Although he is usually thought of as a poet who wrote for the theatre, W. B. Yeats was a theatre practitioner for almost fifty years, and was closely involved in every aspect of producing his plays. As a consummate theorist of the theatre, he thus produced theories relating to theatre space, the use of colour, and an understanding of the uncanny power of objects that prefigures later phenomenological thinking on the same subject. He formulates these precepts early in the 1900s, laying down principles for the use of colour, for instance (two main colours and an accent only), but by the time of his more mature work, he is using objects – such as the severed heads that appear in his later plays – in a way that develops his own thinking on the relation between thought and matter. Indeed, a consideration of Yeats’s understanding of the physical elements of performance shows him to be someone who thinks through the medium of theatre, to borrow a concept from Alain Badiou; using the nature of performance as a means of thought.

W. B. Yeats began writing about the theatre in the mid-1890s, after a trip to Paris where he first saw French symbolist theatre. From the time that the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey) began producing his plays in the early 1900s, Yeats was regularly, and vigorously writing about theatre, with key essays appearing in the little magazines Samhain and Beltaine. From about 1910 onwards, his writing about theatre becomes more meditative, more concerned with his occult interests, and for a period focused on his interest in Japanese Nō theatre. Collectively, Yeats’s fugitive writings for the theatre constitutes an organum for the theatre, which is consistent across more than forty years, and which stands among the most significant contributions to modernist reconceptualisations of theatre.

As with his theorisation of theatre space, W. B. Yeats developed a complex theorisation of bodies, masks, and voices in performance. Like other aspects of his performance theory, these grew out of his own production experience, in which he could be said to have workshopped his theories. By the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, he was writing his Plays for Dancers, in which the moving body is put in dialogue with the spoken word in ways that challenge our view of Yeats as a poet who wrote for the theatre. Likewise, his use of voices – particularly disembodied voices – in his theatre shows a thinking through of the phenomenology of the voice. However, it is in relation to the mask, which he theorises with such complexity in works such as A Vision, that we most clearly see Yeats as someone who thinks through theatre, to borrow a concept from Alain Badiou; using the nature of performance as a means of thought.

W. B. Yeats began work on his theory of theatre in the early 1900s in his writings for the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey, and these included a series of precepts for dramaturgy that encompassed character, action, and language. For Yeats, dramatic character was not simply a mimetic representation of a personality; instead, it was a set of human possibilities defined by an action. Yeats would ultimately relate this theory to his wider understanding of personality and action developed in his poetry, and in writings such as A Vision. Likewise, his theories of the language appropriate to drama, and the techniques that should be used to capture the quality of speech, are closely related to his own development as a poet. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that all of his poetry from about 1900 onwards is theatrical, in the sense that it implies a voice. Collectively, Yeats’s writings on theory constitute a coherent treatise on dramatic construction.

This overview of W. B. Yeats’s writings for the theatre begins with his earliest juvenilia, the verse dramas published in the late 1880s, and moves through his best-known work with the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey) in the early twentieth century through to his Nō plays and finally to his last plays, drawing on the techniques of genetic literary criticism to explore the drafts and multiple editions of these works. It also explores, for the first time, several of Yeats’s early unpublished plays in the context of his wider dramatic output.

Throughout his life, W. B. Yeats used the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ in relation to the theatre. However, it is clear that his understanding of these terms did not derive from Aristotle. He also frequently mentions Nietzsche, and particularly Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy; however, he uses Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy in an unique and distinctive way. For Yeats, tragic theatre was what he referred to as 'subjective', a term he develops in his occult and philosophical works, particularly A Vision, and which he relates to vision, thought, and the individual. 'Comedy', by contrast, is what Yeats considers to be 'objective', concerned with the material world and its manifestations, including the body, and rationality. Based on this opposition, Yeats lays the foundations for a theory of theatre that is distinctive, and which shapes his own theatrical practice.

When W. B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, he singled out his contribution to theatre as one of his main achievements. The critical consensus since his death has not shared this view, and his theatrical work has largely been overlooked. This book contends that Yeats is not only an important modernist playwright, but also a thinker about theatre whose originality can be compared to that of Brecht or Artaud.

W. B. Yeats began with the view that the theatre should offend what he called 'the regular theatre goer', but during his time with the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey), he came to understand that the energy and bank of imagery that an audience brought to the theatre could constitute the life of the performance. He thus came to understand the audience as both the origin and the destination of performance. For Yeats, the audience were the origin of the performance, in that they shared and produced the collective pool of images from which his theatre drew. At the same time, he also understood the theatre in magical terms akin to those of the writings of Artaud, in which precisely chosen actions and words had the power to influence a much wider population. This understanding of theatre developed originally in the context of his engagement with Irish nationalism in the early 1900s, but continued throughout his life, ultimately producing an understanding of the spectator that stands with the writings of Artaud in its originality and radicalism.

For W. B. Yeats, the theatre was not the distraction that his critics have so often considered it to be, but the means through which he thought most intensely and originally. To understand his theatre is to understand it as a form of thought, much as Alain Badiou argues is possible with theatre in putting it forward as a reason why theatre persists. For Yeats, the understanding of embodied thought, of the relationship between self and other, and self and the possibility of being other, was worked out in performance. The result was not simply a body of dramatic writing, but a hitherto overlooked body of dramatic theory that locates thinking at the moment of intense experience.

‘For the amusement of the plundered people’: Irish theatre in 1691

Shortly before Christmas in the winter of 1691, announcements for a production of Othello at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre appeared in the taverns, coffee houses and printers’ shops clustered in the narrow streets between Dublin Castle and the river Liffey. For the people of Dublin, this was yet another sign of civil society re-emerging, for – like so much else in the city – Smock Alley had lain dark and empty during the three years of warfare and plague since William of Orange’s landing in England in November 1688. Anyone reading those notices would have known that reopening the theatre in the months immediately after the Treaty of Limerick involved much more than airing the musty seats and dusting off the scenery. For the audiences who made their way through the thin winter light to that production of Othello, there would have been an uncanny sense of returning to something familiar, and yet anomalous in its familiarity, for all around it had changed.

The theatre in which the play was to be performed, Smock Alley was only the second public theatre building to have been constructed in Ireland. Its predecessor had been established (probably in 1635) in Werburgh Street (just behind Dublin Castle) by the lord lieutenant of the time, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, and was managed by a member of Wentworth’s retinue, John Ogilby. Although it lasted only until 1640, the Werburgh Street Theatre was part of a culture of theatre-going in the Stuart court; Smock Alley, also built by Ogilby, was a continuation of that tradition, and had been built as part of the process of establishing a Stuart viceregal court in Restoration Dublin.

Considered from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, when plays by Irish writers can be seen on stages from Los Angeles to Warsaw, it is difficult to imagine Irish culture without the theatre. However, if we turn back to the first major histories of the Irish theatre, published in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, we find them troubled by an awareness that the theatre does not fit easily into the prevailing definitions of Irish culture.

This problem is best defined by one of the foundational works of Irish theatre history, Joseph CooperWalker’s ‘An Historical Essay on the Irish Stage’, published by the Royal Irish Academy in 1788.Walker was a respected antiquarian who had published his ‘Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards’ two years earlier. He was one of a number of antiquarians and historians of the period who sought to recover indigenous forms of Irish architecture, music, poetry, graphic design, sports, clothing and civil law. In all of these areas, the ancient Irish past seemed to be an almost inexhaustible source, connecting the emerging modern nation with an authenticating history. ‘Can that nation be deemed barbarous in which learning shared the honours next to royalty?’ asks Walker in one of the more passionate moments in his ‘Memoirs of the Irish Bards’. ‘Read this, ye polished nations of the earth, and blush!’1 However, when Walker and his contemporaries looked for traces of theatre in Irish antiquity, they found nothing. ‘It is very extraordinary that we cannot discover any vestiges of the Drama amongst the remains of the Irish Bards’, comments Walker. ‘If the Stage ever existed in Ireland previous to the middle ages, like the “baseless fabric of a vision” it has melted into air, leaving not a trace behind.’