ABSTRACT
Some of Yeats’s plays have dramatised political issues, especially those embracing Irish nationalism and the conflict between the native Catholic middle class and the traditional Protestant landed aristocracy. Both his plays and his politics have been subjected to incisive scrutiny, but not the political components in his plays. I will contrast the treatment of political themes in four of them to that in select ‘political’ poems which articulate similar concerns to highlight what is distinctive as also more shadowy, oblique, and peripheral about the depiction of these issues in his drama. The plays to be analysed are: The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan (written in collaboration with Lady Gregory), The Dreaming of the Bones, and Purgatory. They will be compared with a few poems i.e. ‘At Galway Races’, ‘ September 1913’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘ Upon a House shaken by Land Agitation’, and ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ among others to show what is distinctive in them.
Thanks to John O’Leary and Maud Gonne, Yeats got involved with Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and political controversies, even as temperamentally he abhorred political activism. Although later he was active in the Irish Senate, he never whole heartedly admired politicians and politics. He was always ambivalent towards militant nationalism, especially armed rebellion against English rule. Moreover, the desire to escape from the sordid reality into a world of fantasy struggled in his self with his political endeavours. Ironically, this urge appears to be more evident in his plays than in his ‘political’ poems. In my analysis of Yeats’s political vision, I ask how his Protestant and somewhat genteel background shaped his ‘Tory’ view of the Irish groups he despised: merchants, Catholic clergymen, and rabble rousers, especially the ‘Whigs’ of all shades.
