ABSTRACT
Seven months after the nationalist euphoria of Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats was at pains to reject the idea that an Irish national theatre should be a political one. His November 1902 essay ‘The Freedom of the Theatre’ argues that a national theatre cannot exist as a vehicle for the expression of majority national views, but must function instead as the means for their critique. Like shoving a stick into a beehive, writing plays in a spirit of sincerity entails upsetting the views of the majority (Yeats 1902: 5). The problem with Ireland at the moment, Yeats’s essay insists, is that the norms of ‘recognized criticism’ are unobserved. Instead, a lamentable situation arises in which audiences feel free to judge according to their own lights; the result is that ‘every newspaper man, every crossing-sweeper, thinks himself a moralist’ (Yeats 1902: 5). Evoking The Countess Cathleen controversy as an example of the way in which good drama is frequently unpopular and, necessarily, a disturber of orthodoxies, Yeats also hints that an Irish national literary theatre will be an institution that is, of necessity, at odds with Roman Catholicism. But in resurrecting the 1899 controversy and by portraying the protestors against The Countess Cathleen as unimaginative and dogmatic, Yeats’s essay intervenes directly in a hotly contested contemporary debate concerning religion and culture in Ireland. Theatrical art, it is strongly suggested, is fundamentally incompatible with the myopic
tendentiousness of Roman Catholic religious belief. To this extent, however, Yeats pitches his argument in ‘The Freedom of the Theatre’ in a manner that suggests – albeit inadvertently – that aesthetic norms are themselves historically determined, and that they can and do vary from one political constituency to another.
