1. Yeats, W. B., A Vision (London, 1937, rpt. 1961), pp. 28–9.Google Scholar

2. See discussions in Fuerst, Walter René and Hume, Samuel J., Twentieth-Century Stage Decoration (London, 1929)Google Scholar, Chapter 6: ‘Architectural Stages and Permanent Settings’; Speaight, Robert, Poel, William and the Revival, Elizabethan (London, 1959)Google Scholar; Bablet, Denis, Esthétique Générale du Décor de Théâtre de 1870 à 1914 (Paris, 1965)Google Scholar; Arnott, Peter, Greek Scenic Conventions: In the Fifth Century b.c. (Oxford, 1962).Google Scholar Professor Arnott notes in his first chapter that the German archaeological discoveries of Höpken and Dorpfeld in the 1880s and 1890s changed the theories of classical Greek theatre.

3. Edward Godwin's setting for Hélène à Troie, staged in Circus, Hengler's, London, 1886. Bablet, Plate 174.Google Scholar

4. Craig mentioned that he read the first chapter of Volume II of The Medieval Stage several times a year, but disliked the later ‘desparate’ moralities and mystery plays held outside the church building. Craig, Gordon, Scene (London, 1923), p. 6.Google Scholar

5. Yeats first met Craig in 1902, and their similar views on drama and theatre led to subsequent work at the Abbey. See Karen Dorn, ‘Dialogue into Movement: W. B. Yeats's Theatre Collaboration with Gordon Craig’ and Flannery, James W., ‘W. B. Yeats, Gordon Craig and the Visual Arts of the Theatre’ in O'Driscoll, Robert and Reynolds, Lorna, eds., Yeats and the Theatre (London and Toronto, 1975).Google Scholar

6. Later that year, Craig's screens were used in Stanislavski's production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre. Yeats revised three early plays, The Land of Heart's Desire, The Countess Cathleen and The Hour Glass for the new Abbey screens.

7. In his emphasis on spatial form and movement, Craig placed much less importance on the role of the actor than did Yeats, and on that point their views of theatre diverged.

8. ‘Improvements in Stage Scenery’, Patent Number 1771, A.D.1910. A contemporary critic noted that in 1912, the two major theatre events in London were Granville Barker's production of The Winter's Tale and the exhibition of Craig's screens at the Leicester Galleries. Granville Barker remarked that Craig's art, especially the 1902 production of Bethlehem, taught him to detest excessive scenery. Carter, Huntly, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (London, 1914), pp. 291–2.Google Scholar

9. Carter, , p. 299.Google Scholar

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Wade, A., The Letters of W. B. Yeats (London, 1954), p. 579.Google Scholar No such volume appeared until Plays and Controversies (1923)Google Scholar, in which Yeats's earlier theatre criticism from Samhain was printed with the plays. The events mentioned in the letter occurred in 1911 and 1912: The Winter's Tale, 1912Google Scholar; the Russian Ballet's London visit, 1912; Reinhardt's London production of The Miracle, 1911Google Scholar; and Oedipus Rex, 1912.Google Scholar In a lecture at Harvard on 11 November 1911, Yeats discussed Reinhardt's theatre experiments. Engelberg, E., The Vast Design (Toronto, 1964), pp. 80–1.Google Scholar

13. Arnott, , Green Scenic Conventions, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

14. Symons, Arthur, ‘The Ideas of Richard Wagner’ (1907)Google Scholar reprinted in Bentley, Eric, ed., The Theory of the Modern Stage: An Introduction to Modem Theatre and Drama (Penguin, 1968), p. 311.Google Scholar Wagner objected to the modern opera house which allowed the undemocratic ‘three fold and mutually contradictory appeal to the gallery, the pit, and the boxes, “the vulgar, the Philistine, and the exquisite, thrown into one common pot”’. Ibid., p. 307.

15. Yeats, W. B., Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), pp. 99–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Symonds, , pp. 307, 311.Google Scholar The current view is that the practice of placing actors in tall shoes was Roman rather than Greek.

17. Gilbert Murray's complete letter to The Times, answering criticism of the production, is reprinted in Carter, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt, pp. 221–2.Google Scholar W. L. Courtney, who helped Murray with the translation, is the author of ‘Professor Hubert Herkomer R.A., His Life and Work’ in Art Journal (Christmas Number, 1892).Google Scholar Gordon Craig was influenced by Herkomer's theatre experiments with electric lights and gauze, and he attended Herkomer's lecture on ‘Scenic Art’ (1892) given at Miss Horniman's Avenue Theatre in London. Craig, Edward, Gordon Craig: The Story of his Life (London, 1968), pp. 78–9.Google Scholar

18. Quoted in Carter, , p. 210.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., p. 218.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., pp. 218–19. Just as this production re-created the interior of a Greek theatre, so Reinhardt's previous London production of The Miracle transformed a proscenium theatre into a cathedral.

22. The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner. Translated, with Commentary, by Kaufman, Walter (New York, 1967), pp. 64–5.Google Scholar ‘Apollinian’ is Kaufman's translation of the more conventional ‘Apollonian’.

23. Ibid., pp. 62–3. Yeats's reading of Nietzsche clarified his own thought, Letter of (?) September 26, 1902: ‘Nietzsche completes Blake and has the same roots….’

Letter of May 14, 1903: ‘The close of the last century was full of a strange desire to get out of form, to get to some kind of disembodied beauty, and now it seems to me the contrary impulse has come. I feel about me and in me an impulse to create form, to carry the realization of beauty as far as possible. The Greeks said that the Dionysiac enthusiasm preceded the Apollonic and that the Dionysiac was sad and desirous, but that the Apollonic was joyful and self sufficient. Long ago I used to define to myself these two influences as the Transfiguration on the Mountain and the Incarnation….’ Wade, , pp. 379, 402–3.Google Scholar

Ten years after Reinhardt's London production of Oedipus Rex, the Victoria and Albert Museum acknowledged the growing interest in theatre of the past in its 1922 exhibition of contemporary stage design. Nicoll, A., English Drama: 1900–1930 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 100.Google Scholar

24. F. A. C. Wilson interprets The Cat and the Moon as a parable of the philosophy of history in A Vision. Yeats's Iconography, pp. 145–52.Google Scholar The play was written in 1917 and first performed at the Abbey either in 1926 or 1931. Samuel Beckett's Pozzo and Lucky, which closely resemble the two characters in Yeats's play, have abo been connected with an image of historical process: ‘Since the early thirties when Hegel's dialectic and Marx's theory of the class struggle began to interest the younger generation in France, the famous image of the pair “master and servant” from Hegel's Phaenomenologie des Geistes so deeply engraved itself into the consciousness of those intellectuals born around 1900 that it occupies today the place which the image of Prometheus held in the nineteenth century: It has become the image of man in general.’ Günther Anders, ‘Being without Time: On Beckett's Play Waiting for Godot’, in Esslin, Martin, Editor, Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 149.Google Scholar

25. A Vision, pp. 27–8.Google Scholar

26. Collected Plays (London, 1952), p. 579.Google Scholar

27. Bradford, Curtis, Yeats at Work (Carbondale, 1965), p. 241.Google Scholar The song is a variation of the theme of Yeats's dance play Calvary.

28. Quotations are taken from The Collected Plays, the page numbers given in parenthesis.

29. In an early draft, Yeats blocked out this philosophical debate before giving it dramatic shape. Bradford, , pp. 241–5.Google Scholar

30. In an early version, the self-abandonment of the revellers was suggested in ‘The Drunken Man's song’:

The Drunken Man's Song

By dreaming on a crazy drum

By an odour of spilt blood

Time's great measure is reversed

God is drummed out of the tomb.

(Low sound of drum and rattle)

The Hebrew. Why are they all suddenly silent and raise their arms above their heads and stand motionless, all their unseeing eyes turned upon this house?

The Egyptian. There is someone in the room.

Bradford, , Yeats at Work, p. 248.Google Scholar

31. wrote, Yeats, ‘It has seemed to me of late that the sense of spiritual reality comes whether to the individual or to crowds from some violent shock, and that idea has the support of tradition.’ Variorum Plays, p. 935.Google Scholar The Greek touching the beating heart recalls the opening lyric in which the ‘staring virgin’ bears away the beating heart of Dionysus. For discussion of Yeats's use of Orphic and Cretan myth and of Tarot symbols, see Henn, T. R., The Lonely Tower, p. 166Google Scholar; Raine, Kathleen, Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn, pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

32. Yeats's versions are well known to many audiences. Francis Fergusson based his interpretation of Oedipus Rex in The Idea of a Theatre on the 1944 production of Yeats's version, with Lawrence Olivier as Oedipus. In 1956, the Stratford Ontario Festival Players under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie presented Yeats's version at the Edinburgh Festival. Guthrie later made the film version based on his highly stylized production.

33. Hone, J. M., W. B. Yeats: 1865–1939 (London, 1942), p. 257.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., p. 256. In 1903, Murray first wrote to Yeats to thank him ‘for the extraordinary pleasure which I have received from your Countess Cathleen and Land of Heart's Desire’. Unpublished letter in the collection of Michael Yeats. Yeats then asked Murray to join him in the short-lived Masquers Society, and he followed all the productions of Euripides which Murray, Granville Barker and Florence Farr staged in London. Murray's description of the Masquers, Mrs Patrick Campbell and Florence Farr complements Yeats's more serious description of their efforts:

But living in Surrey brought him [Murray] in touch with less serious projects. There was the Theatre of Beauty, about which he was approached by Yeats; he was abroad when the letter reached him, reading Hippolytus scholia in the Naples Museum. ‘A preposterous name’, he wrote to his wife, ‘Even an offensive name. I shall decline to be on the committee.’ But when it emerged a few days later as The Masquers, founded to ‘produce only those works which convey a sentiment of beauty’, his name appears, elected apparently in his absence, on a managing committee with Yeats, Sturge Moore and Arthur Symons: Miss Craig their only link with the professional stage, money and experience lacking. ‘My hands are red with the life blood of the Masquers’, he was writing soon, dismayed by their wish to do his Hippolytus; and ‘I felt much the same with modifications about Mrs. Patrick Campbell when she wished to chalk herself over and “do it in the Chinese style”.’ In this year Florence Farr, whose ‘speaking to the psaltery’ was so much admired by Yeats, was founding the Fellowship of the Dancers, ‘to meet once a month in beautiful and simple dresses’; they were to dance a farandola, to chant Nietzsche, she to chant a chorus from the Bacchae – ‘my dream for them is to some day do scenes from your Bacchae’. She was Chorus Leader in the two professional productions at the Court Theatre, and then returned to her quest for the Bacchae. ‘My Bacchae choruses will be very different from anything I was allowed to do at the Court’, she confided to the translators; ‘PS Can you let me have the missing parts of the Bacchae restored?’ We do not know what he answered.

Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography, with Contributions by his Friends, ed. Smith, Jean and Toynbee, Arnold (London, 1960), p. 109.Google Scholar

35. Craig's demands that he control any production using his screens and that he personally supervise construction of any masks were often impractical. On one occasion Craig wrote to Yeats from Florence suggesting that the masks being prepared in Dublin for The Hour-Glass be posted to him for inspection. The letter, undated, is in Michael Yeats's private collection.

36. ‘Plain Man's Oedipus’, New Tork Times (01 15, 1933)Google Scholar, reprinted in Wade, p. 537. The note continues, ‘About five years ago my wife found the manuscript and set me to work again, and when the dialogue was revised and the choruses written, Lady Gregory and I went through it all, altering every sentence that might not be intelligible on the Blasket Islands. Have I made a plain man's Oedipus? The pit and gallery of the Abbey Theatre think so.’

37. Letter of Sunday, June 1904, quoted in Saddlemyer, Ann, ‘Synge to MacKenna: The Mature Years’, in Skelton, Robin and Clark, David, editors, Irish Renaissance (Dohnen Press, 1965), p. 69.Google Scholar Murray's producer Granville Barker also directed the Stage Society's production of Yeats's play, Where There is Nothing, later that month.

38. Arnold Dolmetsch, who made Florence Farr's psaltery, arranged and performed the music for William Poel's Elizabethan productions.

39. Sybil Thorndike in collaboration with Casson, Lewis, ‘The Theatre and Gilbert Murray’ in Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography, p. 154.Google Scholar Miss Thorndike, who was in the 1908 Hippolytus produced by Lewis Casson, remarks that ‘Throughout the controversy and experiment Murray's chief anxieties were his horror of anything approaching the ladylike languor of the Alma Tadema–Albert Moore “Greek” convention of those days, and his insistence on the clarity and intelligibility of the words themselves.’ The 1908 Birmingham performance was on an open stage with three levels and room for elaborate choric movement, Ibid., pp. 154, 159–60.

40. The importance of the chorus might be altered, Yeats added, if the play is performed in a different sort of theatre: ‘A producer who has a space below the level of the stage, where a chorus can move about the altar, may do well to experiment with that old thought of mine and keep his singers as much in the range of the speaking voice as if they sang “The west's awake” or sang round a binnacle.’ Yeats referred earlier to ‘that old thought of mine’ in discussing the songs for the chorus: ‘Years ago I persuaded Florence Farr to train the chorus for a Greek play that the sung words were almost as intelligible and dramatic as the spoken; and I have commended that art of hers in Speaking to the Psaltery. I asked my Dublin producer Lennox Robinson to disregard that essay….’ Preface to Sophocles' King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage (London, 1928), pp. v, vi.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., p. vi.

42. Talk on King Oedipus broadcast from Belfast, September 8, 1931. Typescript in Michael Yeats's collection of unpublished manuscripts.

43. Murray, Gilbert, Oedipus King of Thebes by Sophocles (London, 1911), pp. 27–8.Google Scholar

44. SirJebb, Richard G., The Tragedies of Sophocles translated into English prose (Cambridge, 1904), p. 108.Google Scholar Yeats worked partly from Jebb's version.

45. In the 1928 publication of King Oedipus, the music used in the Abbey production was printed with the note that the final chorus was spoken, not sung, by the Leader. The New York Times review, 26 12 1926Google Scholar, of the production reprinted on the cover of the book, notes that ‘when the chorus, standing before the closed curtain, spoke the concluding line, “Call no man happy while he lives”, there followed a scene of enthusiasm surpassing all similar scenes with which the career of the theatre is dotted.’ The use of curtain and concluding song is similar to the conclusion of The Land of Heart's Desire and The Hour-Glass as well as the dance plays.

46. See especially Yeats's adaptation of the Kommos (Collected Plays, p. 567Google Scholar) and the final episode (pp. 573–5).

47. Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems (London, 1967), pp. 217, 218.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., pp. 182–3.

49. Mythologies, p. 341.Google Scholar In this essay, Yeats uses Miss Harrison's ‘daimon’ in his own way:

‘Each Daimon is drawn to whatever man or, if its nature is more general, to whatever nation it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image the antithetical dream of man or nation. The Jews had already shown by the precious metals, by the ostentatious wealth of Solomon's temple, the passion that has made them the money-lenders of the modern world. If they had not been rapacious, lustful, narrow, and persecuting beyond the people of their time, the incarnation had been impossible…. So always it is an impulse from some Daimon that gives to our vague, unsatisfied desire, beauty, a meaning, and a form all can accept.’ Mythologies, p. 362.Google Scholar

50. The group included Gilbert Murray of Oxford and Francis Cornford of Cambridge. For assessments of their work see Pickard-Cambridge, A. W., Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford, 1927)Google Scholar; else, Gerald, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kirk, G. S., Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and other Cultures (Cambridge, 1970).Google Scholar

51. Ancient Art and Ritual (London, 1914), p. 53.Google Scholar

52. Ibid., pp. 25–6. Miss Harrison mentions that Roger Fry's article, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ (New Quarterly, 04 1909Google Scholar) is similar to her own idea, formulated independently, of the function of art. Miss Harrison notes that the theory that ritual preceded myth was first proposed by William Robertson Smith, to whom James Frazer dedicated his first edition (1890) of The Golden Bough.

53. Ibid., p. 26.

54. Ibid., pp. 72–3.

55. Ibid. Miss Harrison refers to Whitehead's book, Introduction to Mathematics, Chapter XII, ‘Periodicity in Nature’. Years later when Yeats read Whitehead, he claimed to see similarities: ‘I have found a very difficult but profound person Whitehead, who seems to have reached my own conclusions about ultimate things. He has written down the game of chess and I, like some Italian Prince, have made the pages and the court ladies have it out on the lawn. Not that he would recognize his abstract triumph in my gay rabble.’ Letter to Mrs Olivia Shakespear, 15 April 1926. In another letter written a week later, Yeats explained that, having so far read Science and the Modern World, he thought Whitehead's terminology and quantum theory were similar to his own terms in A Vision. Wade, , pp. 712, 713–14.Google Scholar

56. Essays and Introductions, p. 163.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., p. 287.

58. Mythologies (London, 1959)Google Scholar ed. by MrsYeats, W. B., p. 352.Google Scholar In ‘Discoveries: Second Series’, Yeats wrote that ‘Passion and energy when they flow unchecked become rhythmical, they take upon themselves a definite beat.’ Irish Renaissance, p. 81.Google Scholar Professor Hough discusses the use of biological rhythm in literature in An Essay in Criticism (London, 1966)Google Scholar, and it is possible that Yeats, who borrowed whatever he could use from scientific theories, would find support in current discussions of ‘biological clocks’.

59. From ‘Ireland After Sie Revolution’, On the Boiler, reprinted in Variorum Plays, p. 899.Google Scholar

See also Yeats's Introduction to ‘Fighting the Waves’, Dublin University Magazine, 04–06, 1932Google Scholar: ‘Let him translate Greek into Irish and learn that our chariot fighting Red Branch resembled the chariot-fighting Greeks and Trojans; that D'Arbois de Joubainville spent his life in the study of Irish for no other reason; that the sacred grove where Oedipus was carried off by the gods differed in nothing from the groves where, according to Connaught tales, men, women and children were carried off; that Greek literature was founded on a folk belief differing but little from that of Ireland; that Roman, like English literature, was founded upon the written word….’ Variorum Plays, p. 573.Google Scholar

As Yeats wrote in ‘Plain Man's Oedipus’ (1933)Google Scholar, ‘When I say intelligible on the Blasket Islands I mean that, being an ignorant man, I may not have gone to Greece through a Latin mist. Greek literature, like old Irish literature, was founded upon belief, not like Latin literature upon documents. No man has ever prayed to or dreaded one of Vergil's nymphs, but when Oedipus at Colonus went into the Wood of the Furies he felt the same creeping in his flesh that an Irish countryman feels in certain haunted woods in Galway and in Sligo.’ Wade, , p. 537.Google Scholar

60. BBC Typescript in Michael Yeats's collection of unpublished manuscripts, p. 4.

61. Essay s and Introductions, pp. 157–8.Google Scholar

62. A Vision, p. 28.Google Scholar

63. BBC Typescript, pp. 4–5.