ABSTRACT

IN THE evolution of any poetic dramatist a time ought to come when life to Shakespeare appears to be death to him. What has been done supremely well cannot be done again; and the problem then becomes the nearly insoluble one of doing something which is radically different and essentially dramatic, which is creative in its own right and not a reflection of the past, either in mimicry or in rebellion. With Yeats there were other complications in the movement of dissent. Character and plot were resources that had become vulgarised in the naturalistic theatre and the poetic drama had to be held away from them-distanced by legend or by specific conventionsif it was to engender a poetic response. The 'Playboy riots' had discredited the popular theatre and artistic salvation now had to be aristocratic. 'I have invented a form of drama', Yeats wrote, 'distinguished, indirect and symbolic, and having no need of mob or Press to pay its way.' He invented it partially because modem poetic drama 'always dominated by the example of Shakespeare' sought to 'restore an irrevocable past'. In rejecting one tradition he was guided to another, that of the Noh drama of Japan, with its fivehundred-year continuity of writing and performance, played before a military aristocracy, which Yeats wishfully visualised as combining the best qualities of Achilles and Walter Pater.