Photographic Theatre Studies

In 1901 Yeats reflected on his recent visit to Shakespeare's hometown: “the theatre has moved me as it has never done before.”Footnote ¹¹ His essay lavishes praise on the library and repertory performances, but he reserves some criticism for Stratford's “half-round theatre.” Yeats believes that the half-round architecture impedes a designer's ability to compose “a succession of pictures.”Footnote ¹² Modernist theatre already had ushered in the “new and legitimate art” of set design, led by Yeats collaborator Edward Gordon Craig, who built “the first beautiful scenery our stage has seen.”Footnote ¹³ In the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner had pioneered the proscenium frame and the darkened house to accentuate this legitimate art, and at the turn of the century Yeats wanted to maintain those conditions.

Yeats's reference to this succession of images is part of a longer theatre history. Across the nineteenth century, theatre and other arts were characterized by a committed pictorialism. Performance was discussed in terms of iconic poses and tableaux, as Martin Meisel details in Realizations, and this trend stretches further back as well. In 1758, Denis Diderot called theatre “une succession de tableaux,” and Meisel finds similar precursors in English and German contexts.Footnote ¹⁴ Yeats's advocacy for a pictorial sensibility is another of modernism's only seeming novelties, better understood as an artful modification of inheritance.

In his writings on theatre, Yeats regularly appeals to a visual vocabulary with references to visions, images, and pictures, as well as to prints, paintings, and photographs. The terminological distinctions matter, of course, but the slippages and imprecisions are revealing too, as if Yeats is auditioning language for what he sees and what he wants to realize. In broad terms, the “image” became less painterly for Yeats's generation: it was part of a new vocabulary for poetry, for example, and in its Francophone usage the “image” emerged as a key concept for psychology and philosophy. A “succession of pictures” inevitably called to mind photography and cinema. Modernist artists variously adopted, resisted, and responded to questions of mechanical reproduction, and a theatre of images was becoming, a little anxiously, a theatre of prints and photographs.Footnote ¹⁵

Photographs are often understood by theatre makers, audiences, and scholars as records of past performance. Since the mid-nineteenth century, they have provided a limited but valuable visual impression of what a performer or a performance looked like.Footnote ¹⁶ Our personal and collective senses of the theatrical past are shaped by iconic images. In The Empty Space, Peter Brook writes that certain images are in fact all that remain in a spectator's memory. He recalls a set of iconic tableaux: “two tramps under a tree, an old woman dragging a cart, a sergeant dancing, three people on a sofa in hell.”Footnote ¹⁷ Among theatre scholars and teachers there is a shared, virtual photo album of these kinds of distilled moments, reproduced on our handouts and presentation slides: Hugo Ball's costume at the Café Voltaire, the constructivist sets of The Magnanimous Cuckold, the backdrop-bones in Orson Welles's Voodoo Macbeth. The modernist theatre is remembered and replayed in research and teaching as a succession of pictures.

And yet photographs and theatre have a still more complex and dynamic relationship. Since about the 1980s, scholars led by Laurence Senelick have interrogated our assumptions about photographs in theatre history.Footnote ¹⁸ Joel Anderson synthesizes these discussions in his 2015 Theatre & Photography, detailing the roles photographs play for theatre makers, spectators, and scholars. If photography is understood first as a record of performance, that is, as something that comes after, Anderson shows how the image also comes before and during performance.Footnote ¹⁹ Pictures may be afterimages, in Brook's sense, but they are used for making new work and for priming future audience members. Working from photographs remains common theatre-making practice, as a visit to a design studio or a rehearsal room would attest. And since the mid-nineteenth century, photographs and cameras have been integrated into dramatic performances themselves. The plot of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859) turns on the taking, developing, and consulting of a photograph onstage. Anderson shows how onstage photography updated tableaux vivants for and beyond the age of mechanical reproduction.

Yeats's dramatic career, from the 1890s to the 1930s, coincides with an important phase of this medial transition. Images are present at every stage of Yeats's artistic process: before, during, and after. A new project begins with the consultation of prints and photographs; the performed plays comment on their own images and aspire to more mystical visions; and Yeats was wary of photography's somewhat crude role in advertising, recording, and displaying his theatre beyond the theatre.

The Image in Yeats's Theatre

Yeats is cast in cultural history primarily as a poet, but his theatre career was robust, varied, and international. As the largely autobiographical speaker in a late poem puts it, “Players and painted stage took all my love / And not those things that they were emblems of.”Footnote ²⁰ Yeats recognized the collaborative, material, and multimedia nature of his work. He was—in that poem's language—fascinated by and an advocate for the stage's players. The title of his Four Plays for Dancers is in one sense a dedication of these plays to their featured performers, Michio Itō and later Ninette de Valois. For the “painted stage,” Yeats sought out collaborators such as Edmund Dulac and Gordon Craig to craft what that same poem calls “Those masterful images.” Visual artists helped to realize Yeats's stage pictures, as well as those of other playwrights he promoted in England and Ireland, including Maurice Maeterlinck, August Strindberg, and Rabindranath Tagore. Yeats's involvement in theatre was always-already cosmopolitan, despite its famed tethering to the Irish literary revival.

His plays themselves feature traces of this syncretism and this collaborative process. The published version of Four Plays for Dancers, for example, includes Dulac's illustrations and musical score. Like Samuel Beckett after him, Yeats was a hands-on playwright invested in how his plays would be realized, in terms of voice, movement, and design. Stylistically, he broke with the popular naturalists of his generation, preferring an artistic allegiance with the symbolists working on the Continent and with other movements further afield. In “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” he compares his method to what he imagines to be that of a noh actor, “there is no observation of life.”Footnote ²¹ Yeats left life's observation to the likes of Ibsen and Shaw, whom he saw, according to J. L. Styan, as “bourgeois moralists and reformers—mere logicians whose colourless dialogue was lacking in poetic vision and exhilaration.”Footnote ²² Yeats's plays were in careful verse, but that was only one element; the poetry was not the ultimate form. The “poetic,” as Styan's syntax insists, was in service of a “vision”—and it needed to be exhilarating.

One of Yeats's first plays, The Shadowy Waters, dramatizes how spoken lines are not enough for the poet-playwright. The play's hero Forgael puts the predicament into words, “I can see nothing plain; all's mystery / . . . I have but images, analogies.”Footnote ²³ At this early stage, the obstacle for Yeats was in not yet knowing how to express the images and analogies, how to synthesize these elements into a unified vision. In a metatheatrical moment, Forgael speaks of the physical set's meager offerings. He apologizes for this poor theatre: “I weep because I've nothing for your eyes / But desolate waters and a battered ship.”Footnote ²⁴ Yeats continued to rework this same play over nearly twenty years. It was begun in the 1890s, first performed in 1904, and published in different versions in 1906 and 1907.Footnote ²⁵ The Shadowy Waters eventually worked for Yeats not because it had stronger characters or more refined dialogue but because it had become a series of compelling pictures. In a 1904 letter, Yeats describes the effect he hoped to achieve: “one should lose the persons in the general picture.” The people lost, the image takes on its own character: “The whole picture as it were moves together—sky and sea and cloud are as it were actors. It is almost religious. . . . It is deliberately without human characters.”Footnote ²⁶ What matters for Yeats is not so much what is said or by whom but how the “whole picture” moves. It is almost religious.

In the Four Plays for Dancers from the late 1910s, Yeats further develops his theatrical vision to make the audience see differently, the pictures and visions almost mystical. These plays begin with a common ritual, the unfolding and folding of a cloth. For this devised convention, the ornamental cloth is opened and, despite spectatorial desire for something to be revealed, it is empty; it is the material and gestural transaction that matters. In the first two plays this action is accompanied by a choral incantation: “I call to the eye of the mind / A well long choked up and dry”; and “I call before the eyes a roof / with cross-beams darkened by smoke.”Footnote ²⁷ The singing, coupled with the cloth's unfolding, creates a mental vision that is both bound to and beyond the visible stage. Yeats repeats variants of the “calling to the mind's eye” line frequently. The phrase appears seven times in his poetry, five times in the collection The Wild Swans at Coole, whose composition coincided with that of these plays. Beckett shared Yeats's affection for these words too, cribbing them in Happy Days, in one of several homages to At the Hawk's Well.Footnote ²⁸

By the time of his last play, Yeats had grown more skeptical of theatrical speech in favor of stage images realized by props and costume. In the opening of The Death of Cuchulain (1939), Yeats supplants the chorus and cloth with a “very old man looking like something out of mythology.” This old man introduces the play in prose. He welcomes the same kind of chorus from the Plays for Dancers but tells us that he “picked them up here and there about the streets.” He promises a dance, “because where there are no words there is less to spoil. Emer must dance, there must be severed heads.” There will be seven severed heads in all, black parallelograms arranged by the Morrigu, a woman with a crow head. This old man, a kind of stage manager and “out of fashion and out of date” proxy for Yeats,Footnote ²⁹ cautions readers, prospective performers, and the audience against too narrowly attending to language. He distrusts his words, even on a Nobel Prize–winning poet's stage. In isolation, he warns, they are a source of ruin or disappointment.

Across his dramatic career Yeats experimented with how the action, symbol, and mood could be carried through incantation and choreography, through music and plastic design. He aspired to create a succession of moving pictures, relying on images he invented, remembered from galleries, or witnessed in mystical visions. Like Forgael, the playwright negotiated a catalog of pictures. “Certain Noble Plays of Japan”—the essay most directly linking Yeats and noh—opens with a striking singular image. Like many of the photographs held at the National Library of Ireland, this image does not neatly correspond to the noble plays of Japan. Writing this introduction to noh plays, Yeats calls other pictures to mind.

A Certain Noble Image

Between 1913 and 1916, Yeats and Ezra Pound lived together for part of each winter in Sussex, in the now-famous Stone Cottage. Pound worked as Yeats's secretary, and the two read and wrote and drank cider in the evenings. It was over this period that they both principally became acquainted with noh, a form neither saw performed. They gathered their impressions through the Hirata–Fenollosa translations; by way of their acquaintance with Michio Itō and other Japanese expatriates; and through visits to museums, where they examined prints of Japanese theatre. In imagining these plays, both writers appealed to the “image.” In 1914, Pound connected his poetic Imagism to noh: “the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered about one image”; a year later, “the Japanese ‘Noh’ plays seem to me in many cases to be built ‘out of the image’ . . . or from two or three images in dramatic relation.”Footnote ³⁰ Pound joins Yeats in implying that the image comes both before and during the play; it offers the material for the play's construction (it is “built” from the image) and it also becomes its center of dramatic gravity (the play “consist[s]” of one image). If, in an Imagist poem, Pound transforms “the motion of narrative into the stillness of epiphany,” his noh adaptations reverse or dilate that process.Footnote ³¹ In Imagist plays, he makes epiphanic stillness move.

Yeats's 1915 “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” presents the reader with a succession of pictures. He begins by simulating a live scene of writing; rhetorically, he has just now returned home to write. The essay shares this immediacy with other modernist texts such as F. T. Marinetti's 1909 manifesto. “We have been up all night, my friends and I,” Marinetti begins, “beneath mosque lamps. . . . And, while we trod our native sloth into opulent Persian carpets, we carried our discussion to the farthest limits of logic.”Footnote ³² Yeats and Marinetti both put into words the excitement springing from collaboration. Writing from European cities, they also turn to exotic materials to share a sense of that moment. Yeats begins: “I am writing with my imagination stirred by a visit to the studio of Mr. Dulac, the distinguished illustrator of the Arabian Nights.”Footnote ³³ Yeats's invented form of theatre does not begin with noh, nor with the work of an actor or playwright, but with the French illustrator of the Arabian Nights (Fig. 1). Despite this essay's stated relationship to certain noble plays of Japan, Yeats insists from the first on the relevance of other arts and other places. His method of artistic derivation and association is loose and expansive, his theatre practice part of a “flexible, mobile, rather messy version of modernism.”Footnote ³⁴

Figure 1. Edmund Dulac, illustration from One Thousand and One Nights, retold by Laurence Housman (London: Stoddard & Houghton, 1907), Plate 34. Source: Wikicommons; public domain.

Yeats describes the source of his stirred imagination: “I saw there the mask and head-dress to be worn in a play of mine . . . this noble, half-Greek, half-Asiatic face, will appear perhaps like an image seen in reverie by some Orphic worshipper.”Footnote ³⁵ Yeats offers this half-and-half equation to make sense of Dulac's mixed “Orientalist” inspirations, an example of the “wild hybridity of styles” in fashion during the period, combinations like “Egypto-Greek, Greco-Asian, Biblical Moorish.”Footnote ³⁶ Dulac's mask is the product of this combinatory poetics, but Yeats's treatment of this mask makes it still stranger (Fig. 2): it will “appear perhaps like an image seen in reverie by some Orphic worshipper.” In a performance yet-to-come, this mask appears in a displaced vision. It will be seen by another, and it will be the occasion for transgression; Orpheus’ crime was to look where he was not supposed to. The “image” in Yeats's theatre is associative and other than it seems.

Figure 2. Edmund Dulac, illustration for At the Hawk's Well, from W. B. Yeats, Four Plays for Dancers (London: Macmillan, 1921). Source: Author's collection; public domain.

Later in “Certain Noble Plays,” Yeats more concretely indicates how he works with theatrical images, commenting on the kind of activity that finds eventual form in the contents of the National Library folders. After describing the sliding movements of a Japanese dancer—in a Stone Cottage demonstration—Yeats abruptly opens a new paragraph: “The Print Room of the British Museum is now closed as a war-economy, so I can only write from memory of theatrical colour-prints.”Footnote ³⁷ Following his Orphic worshipper, Yeats cites another displacement in his process. The Print Room's closure makes it impossible for Yeats to look directly at the prints, but the obstacle is an artistic opportunity, a strategic limitation characteristic of modernist poiesis.

As Rupert Richard Arrowsmith details in Modernism and the Museum, the British Museum was “the West's most significant hub of global aesthetic exchange during the years leading up to the First World War.”Footnote ³⁸ Pound, Yeats, Fenollosa, and Dulac were all regular visitors to Laurence Binyon's exclusive Students’ Room, where they examined newly acquired prints. The fascination with these prints and with japonisme generally extended well beyond this small coterie. The public portion of Binyon's Print Room welcomed twenty-thousand visitors a month, and new collections at the Victoria & Albert brought in similar crowds.Footnote ³⁹ Beyond these institutional walls, the Japanese–British exhibition of 1910 attracted more than eight million visitors, more than had visited the Great Exhibition.Footnote ⁴⁰

Inside the more exclusive reading rooms, these artists studied and riffed on the nishiki-e (the full-color woodblock prints), with Yeats's attention drawn especially to depictions of theatre. The museum's main acquisitions—the collections of W. C. Alexander, Arthur Morrison, and Samuel Tuke—feature many such prints, the preponderance of which are of kabuki. Kabuki was the more popular form, and its sets, costumes, and makeup better lend themselves to colorized treatment. Many prints isolate performers in iconic roles, while others capture the atmosphere of the theatrical event (Fig. 3a). These acquired collections also include “reverse shots,” in which Europeans would see themselves represented from a distant point of view (Fig. 3b).

Figure 3. (a) Color woodblock print by Utagawa Toyokuni of a performance of Shunkan futatsu omokage (1800). Source: The Samuel Tuke Collection, The British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum. (b) Woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshitora depicting London, Irigisu Rondon-ko (1859). Source: The Arthur Morrison Collection, The British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Yeats sought out the less common noh images among these prints, embellishing their minimalism with his own interpretive projections, for instance, “a ship . . . represented by a mere skeleton of willows or osiers painted green.”Footnote ⁴¹ But his eye did not remain fixed there, and it wandered to the adjacent representations in Binyon's Students’ Room and beyond. Yeats acquired books on Japanese visual arts for his own library, and in later years showcased Japanese art in his home.Footnote ⁴² Shotaro Oshima recalls seeing twenty kabuki prints along Yeats's wall, festival dolls on the mantlepiece, and Junzō Satō's gifted sword on the writing table.Footnote ⁴³ If the theatrical prints at the British Museum were unavailable for immediate consultation, Yeats could rely on other sources as well as on the unreliable and creative work of memory.

In “Certain Noble Plays,” Yeats writes what sounds like a conclusive statement regarding his newfound influence, a sentence routinely cited as evidence for his noh fascination: “Therefore it is natural that I go to Asia for a stage convention, for more formal faces, for a chorus that has no part in the action, and perhaps for those movements of the body copied from the marionette shows of the fourteenth century.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This “Asia” to which Yeats rhetorically departs is indistinct and expansive, through the essay and throughout his career. Yeats adopts something of the typical orientalist gaze, but his manifest vision remains idiosyncratic. Asia poses a “vexed and vexing question” for Yeats, Seán Golden writes, variably calling to mind Byzantium, Zen, or the Upanishads.Footnote ⁴⁵ Reading the Plays for Dancers, critics often ignore this variability and fail to account for both the faults and virtues in Yeats's more expansive, associative thinking. In the paragraph preceding the touchstone line, Yeats describes going “to school in Asia” with Greek sculpture and Egyptian funerary practices; then he mixes those ideas with Tintoretto, Velazquez, and Dryden.Footnote ⁴⁶ This proliferation of references signals a desperation to communicate an elusive idea. He closes the section about a journey to Asia by asking who among his readers can forget the face of the Mogul King in the Russian opera Prince Igor.Footnote ⁴⁷

Aside from his erratic geography, Yeats more concretely specifies that it is a “stage convention” he seeks. He does not mention noh within a few paragraphs, and the features in the quotation pertain to a number of Japanese traditions. The named “marionette shows” are bunraku, photographs of which appear in his personal papers. (He also mischaracterizes that noh borrows from bunraku; the reverse is more accurate.) The “more formal faces” are present in all these forms, through mask, makeup, and the puppets; and noh, kabuki, and bunraku all include chorus elements. The scholarly paper trail casts Yeats as a fellow writer working with Pound on noh translations, but the named features regard a physical and visible style, the mise-en-scène. The figurative journey to Asia, by Yeats's own accounting, has very little to do with playwriting as such. Yeats is grappling with dramaturgical ideas more easily accessed through images than in print.

Under the label of noh—as he understood that form through demonstrations, scripts, and memories of the print room—Yeats discovered a visual vocabulary and a dramaturgical framework that systematized many elements with which he previously had experimented. In early plays Yeats already deployed many of the features that, according to some, noh taught him: a symbolic mise-en-scène, transformative dances, the musicians and the chorus, and the meetings between the mortal and the immortal.Footnote ⁴⁸ The noble plays of Japan did not offer Yeats a straightforward model for playwrighting; they did offer elegant synthesis, distant solidarity, and exotic prestige for his ongoing collaborative practice. Some of Yeats's new choices do derive from noh proper, but for his invented form Yeats moved across what Yoko Chiba calls Japan's “interconnected” arts.Footnote ⁴⁹

Masks, dances, and staging ideas tend to be only superficially glossed in printed plays, in the stage directions. In Pound's “Noh,” or Accomplishment there is little attention to that unique register of dramatic discourse. In the Fenollosa and Hirata materials, stage directions would have been spare, as the noh repertory is transmitted from teacher to student, through instruction and imitation. Pound recognized the limitations of his own literary approach, as it was “impossible to give much idea of the whole of this art on paper.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, for him the project remained a publication enterprise, his plays a series of closet dramas. Unlike Yeats, he made no real efforts to organize productions, despite recognizing that noh was “an art of splendid posture, of dancing and chanting.”Footnote ⁵¹

For indications of that “whole of this art” Yeats looked to other sources and materials. Chiba insists that “Yeats took whatever ideas he could from Japanese art and prints, Noh and Zen,” and he “took an interest in Kabuki.”Footnote ⁵² Concentrated study of one form did not preclude his drawing upon another; it likely even encouraged it. Just as he drifted easily across a figurative map of Asia, he moved across genre, form, and medium in imagining the Japanese dramas he never saw. His eclectic, unfaithful speculations are on clear display both in his “Certain Noble Plays” essay and in his disorganized folder of “noh” images. Traditions such as kabuki and noh are rigidly distinct in practice, but they share similarities too. They have common plays in their repertories, they both include female impersonation, and they rely on various forms of stylization and “decorativeness.”Footnote ⁵³

Chiba suggests that kabuki had an intertwined and perhaps an earlier influence on Yeats's work than did noh, through ukiyo-e (woodblock prints).Footnote ⁵⁴ In a lecture at Harvard University in 1911, Yeats praises the exacting realism of Japanese set interiors, presumably kabuki's; here, he is not describing the abstract visual suggestions of the noh stage. His eye and mind follow larger stylized wave patterns that “represent the sea by surrounding not only the stage but the auditorium.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In his lively imagination, these decorative patterns go beyond the stage and they travel beyond the auditorium. Despite the expression, Yeats did not need to go to Asia for these designs, these images, and these ideas. In the early twentieth century, iconographies of Asian performance and visual art came to him, through circulating pictures and exhibitions.

The World Theatre of Images

In a 2015 address to the Modernist Studies Association, Martin Puchner argued that world literature is in fact a modernist enterprise. Despite obvious earlier contact among literary traditions, it was in the late nineteenth century that publishing, trading, and reading practices ushered in what we now call “world literature.” In a related essay, Puchner demonstrates how such a vast formation became sustained and legible through steady and reciprocal (through rarely egalitarian) exchanges among mutually remote cultures.Footnote ⁵⁶ The main character in Puchner's essay is the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen.

World literature and world theatre share a common period of historical emergence, some of the same underlying geopolitical conditions, and some of the same players. The fields diverge, however, in terms of the means and materials of their global transmission. The printed paper trail, so essential for world literature, tells only part of the story of world theatre's development, even for distinguished writers like Ibsen and Yeats. Theatre practitioners, as well as new cosmopolitan audiences, certainly appreciated the availability of newly translated plays, but they were more fascinated by opportunities to see new kinds of touring performance, in person and more vicariously through circulating print culture.

Theatre historians join their literary colleagues in privileging published records, but during the modernist period the paperwork was rarely what inspired theatre artists. Comparing the mutual influences of European and Asian theatre, Olga Taxidou characterizes what different parties sought from the exchange. The mutual borrowing consisted of physical staging styles more than literary values, and scripts were seldom the site of artistic excitement. European and Asian adaptations, for Taxidou, were characterized by respective outward and inward turns: European artists tended to seek “stylisation, exteriority and artificiality” from their sources, while Asian artists looked for “individuation and psychological character.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Even if “individuation and psychological character” could be gleaned from printed lines, Asian artists more often borrowed storytelling structures or acting conventions. This approach is similar to what Yeats did extract from the translated noh plays: he borrowed scenarios, such as a lost traveler asking his way or a site that promises immortality. But he invented his own characters, suited to an “Irish Heroic Age,” and fashioned for them a new language.Footnote ⁵⁸

Siyuan Liu finds similar domestication and local repurposing in his study of shingeki in Japan and wenmingxi in China. The Spring Willow Society, the group of Chinese students who brought “Western” theatre to China, first staged an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Tokyo, based on the developing styles of shingeki; their Black Slave's Cry to Heaven commented on the United States’ anti-Chinese biases.Footnote ⁵⁹ Spring Willow adapted a scenario, a mode of commentary, and a staging style with little regard for authentic replication of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Modernist theatre, despite functional classifications by national tradition, was forged through this kind of cross-pollination, and there were few contexts in which dramatic scripts themselves held much sway. East Asian theatre traditions were performer-centric, and domestic and foreign scripts alike “were treated cavalierly by actors.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In Euro-American theatre as well, the concern for authorship was decidedly weak, as Katherine Biers and Sharon Marcus show.Footnote ⁶¹ Content, language, and interiority were produced locally, within more experimental, and often borrowed, dramatic frameworks.

With translations either arriving late to the scene or being disregarded by artists, theatre historians also turn to exceptional moments of contact between practitioners and audiences to help explain the emergence of world theatre. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a boom in regional and global touring facilitated by steamships and railroads. Transporting live performances far from a production's or a tradition's place of origin became increasingly common. Such theatrical exchange was coordinated through colonial networks, often sited at expositions and world fairs. European and American theatre historians have assembled a canon of important encounters from this traffic, in which the outward style of presentation once again takes precedence over dramatic content. In Moscow in 1935, Mei Lanfang mesmerized Bertolt Brecht, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vsevolod Meyerhold with his demonstrations of Chinese opera, and Antonin Artaud found “pure theater” in the “delightful anachronism” of Balinese dance in Paris in 1931.Footnote ⁶² But even these celebrated moments came relatively late, given the global repertory established decades earlier through the tours of Sarah Bernhardt, the Kawakami troupe, and others.

Mythologized encounters make for fascinating case studies, but they were belated, sporadic, and inaccessible to most audiences and artists. Alone, they do not account for the prevalent world theatrical zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century. I here contend that the image—what Yeats believed to be theatre's basic unit—played an as yet underappreciated role in the development of these transnational networks and in the formation of something like a world theatre. Aside from those rare, undoubtedly memorable performances, mutually distant performance forms were more patiently and more creatively consulted through reproduced images. Visual reproductions of noh, Kathakali, and wayang kulit—and Greek stage architecture, ballet, and commedia dell'arte—were circulating earlier, further out, and more consistently than were written documents or performance troupes. World theatre was a theatre of images avant la lettre.

These comparisons and timelines are inevitably broad-strokes, and the case of Japanese theatre as world theatre neatly bears out the dynamics and the historical sequence of print translation, performance tours, and the broader circulation of images. Like some of its European counterparts, Japan played an outsized role in this transnational traffic, due to its Meiji-era modernization—which took the form of westernization—and its later imperial expansion. The translations came relatively late, after much of the initial japonisme had been assimilated or had dissipated. Marie Stopes published Plays of Old Japan in 1913, and Pound's publication of individual plays culminated with his “Noh,” or Accomplishment in 1916. Arthur Waley's more comprehensive and expertly translated The Nō Plays of Japan was published five years later in 1921. As another point of reference, The Tale of Genji, Japan's monumental entry in world literature proper, would be fully translated into English in the 1930s.

The tours came earlier and made a stronger impression on European and American audiences. The peripatetic career of Yeats collaborator Michio Itō is itself, as Carrie Preston notes, “an exemplary case study in modernist transnational circuits” in all their “paradoxes and contradictions.”Footnote ⁶³ From 1912 to the 1960s, Itō danced, choreographed, and taught in Europe, the United States, and then back in Japan—making him a relative latecomer as well. The Kawakami troupe and its star, Sadayakko, were at the forefront of Japanese theatre's becoming world theatre at the turn of the century. In another instance of slippage between forms—and national traditions—Yeats miscasts these performers in his memory, writing of “Chinese dancers” performing in Paris in his poem “Nineteen Hundred Nineteen.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Otojirō Kawakami's theatre, even before it toured, was always-already a syncretic form of world theatre. As Ayako Kano shows, his plays drew on kabuki and European staging practices, and he cribbed ideas from Jules Verne and Adolphe d'Ennery's plays.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Kawakami troupe were among the first to bring Japanese theatre to the United States and Europe, and they brought those theatres back to Japan. But they also showed how traces of those theatres had already arrived there, by other means.

Images depicting Japanese theatre, first woodblock prints and later photographs, were available in Europe as early as the 1860s. Major collections were in London by the early 1880s, with institutional acquisitions peaking in the 1900s.Footnote ⁶⁶ These prints often featured theatrical images and particularly kabuki. The woodblock medium lent itself to mass reproduction, and copies moved easily, as stand-alone art and as illustrations in magazines, newspapers, and promotional materials. Laurence Senelick tellingly opens his article on theatre and photography in Europe and Russia with a detour to Japanese prints. He sites ukiyo-e as the “first attempts to preserve the evanescent” event of theatre.Footnote ⁶⁷ These images had at least a double function in extending performance: they were mementos for in-person spectators and proxies for those who did not attend. The early international circulation of these Japanese theatrical images—half a century before Itō danced the Guardian of the Well—started an incredible exchange of theatrical ideas, methods, and motifs, inspiring practitioners who as yet lacked access to translations or performances themselves.

For Yeats, images provided a consistent way for understanding both familiar and unfamiliar theatre practices. In a 1937 introduction to his plays, he reflected on the tenacity of image-inflected stage conventions. In rehearsal, he recalls, he gave the actor Frank Fay a spear rather than a sword because “I knew that he would flourish a sword in imitation of an actor in an eighteenth-century engraving.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Acting styles are beholden to the power of images, and Yeats processed new performance ideas through a pictorial frame. In describing the dance demonstrations at Stone Cottage, he wrote: “I notice that their ideal of beauty, unlike that of Greece and like that of pictures from Japan and China, makes them pause at moments of muscular tension.”Footnote ⁶⁹ At a poised moment of tension, a pause becomes a pose, an ideal image arrested from the continuum. In this formulation, remembered pictures are the originals for which live theatre provides a moving copy. Yeats goes further to suggest that this sensibility is shared with characters within dramatic fictions. In the world of a noh play, he speculates, a meandering traveler is guided by the pine trees, “which he will recognise because many people have drawn them.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Trees become real for the characters onstage through their extratheatrical pictorial representation.

As the “Certain Noble Plays” essay nears its conclusion, Yeats recalls image after image. He suggests that the Irish and Japanese—apart from the English and European—share a kindred emotion, “always associating itself with pictures and poems.” This poetic–pictorial emotion is “as deliberate as the echoing rhythm of line in Chinese and Japanese painting.” Yeats asks his reader to recall ostensibly common examples: “One half remembers a thousand Japanese paintings, or whichever comes first into the memory: that screen painted by Korin, let us say, shown lately at the British Museum.”Footnote ⁷¹ After Korin's abstract landscape, he calls to mind Nobuzane's seated portrait of the fourteenth-century Buddhist monk Kōbō Daishi. From the combination of these two images, he strives to name what is essential in Japanese art: “the most vivid and subtle discrimination of sense and the invention of images more powerful than sense.”Footnote ⁷² Given the frequency of image references—which overwhelm the erstwhile discussion of noh plays—one wonders whether this essay is about plays at all.

Despite the essay's eccentricity, Yeats manages to convey the power and portability of the image for modernist theatre. Once in focus as a key dramatic unit, the image appears to surface throughout the period's theatrical culture. Theatre pictures were printed in newspapers, programs, and other ephemera, producing a bigger virtual audience. Allusions to image culture appear in the period's foundational treatises. August Strindberg opens his famous preface to Miss Julie by comparing theatre to a “Bible in pictures.”Footnote ⁷³ Émile Zola, author of “Naturalism in the Theatre,” was an avid photographer and once wrote, “In my opinion you cannot say you have thoroughly seen anything until you have got a photograph of it.”Footnote ⁷⁴ And Brecht's epic theatre involves, as Puchner puts it, “proceeding through series of tableaux and framed stills.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Photographs and photographers come out onstage too: the main character in Ibsen's The Wild Duck is a photographer, as is a character in Jean Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower. From the 1920s, Erwin Piscator and others projected still and moving images onto their sets.

Beyond the cameras and cameos, the photographic image profoundly shaped audience expectations, experiences, and memories of performance. Theatre circulated in the public imagination in advertisements, distilled mementos, and other surrogates. Nineteenth-century performance and print cultures were jointly fixated on the pose, whether the flat illustration or the live tableau. Like a noh character seeking out the memory of a painted pine tree, audiences went to a play for a glimpse of a famous scene they already had seen. It was both a photographic memory and a script for the spectator.

Matte imashita! or, This Is What We Were Waiting to See

Images were essential for Yeats's theatrical practice, and yet he expressed suspicion about photographs.Footnote ⁷⁶ About the now-legendary 1916 performances of At the Hawk's Well, Yeats wrote in a letter, “No press, no photographs in the papers, no crowd.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The performance of his new form, shared with select spectators, was to be protected from the looser networks of circulating images on which Yeats himself relied. He wanted a visionary theatre, a succession of pictures witnessed fleetingly or not at all. This prohibition shows, as through a negative, how powerful he took photographs to be. At the time and in retrospect, Yeats's photographic policy made the performance more special for its audience; in colloquial terms, “you really had to be there.”

For a production that explicitly curtailed its own photographic representation, At the Hawk's Well is accompanied by an unusually prominent visual archive. Dulac's iconic design illustrations were published in Four Plays for Dancers. The costumed actors were photographed outdoors by the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who, as Carrie Preston indicates, was effectively another collaborator on the project.Footnote ⁷⁸ His photos, especially of Itō but also of the other artists, have acquired iconic status, placing this production in modernism's visual repository. In the undocumented drawing-room performances, the actors were lit by twin lanterns, and so the Coburn photographs, taken in the garden sunlight, are another displaced vision. The actors Allan Wade and Henry Ainsley model Dulac's masks, though Itō's portraits are the more striking. In one, he wears a headdress, and makeup defines his nostrils and flares outward from his eyes, a style on display in the circulating images (Fig. 4a). His eyes do not meet the camera's lens for this close-up but are rolled upward in the style of mie, a kabuki pose (Fig. 4b). In the play most associated with Yeats's noh inspiration, the principal performer's visage is reminiscent of kabuki, aligned with the playwright's and the designer's visual research (Fig. 5).

Figure 4. (a) Kabuki makeup illustration in the Edward Gordon Craig Collection. Source: gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). (b) Color woodblock print by Toyohara Kunichika depicting Nakamura Shikan IV (1869). Source: The Arthur Morrison Collection, The British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 5. Michio Itō as the Guardian of the Well from W. B. Yeats's play At the Hawk's Well. Photo: Alvin Langdon Coburn. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

At the Hawk's Well has had an autonomous visual afterlife. The contemporary British artist Simon Starling in the mid-2010s recreated the masks and costumes as part of a gallery show held in Yokohama, New York, and Basel. The New York show was subtitled “After W. B. Yeats’ Noh Reincarnations.” In writing about the minimal properties in “Certain Noble Plays,” Yeats predicted this kind of extratheatrical legacy. He remarks on the portability and visual appeal of At the Hawk's Well, “its few properties can be packed up in a box or hung upon walls where they will be fine ornaments.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Despite the photographic prohibition, Yeats's most important play is memorialized and updated through the circulation of related objects and images, and further images of its objects. These pictures do not capture the staged action itself, but they extend the long tradition of performance ideas traveling to other artists and audiences through pictures. They are a record of a past event, and they inspire future ones.

Theatrical pictorialism stretches before and after Yeats's historical moment. But as images were printed and circulated en masse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they became a novel way for audiences to participate virtually—at once more distantly and more personally—in theatre culture. As Penny Farfan and Sharon Marcus show, the circulation of actor portraits, commemorative cards, and illustrated advertisements was fundamental to modern theatre, modern celebrity, and modern culture at large.Footnote ⁸⁰ Amateur collectors were not passive consumers, and many became—not unlike Yeats—the archivists, collagists, and page-setters of their own theatre scrapbooks. Through this print culture, Sarah Bernhardt was a household name and image for far more people than those who saw her in person. If someone did see her perform in Guayaquil, New Orleans, or Sydney, they likely would have already seen images of her signature scenes. Seeing her reassume one such pose live offered a thrilling sense of recognition. This modern theatre experience, enabled by the precirculation of theatrical images, provides a bluntly literal gloss on Herbert Blau's characterization of theatre's uncanny liveness: “we are seeing what we saw before.”Footnote ⁸¹

The transnational movements of print and photographic archives were extensive and unpredictable. The kabuki actor Matsumoto Kōshirō VII did not tour like Bernhardt or Kawakami, and yet his likeness appeared in Europe nonetheless. Yeats's collaborator Edward Gordon Craig had a color woodblock print of this actor in his personal collection, a print now held at France's national library. One of the most recognizable images in the Yeats papers at the National Library of Ireland is a photograph of the same actor performing in Kanjinchō. In kabuki—the form most documented in Yeats's private collection—there is a codified way for appreciating stage images inside and outside the theatre. In the lobbies of contemporary kabuki productions, audience members can purchase souvenir photographs of performers in their iconic poses. These pictures continue in the tradition of the woodblock prints that circled the world in the nineteenth century and the photographs that followed in the twentieth. These are material reminders that theatre is made out of a succession of pictures.

Kabuki invites image dissemination more than noh does, and its iconography informed Yeats's sense for Japanese plays of all kinds. Within a kabuki auditorium, images are realized onstage and emphatically cheered; this atmosphere is a far cry from noh's comparative austerity. Devoted fans, the omuko-san (“the people beyond”), vocally punctuate live performances, isolating important moments. The omuko-san shout signature phrases at particularly heightened moments, often for a star's entrance or exit or for an emphatically held pose. They have a number of expressions in their repertoire—saying the performer's name, for example, or offering praise. They shout “matte imashita!” meaning “I was waiting for that!” or something like “this is what we came to see!”Footnote ⁸² In this long established, interactive process, the audience marks, quite literally, the moments when their visual expectations have been realized, when they see what they have seen before. This convention affirms an ongoing conversation between audiences and artists that is facilitated by images and that carries beyond any single performance. The exclamations score the moments when a remembered vision, called before the mind's eye, finds fleeting form in the theatre.