CRAZY JANE AND JULIET

That Yeats associates Shakespeare with his own kind of modernity has its paradoxes, given the one poem of his in which the word ‘Shakespearean’ figures, ‘Three Movements’, in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933):

The Shakespearean poetic as independent, elusive and self-assured; the Romantic as approachable and worth inheriting; and, implicitly, the modern as an image of desuetude and approaching death, and phrased not as statement but interrogative anxiety: Yeats here offers his characteristically high-minded or high-handed attitude to what he elsewhere calls ‘the filthy modern tide’, in the form of a dismissively judgemental parable. In some aspects of his own modernity, however, the Shakespearean fish swim much closer to the Yeatsian land; and they do so prominently in relation to sexuality.

When, in the essay on Spenser, Yeats situates Shakespeare as still a member of ‘the old nation’, he is thinking primarily of his adaptations of the materials of English folklore in such things as his songs and the riddling speeches of his fools, with their baffling vocabularies and vagaries. Yeats's own attraction to song and refrain has its Shakespearean sanction. Helen Vendler, for instance, in one of several thought-provoking remarks about Yeats's formal responses to Shakespeare, thinks that the ‘impetus’ for the ‘new kind of sequence-structure’ apparent in ‘The Three Bushes’ may derive from Shakespeare's use of songs in his plays.