The Shaping Force in Yeats's Plays
| Autor: | John Unterecker |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1964 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Modern Drama. 7:345-356 |
| ISSN: | 1712-5286 0026-7694 |
| DOI: | 10.3138/md.7.3.345 |
| Popis: | My TWO-PRONGED THESIS IS THIS: that William Butler Yeats was one of the most conscious craftsmen the theater has ever known, and that he may well, in the long run, be one of its most successful artists. In making these claims I am, I realize, taking positions both unpopular and extreme. With the exception of the adaptations of Sophocles, Yeats's plays have never, so far as I know, achieved longruns anywhere. And though such die-hards as Eric Bentley have praised Purgatory to the skies, most professional drama critics have neatly solved the problem of dealing with Yeats's plays either by ignoring them or by tucking them into the catch-all never-never-land of "experimental drama." Even among the admirers of Yeats's poetry, the plays seem to create a good deal of discomfort. F. A. C. Wilson, for instance, who deals with them extensively, seems happiest when he is able to extract from them allegorical messages. And Helen Vendler, who explicates them brilliantly—more brilliantly, to my mind, than any other critic—dismisses them flatly as plays written for a coterie theater, remarking of The Death of Cuchulain that "the play is no more compelling, dramatically speaking, than the other late plays, which is to say almost not at all." Purgatory, for her, is "thin and unsatisfying" largely because it ends, she feels, "on a tone of frustration and incomprehension." Only a handful of Yeats scholars—most conspicuously among them John Moore, David Clark, and Peter Ure—have made any serious attempt to see how the plays function both as drama and as poetry, how the poetry in a very literal way complements the drama, enriching and strengthening it, and how the drama in turn complements the poetry, providing a structure of essential action-the articulated bone, if you will, which is driven by Yeats's muscular verse. And yet, finally, it is this combination which makes Yeats's plays the powerful dramas that they are: a verse which at its best functions so inconspicuously as in production to be unnoticeable, integrates and supports a very carefully planned dramatic structure. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|