As early as 1919, Yeats hoped to see his early dramatic criticism, first published in a series of pamphlets and collected only as part of one of the volumes in an expensive collected edition in 1908, available in a separate, regular edition. Although more often than not successful in his dealings with publishers, in this instance Yeats eventually had to be content with The Irish Dramatic Movement as a section of the 1923 Plays and Controversies. If either of the two expensive collected editions planned in the 1930s had come to fruition, The Irish Dramatic Movement would have still been denied a volume of its own, sharing space with the early prose fiction. After Yeats’s death the work was finally published in a rather miscellaneous collection of prose, Explorations (1962). The present edition is thus a belated fulfillment of Yeats’s wish. To The Irish Dramatic Movement as Yeats last approved it has been added the uncollected material from the original pamphlets.
As with any editorial endeavor, this volume would not have been possible without the assistance of many others. We are especially indebted to Joseph Black; George Bornstein; D. Allen Carroll; Kathleen Clune; Morris Eaves; Robert Essick; Nora FitzGerald; Ed Folsom; Roy Foster; John Frayne; Stan Garner; Nancy Moore Goslee; John E. Grant; George Mills Harper; Margaret Mills Harper; Thomas Heffernan; George Hutchinson; K. P. S. Jochum; Mary Lynn Johnson; Declan Kiely; J. C. C. Mays; Jerome McGann; William H. O’Donnell; Morton Paley; Alan Raitt; Peter Robinson; Ann Saddlemyer; Ronald Schuchard; Colin Smythe; Mary Speer; Wayne Storey; Jeff Tamaroff; Joseph Trahern; Anne Yeats; and Michael B. Yeats. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; the British Library; the National Library of Ireland; the University of North Carolina Library; and the University of Tennessee Library. A special thanks goes to my graduate students Stephen Holcombe and Lauren Todd Taylor for their tireless efforts in tracking down some of Yeats’s obscure allusions.
We are also grateful to Sarah McGrath at Scribner for her support of this edition and to John McGhee for his care in seeing the manuscript through the press.
Mary FitzGerald died from metastatic breast cancer on 8 August 2000, before this edition could be finished. It has been my privilege to bring it to completion. To her many students, friends, and colleagues, Mary was known as a superb teacher, a generous and loving companion, and a fine scholar. Only Richard Edmond, Catherine Anne, and I also knew her as the very model of a mother and a wife. As Yeats once wrote,
time may bring
Approved patterns of women or of men
But not that selfsame excellence again.
R.J.F.
Wildwood, Missouri
15 March 2002