society, and the next year, helped form the National Literary Society in Dublin. The society planned to establish a series of lending libraries, and to issue books in the Irish language, but was beset by internal quarrels. Yeats returned to Ireland in 1896, and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an explicitly political independence movement. He became a close friend of the nationalist playwright Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, whom he often visited at her estate at Coole Park and with whom he travelled in Italy. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and like-minded literary figures such as George Moore and Edward Martyn established a company of largely English actors to stage new plays on Irish themes. These plays reflect the mystical concerns of his poetry. The Countess Cathleen (1892) tells the story of an Irish noblewoman who sells her soul to the Devil rather than let the local peasants starve. The Land of Heart's Desire (1894) is a romantic piece dealing with abduction by fairies. Like the fairy people of “The Stolen Child” (1889), these figures are not the picturesque characters of children's fiction, but powerful, amoral entities dwelling on the fringes of Irish peasant culture. They offer release from drudgery, but this is “maddening freedom and bewildering light” which few humans can bear.

A generous bequest from Annie Horniman (a philanthropist and member of the Golden Dawn) allowed the company to found what became in 1904 the famous Abbey Theatre, dedicated to reviving Irish national drama. In his period as its manager (1904-1910), Yeats established the Abbey as a centre of the Irish literary revival called the Irish Renaissance. Yeats's range as a playwright is remarkable: The Pot of Broth (1904) is a whimsical peasant comedy; Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), a nationalist prose drama (with Maude Gonne in the title role); and Deirdre (1907), a verse tragedy. Although the movement aimed to regenerate Irish culture by heightening awareness of native mythology and literature, it met with great opposition from many Dubliners. When the company staged The Playboy of the Western World (1907) by John Millington Synge, the audience rioted, incensed by its unidealized portrayal of the Irish peasantry. Yeats, frustrated by these events, eventually withdrew from the popular theatre to produce small-scale productions for private audiences.

Yeats also wrote short plays on the Celtic legendary hero Cuchulain, combined as Four Plays for Dancers (1921). They were strongly influenced by the Noh drama of the Japanese court, some of which was being translated in 1913 by the American poet Ezra Pound, who was living with Yeats in Sussex and working as his secretary. These pieces were designed more for coterie audiences in aristocratic drawing rooms than for the middle-class public in commercial Dublin theatres. The language of these plays, spoken by masked actor-dancers, is sparse and ritualistic:

At the Hawk's Well (1917)

In these later plays Yeats returned poetry to the theatre, from which it had long been absent, and created poetic dramas as spare and pregnant with mysterious meaning as the images of a dream. His last plays, sparse, brooding pieces such as Purgatory (1939), are chamber works in a formal, liturgical language that nevertheless evokes apocalyptic and monstrous events: in 1937, Yeats wrote that his characters were all in the process of “holding down violence or madness”.