These notes attempt to elucidate all specific allusions, though some have eluded our search. Figures on the order of Sophocles or Shakespeare are identified only in the Index. Other names are usually identified fully only at their first mention. Rather than offering notes that simply direct the reader to other notes, some material has been repeated.
1. Yeats met the Irish dramatist, folklorist, and translator Lady Gregory (1852–1932) in 1894; in 1897 he stayed with her during the summer at Coole Park, her estate in County Galway, as he would for many summers to come. They enjoyed a mutually creative friendship that lasted until her death. Along with the Irish playwright Edward Martyn (1859–1923), in 1897 they began to plan for an Irish Literary Theatre. Martyn provided considerable financial support for the venture.
2. The Irish writer George Moore (1852–1933), a cousin of Edward Martyn, began to be involved with the Irish Literary Theatre at the end of 1898.
3. Oisín is the poet-hero of the Fionn or Ossianic cycle of Irish tales; Saint Patrick (? d. 493) is the patron saint of Ireland. Many of the Fionn tales depict acrimonious debates between Oisín and St. Patrick on the virtues of Christianity.
4. The Irish scholar and cultural activist Douglas Hyde (1860–1949) was one of the founders and the first president of the Gaelic League. Father Patrick S. Dinneen (1860–1934) was an Irish writer and scholar, Peter MacGinley (Peadar Mac Fhionnghaile, 1857–1940) an Irish writer.
The competition was held at the 1901 Oireachtas, the annual festival of the Gaelic League, on 28–31 May 1901. The United Irishman noted on 18 May 1901 that “The competition for the One-Act Drama has brought forth ten competitors, which is certainly encouraging, considering the difficulty which the Literary Theatre has experienced during the last three years in obtaining a suitable play in Irish” (1). Yeats’s lack of knowledge about the winner is understandable, as on 8 June 1901 The United Irishman noted only that the entry from County Cork “came out in the front rank” (1), without providing either author or title. However, The Freeman’s Journal for 31 May 1901 reported that the competition was won by “Miss Minnie Sheehy, Clonakilty, Co. Cork,” with a “special prize” to “D. O’Connell, Mill street, Co. Cork”: “This competition was a distinct success. Out of ten, four were well qualified to obtain a prize, and some of the pieces sent in were fairly suited for stage production. The language, on the whole, was good. With practise the four names put forward on the list would do very well” (6). Neither play was apparently published.
5. Along with his brother, the Irish actor Frank J. Fay (1870–1931), the Irish actor and producer W. G. Fay (1872–1947) had founded an amateur dramatic company, eventually called the Ormond Dramatic Society. The Fays joined forces with the Daughters of Erin (Inghinidhe na hÉireann), a nationalist political and cultural organization founded in 1900 by Maud Gonne (1866–1953), an Irish nationalist and Yeats’s beloved, to produce An Tobar Draoidheachta (The Enchanted Well) by Patrick S. Dinneen in 1900 and Eilis agus an Bhean Déirce (Lizzie and the Beggarwoman) by Peter MacGinley in Dublin on 27 August 1901 (a possible earlier production outside of Dublin is untraced). Macroom is in County Cork, Letterkenny in County Donegal.
6. The conversation with Death by the Irish poet Anthony Raftery (Antoine Raiftearí, 1779–1835) occurs in his poem “Vision”; Yeats is misremembering his “Argument with Whiskey.” Both poems are discussed by Lady Gregory in “The Poet Raftery,” published in Argosy for January 1901 and later revised for her Poets and Dreamers (London: John Murray, 1903). A feis is a festival.
7. The Claddagh was an Irish-speaking enclave in Galway.
8. Sir Frank Robert Benson (1858–1939) was an English actor and manager.
9. The Deliverance of Red Hugh by the Irish writer Alice Milligan (1866–1953) was first produced in Dublin by the Ormond Dramatic Society for the Daughters of Erin on 27 August 1901. Tadgh Saor (Tadgh the Smith) by the Irish writer Father Peter O’Leary(An tAthair Peader Ó Laoghaire, 1839–1920) was first produced in Macroom on 13 May 1900.
10. Dion Boucicault (1820–90), Irish actor and playwright; Henry Arthur Jones (1851–1929) and Sydney Grundy (1848–1914), English playwrights. The Táin Bó Cuailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley) is the central saga of the Ulster cycle of heroic tales.
11. Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin, a play about Raftery, was included in this issue of Samhain with a translation by Lady Gregory as The Twisting of the Rope.Diarmuid and Grania was a collaboration between Yeats and George Moore. Both were first produced by the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin on 21 October 1901.
12. Yeats is quoting from a letter from his father, the Irish painter John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), on 27 July 1901. A fragment of this letter is included in J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922, edited by Joseph Hone (New York: Dutton, 1946), 67 (misdated 27 October 1901); and the letter is also quoted from in CL3 86n1. Underwoods (1640) is a collection of poems by the English writer Ben Jonson (1572–1637); Yeats presumably means to refer to his Timber: or, Discoveries (1640), a commonplace book. Although Jonson does not directly quote Shakespeare, he does describe his “gentle expressions: wherein he flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d. . . .” There are several apocryphal accounts of Shakespeare’s conversation, most notably in The History of the Worthies of England (1662) by the English writer Thomas Fuller (1608–61), which describes but does not actually quote conversations between Shakespeare and Jonson. “Eliza” is Elizabeth I (1533–1603), queen of England from 1558.
13. A Daughter of Erin, a comedy in four acts by Miss Le Fanu Robertson, produced at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, on 19 August 1901, and the subject of a long and favorable review in the Irish Times for 20 August 1901.
14. The portrait (of “Miss B. Robertson”) was published in The Figaro and Irish Gentlewoman for 24 August 1901, the journal noting the “signal success” of A Daughter of Erin (575).
15. The Fenians was an Irish nationalist society, formed in 1858 and responsible for the uprising of 1865. Although the movement had all but disappeared by 1885, its principles were adopted by the Sinn Féin party at the turn of the century.
16. Jeremiah J. Callanan (1795–1829), Irish poet and translator.
17. By the 1870s, there was a growing protest that the reforms of Alexander II (1818–81) had not sufficiently improved the conditions of the common people of Russia.
18. In the Bible, Moses kills an Egyptian who had murdered a Hebrew.
19. A cromlech is a prehistoric stone structure consisting of a large flat stone resting on three or more horizontal stones; in many parts of Ireland cromlechs are knows as “beds” of Diarmaid and Gréinne, where they are supposed to have spent a night while in flight from Fionn. This issue of Samhain included “The Legend of Diarmuid and Grania,” a summary of the story by Lady Gregory (16–19).
20. Tara, a hill in County Meath, is the ancient seat of the High Kings of Ireland; Ben Bulben is a mountain in County Sligo.
21. Yeats refers to attacks on his The Countess Cathleen (“heresy”) and George Moore’s The Bending of the Bough (“sedition”).
1. Yeats refers to “The Lay of Diarmaid” in J. F. Campbell, Superstitions of the West Highlands & Islands of Scotland (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1900); and Kuno Meyer’s “Finn and Grainne,” Zeitschrift für Keltische Philologie 1.3 (1897): 458–61. Most versions of the story treat Gráinne rather more favorably that did Yeats and Moore. In particular, only one of the forty-one extant manuscripts of the story has the ending adopted in the play, with Gráinne willingly returning to Fionn. Both the oldest and the second oldest manuscripts have Gráinne exhorting her children to wreak vengeance on Fionn.
2. Yeats has overlooked the production earlier in 1901 of Eilis agus an Bhean Déirce (Lizzie and the Beggarwoman) by Peter MacGinley.
3. Founded in 1900, the Cumann na nGaedheal (Society of the Gaels) was a radical political and cultural organization and the precursor of the Sinn Féin party.
4. George W. Russell (AE, 1867–1935), Irish writer and social reformer; James H. Cousins (1873–1956), Irish writer; and Frederick Ryan (1876–1913), Irish journalist and playwright.
5. The French actor and manager André Antoine (1858–1943) founded the Théâtre Libre in Paris in 1887.
6. The Daughters of Erin sponsored the first public performance of AE’s Deirdre and the first performance of Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan on 2 April 1902 by W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Society in St. Teresa’s Hall in Dublin.
7. Maud Gonne played the title role in the 2 April 1902 production of The Countess Cathleen.
8. Yeats saw the production of Racine’s Phèdre with the French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) and the French actor Édouard De Max (1869–1925) in London on 20 June 1902.
9. Apparently derived from Goethe’s “the Arts also produce much out of themselves, and . . . add much where Nature fails in perfection, in that they possess beauty in themselves,” in Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, translated by Bailey Saunders (New York and London: Macmillan, 1893), 173.
10. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth (performed 1606, printed 1623), Banquo refers to the “procreant cradle” (I.6.8) of a martlet.
11. Yeats was to lecture in London on “The Future of Irish Drama” on 7 February 1903 (CL3 xxi).
12. Yeats is quoting from the “Notes and Comments” by the Irish writer and historian Standish O’Grady (1846–1928) in the All Ireland Review for 12 April 1902: 84 (correctly “leave the heroic cycles alone and don’t bring them down to the crowd . . .”).
13. “The Dramatic Treatment of Heroic Literature” by AE was published in The United Irishman for 3 May 1902. AE argued that “it is possible we may yet hear on the stage, not merely the mimicry of human speech, but the old forgotten music which was heard in the duns of kings, which made the revellers grow silent and great warriors to bow low their faces in their hands” (3). A portion of AE’s essay with an added footnote by Yeats was reprinted in this issue of Samhain (11–13) as well as in the All Ireland Review for 1 November 1902 (576–77).
14. Late in 1900, Yeats began a series of recitals in which poetry was chanted by the English actress Florence Farr (1860–1917) to the accompaniment of musical notes. In 1901 the English musician Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) constructed for the experiments a psaltery, a lyre-shaped instrument of twenty-six strings; this was first used in public at Yeats’s lecture on “Speaking to Musical Notes” in London on 10 June 1902.
15. Douglas Hyde’s An Pósadh (The Marriage) was first produced at the Connacht Feis, Galway, on 20–21 August 1902.
16. Hyde’s An Tincéir agus an tSidheóg (The Tinker and the Fairy) was privately performed for delegates to the Oireachtas (the annual festival sponsored by the Gaelic League) in George Moore’s garden on 19 May 1902.
17. From the “Proverbs of Hell” in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790–93): “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”
18. In The Tinker and the Fairy, the first kiss saves the fairy from death; the second (and third) looks forward to their anticipated marriage. When at the end of the play the fairy returns to her realm, the tinker turns to his bottle for consolation.
19. Not exactly. In Tribulat Bonhomet (1887) by the French writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89), the title character enjoys killing swans so that he can hear their dying song. Villiers invented other anecdotes about Bonhomet which were never published; some of these were collected by his future biographer (a distant cousin). Yeats’s source was most likely Lady Mary Loyd’s Villiers de l’Isle Adam: His Life and Works from the French of Vicomte Robert du Pontavice de Heussey (London: William Heinemann, 1894), in which the following anecdote is recounted: “Then, as a pendant to Bonhomet the slayer of swans, there was Bonhomet the ermine-hunter, who, having read that one of these immaculate creatures dies as soon as a stain marks its snowy whiteness, hides himself with a wonderful silent gun, charged with ink, and thus exterminates several dozen!” (230). Yeats recalls his hybrid version in “Coole and Ballylee, 1931,” describing a “mounting swan” as “So arrogantly pure, a child might think / It can be murdered with a spot of ink” (P 248). Whether Yeats was confused or simply decided to substitute the symbolic swan for the ermine is an open question.
20. An Tobar Draoidheachta (The Enchanted Well) by Father Patrick S. Dinneen was performed at the Oireachtas in Dublin, 20–22 May 1901. Yeats had discussed Father Dinneen’s Creideamh agus Gorta (Faith and Famine) in the 1901 Samhain.
21. Fionn mac Cumhaill is the hero of the Fionn or Ossianic cycle of heroic tales. In “The Coming of Finn” in Gods and Fighting Men (London: John Murray, 1904), Lady Gregory describes one part of Fionn’s early training: “they would leave him in a field, and hares along with him, and would bid him not to let the hares quit the field, but to keep before them whichever way they would go . . .” (160).
22. The unpublished play by Father Peter O’Leary is untraced. His La an Amadán (Fool’s Day) was also apparently not published.
23. As noted in “ ‘Hugh Roe O’Donnell’ at Sheestown” in The Kilkenny Journal for 20 August 1902, “Close on two thousand persons were present at the production of Mr Standish O’Grady’s Irish Historical play, ‘Hugh Roe O’Donnell,’ at Sheestown, on the demesne attached to the residence of Capt the Hon Otway Cuffe, Vice-President of the Kilkenny Branch of the Gaelic League, on Friday night [15 August 1902].” See also “ ‘Hugh Roe O’Donnell’: An Irish Historical Masque,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 8.4 (October 1902) by Francis Joseph Bigger (who took part in the production). Bigger notes that the play was “printed in Belfast for private circulation” (172). The play climaxes with the installation of Hugh Roe O’Donnell (ca. 1571–1602) as chief of the O’Donnells in May 1592.
24. Douglas Hyde’s play was An Naomh ar Iarraidh; also included was a translation by Lady Gregory, as The Lost Saint (14–23).
25. In a note to his poem “Baile and Aillinn” in The Monthly Review for July 1902, Yeats described Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (London: John Murray, 1902), to which he had contributed a Preface, as “the most important book that has come out of Ireland in my time.”
26. Yeats refers to Jedediah Cleishbotham, the supposed author of framing sections in several novels by Sir Walter Scott.
27. Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht was published by T. Fisher Unwin (London) in 1893.
28. Hyde’s Dráma Breite Críosta, translated by Lady Gregory as The Nativity, was performed at the Ursuline Convent in Sligo on 8 December 1903. The Sligo Champion noted on 19 December 1903 that “if the presentation of the play was good, the staging of it by those responsible for that department was perfect” (1). The play was not produced at the Abbey Theatre until 5 January 1911.
29. Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914), Provençal poet.
30. Hyde’s Beside the Fire: a Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories was published by D. Nutt (London) in 1890.
31. Yeats refers to the so-called “Genesis Manuscript” (ca. 1826–27), an incomplete illustrated manuscript of eleven leaves, now in the Huntington Library.
32. The standard Bible in Irish was the so-called “Bedell Bible,” named after William Bedell (1571–1642), a Church of Ireland Bishop who in 1634 called for the completion of the project to produce an Irish Bible, which had been authorized by Elizabeth I. The work was completed in 1640 but not published until 1685. The entire Bible was issued for the first time in 1690 as An Bíobla Naomhtha (The Holy Bible).
33. Although Yeats attributed this thought to the French writer and literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69) at least four other times, in fact it is found in Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (London: Strahan, 1863) by the Scottish writer Alexander Smith (1829–67): “And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.” Style itself is defined as “the amalgam and issue of all the mental and moral qualities in a man’s possession, and which bears the same relation to these that light bears to the mingled elements that make up the orb of the sun” (43). Smith’s remarks come in a discussion of the French essayist Montaigne (1533–92), which perhaps explains Yeats’s ascription to another French writer.
34. In the chapter on “Personal Expression” in “The Novel,” included in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (1894), the French novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902) suggests that many novelists “who write very correctly, and who have finally obtained very great literary renown,” nevertheless have the “misfortune to be without any individual expression, and that is enough to make them forever commonplace.” Zola argues that “Personal expression does not necessarily include a perfect form. You can write badly, incorrectly, like the devil, and yet, with it all, retain a true originality of expression.” He notes that like Stendhal, Balzac “has been accused of writing badly” but concludes that “Whatever may be his faults, his is a grand style.”
35. In “The Dramatic Treatment of Irish Literature,” published in The United Irishman for 3 May 1902, AE noted that “Men too often forget in this age of printed books, that literature is, after all, only an ineffectual record of speech. The literary man has gone into strange byways through long contemplation of books, and he writes with elaboration what could never be spoken, and he loses that power of the bards on whom tongues of fire had descended, who were masters of the magic of utterance, whose thoughts were not meant to be silently absorbed from the lifeless page” (3).
36. A letter from Edward Martyn about the 2 April 1902 productions of AE’s Deirdre and Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan had been published in The United Irishman for 19 April 1902. Martyn regretted the lack of “more competent acting and stage management” and was particularly critical of W. G. Fay’s performance as Peter Gillane in Yeats’s play; he ended by hoping that “with practice, Mr. Fay’s company will improve and be able to grapple with the more advanced forms of modern drama” (1). Yeats responded with a letter in The United Irishman for 26 April 1902, accusing Martyn of preferring “a form of drama that is essentially modern, that needs for its production actors of what is called the ‘natural school,’ the dominant school of the modern stage” (CL3 178).
37. By the 1870s, there was a growing protest that the reforms of Alexander II (1818–81) had not sufficiently improved the conditions of the common people of Russia.
1. The first series of plays were offered on 12–14 February 1903. Hyde played the part of Raftery in his An Pósadh (The Marriage). Also performed was Aodh ó Néill (Hugh O’Neill, 1902), by the Irish writer Pádraig ó Séaghdha (1855–1928). (Hugh O’Neill [1550–1616], inaugurated as the O’Neill in 1595, was one of the leaders of the Irish forces at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601.) Tobar Draoidheachta (The Enchanted Well) by Father Patrick S. Dinneen was presented at the Rotunda on 14 May 1902, as part of the Oireachtas, the annual festival sponsored by the Gaelic League; it was accompanied by Hyde’s An Pósadh, offered by the Ballaghadereen Branch of the Gaelic League.
2. Meadhbh (Maeve) by Father Peter O’Leary (1839–1920) was apparently never published.
3. Douglas Hyde’s An Cleamhnas (The Matchmaking) was performed at the Galway Feis on 20 August 1903. Yeats had missed the production on 19 August 1903 of The Rent-Day by E. L. O’Toole, described by the Galway Observer for 22 August 1903 as “an admirable performance, which would deserve special praise” (3). The play was apparently never published.
4. Douglas Hyde’s An Naomh ar Iarraidh (The Lost Saint) was performed by children of classes of the Daughters of Erin on 29–30 January 1903. The Saxon Shillin’ by the Irish writer Padraic Colum (1881–1972) was revived by the Daughters of Erin at the Banba Hall in Dublin on 15 May 1903. The play about the Royal Visit of Edward VII in July 1903 was Joseph Ryan’s A Twinkle in Ireland’s Eye.
5. That is, The Laying of the Foundations.
6. Arthur Bingham Walkley (1855–1926) was the drama critic for The Times (London). Yeats reprinted his commentary on the productions, “The Irish National Theatre” (The Times, 8 May 1903), in this issue of Samhain.
7. The acting area of the Abbey stage was ca. 20 feet by 15 feet.
8. Yeats had met the Irish playwright John Millington Synge (1871–1909) in Paris in 1896, and urged him to concentrate his attention on Irish materials.
9. The play is based on the early Irish tale The Great Visitation to Guaire, in which Guaire, King of Connacht, is visited by 150 poets, headed by Seanchan the Chief Poet. Guaire is a market town in County Galway.
10. The play by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was John Bull’s Other Island (1904). The character of Broadbent would have required a trained English actor.
11. Hyde’s “The Oireachtas Ode” was published in The United Irishman for 14 June 1902: 3.
12. Hanrahan is the main character in Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope). The other play referred to is An Naomh ar Iarraidh.
13. This issue of Samhain included Hyde’s Teach na mBocht, translated by Lady Gregory as The Poorhouse, and Synge’s Riders to the Sea.
1. An earlier version of this essay was published under the same title in The United Irishman for 4 April 1903.
2. In “The Best Men of the Fianna” in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men (London: John Murray, 1904), Finn offers advice to the Son of Lugaidh: “If you have a mind to be a good champion, be quiet in a great man’s house . . .” (184).
3. Although Yeats attributed this thought to the French writer and literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69) at least four other times, in fact it is found in Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (London: Strahan, 1863) by the Scottish writer Alexander Smith (1829–67): “And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.” Style itself is defined as “the amalgam and issue of all the mental and moral qualities in a man’s possession, and which bears the same relation to these that light bears to the mingled elements that make up the orb of the sun” (43). Smith’s remarks come in a discussion of the French essayist Montaigne (1533–92), which perhaps explains Yeats’s ascription to another French writer.
4. Falstaff is a character in several plays by Shakespeare.
1. In “Mr. Yeats and Theatre Reform,” published in The Leader 6.5 (28 March 1903), “Chanel” (Arthur Clery) argued that when Yeats “began his lecture on dramatic reform by saying he did not care whether a play were moral or immoral, provided it were not vulgar, and preached the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake, one might fairly say that he straightway put himself out of court as a writer of ‘morality’ plays, unless that word is to be wrenched out of its proper meaning”(72).
In the 1903 Samhain, this essay (untitled) was the second section of “The Reform of the Theatre”; it was first published in this format in the 1908 Collected Works.
2. Quotation untraced. Yeats had met the Belgian poet émile Verhaeren (1855–1916) in late 1898 or early 1899 in London. Yeats’s main source of knowledge of Verhaeren was the English teacher, critic, and translator Osman Edwards (1864–1936), whose “émile Verhaeren” had appeared in the November 1896 issue of The Savoy (65–76), preceding Yeats’s “The Tables of the Law.”
3. Mice and Men: A Romantic Comedy in Four Acts by the American playwright Madeleine Lucette Ryley (1868–1934) was performed by the Forbes-Roberston Company at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on 1–6 June 1903. The play had first been produced at the Lyric Theatre in London, 27 January 1902–4 February 1903. The reviewer for The Times (London) objected to the improbability of the plot but nevertheless described the work as “a very wholesome entertainment” and “as pretty a picture of girlhood as the stage can show” (28 January 1902: 8). Likewise, the critic of The Athenaeum concluded that although the play was “slight to fragility,” it was “pleasing and idyllic” (1 February 1902: 156).
4. Parzival is a German Grail romance by Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220). Yeats owned the translation by Jessie L. Weston, Parzival: A Knightly Epic (London: D. Nutt, 1894). Thuringia is a region in central Germany. According to legend, when St. Elizabeth of Thuringia (1207–31) was surprised by her husband as she was on a secret errand of mercy, the bread she was trying to conceal was turned to roses.
5. Untraced. Connacht is a province in the west of Ireland.
1. This essay was first published in The United Irishman for 10 October 1903. It was revised and added to the 1903 Samhain in the Collected Works (1908). The newspaper version is reprinted at CL3 439–41 but with the title omitted.
Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen was produced by the Irish National Theatre Society at the Molesworth Hall in Dublin on 8 October 1903. The play was attacked by various newspapers for presenting an unflattering picture of Irish womanhood. The United Irishman for 8 November 1903, for instance, claimed that “To take the Widow of Ephesus and rechristen her Mrs. Burke, and relabel Ephesus Wicklow, is not a brilliant thing.” Moreover, Synge is “as utterly a stranger to the Irish character as any Englishman who has yet dissected us for the enlightenment of his countrymen” (1).
2. In 1892 Yeats was involved in a dispute with the Irish nationalist Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903) over control of a series of books to be called the “New Irish Library.” Duffy eventually prevailed.
3. The Spirit of the Nation was a collection of mainly patriotic poems and ballads collected from The Nation, first published in 1843; a second part was issued in 1844 and an enlarged edition in 1845. By 1870 the collection was in its fiftieth printing.
4. Michael Doheny (1805–63), Irish poet and nationalist. Yeats refers to “A Cuisle Gael Mo Chroidhe” (“Bright Pulse of My Heart”), written in the mountains after the collapse of the 1848 Rebellion. “On his keeping” is an Irish expression for someone being hunted as a fugitive, in this instance by the English.
5. John 3:8.
6. I Cor. 13:13.
1. “An Irish National Theatre,” published in The Irish Daily Independent and Nation for 8 October 1903. The editorial writer objected to “the perversion of the Society’s avowed aims” and “these unwholesome productions” (4).
Yeats’s essay was first published in The United Irishman for 17 October 1903. It was revised and added to the 1903 Samhain in the Collected Works (1908). The newspaper version is reprinted at CL3 445–49 but with the title omitted.
2. Falstaff is a character in several plays by Shakespeare, whose Antony and Cleopatra follows closely the account by the Greek historian Plutarch (A.D. ?46–120), in the version by Sir Thomas North (?1535–?1601), published in 1595. In Greek mythology, Pandora had been warned by the gods not to open a box they gave her; when she disobeyed and opened it, the world was subjected to numerous evils. The Golden Treasury of Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861) by Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–97) was a very popular anthology.
3. In The Tripartite Life of Patrick, written in Irish probably in the eleventh century, St. Patrick becomes enraged when he learns that his sister, Lupait, was unchaste and had become pregnant. He kills her by driving his chariot over her three times.
4. In Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916), Yeats recalled a remark by the Irish patriot John O’Leary (1830–1907): “ ‘Never has there been a cause so bad’, he would say, ‘that it has not been defended by good men for good reasons’ ” (Au 100).
5. In Yeats’s The King’s Threshold, Seanchan asks “When did the poets promise safety, King?” (Pl 147).
6. Untraced.
7. In the 1903 Samhain (see p. 25).
8. Prince Pyotr Alexeievitch Kropotkin (1842–1921) and Sergius Stepniak (1852–95), Russian revolutionaries. Both fled Russia and settled in London. Yeats recalled meeting Kropotkin at the home of William Morris (Au 131); he probably also knew Stepniak, as his portrait was painted by his father, John Butler Yeats (1839–1922).
1. After Yeats’s curtain speech at the performance of John Millington Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen on 20 October 1903, Annie E. F. Horniman (1860–1937), an Englishwoman of some wealth and a considerable interest in the theatre (and in Yeats), promised Yeats “I will find you a theatre” (Au 415). By January 1904, negotiations had begun to acquire leases on the Hall of the Mechanics’ Institute in Abbey Street and on the old City Morgue, adjoining in Marlborough Street. The formal offer was made in a letter of 4 April 1904, which was reprinted in this issue of Samhain. Although Horniman planned to spend £1,600 on the renovations, the final cost was almost £3,000, plus annual leasing costs of £170.
2. Sarah Henrietta Purser (1848–1943) was an Irish painter; in 1903 she founded an Irish stained-glass industry, An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass). Youghal is a town in County Cork. John Butler Yeats produced portraits of Annie Horniman, W. G. Fay, Frank Fay, Douglas Hyde, AE, and the Irish actress Mary Walker (“Máire Nic Shiúbhlaigh,” d. 1958). Yeats’s portrait, however, was by a French artist, Madame Troncy (he disliked it, and it was removed in 1906).
3. Robert Gregory (1881–1918), Lady Gregory’s son, had studied at the Slade School of Art in London. “Honor Lavelle” was the stage name of the Irish actress Helen S. Laird (1874–1957).
4. Probably the English artist Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866–1931).
5. Biblical drama was popular in England from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Yeats is distinguishing between plays which deal with Gospel events (Mystery Plays) and those which concern the lives of the saints (Miracle Plays). Racine’s plays performed by the girls at the convent school of Saint-Cyr were Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691).
6. From “St. Luke the Painter,” part of the sonnet sequence “The House of Life” by the English artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82).
7. Standish James O’Grady was quoting from the Preface to The Raven and Other Poems (1845) by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49).
8. The objections to the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre were heard on 4 August 1904. Nevertheless, the patent was granted on 20 August, with the restrictions mentioned as well as others (e.g., the theatre could not be enlarged beyond its present capacity). Yeats had seen the production of Everyman, a morality play of ca. 1509–19, by the Elizabethan Stage Society in London on 17 March 1902; the Dublin production, on 24–29 October 1902, took place in the large Round Room of the Rotunda.
9. The Abbey had a total of 562 seats: 186 in the pit, 178 in the stalls, and 198 in the balcony.
10. The Independent Theatre Society had been formed in London in 1890; it came to an end in December 1898 (Yeats was never very adept at mathematics). L’Intruse (The Intruder), a one-act play about death by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), was first performed in Paris at the Théâtre d’Art on 21 May 1891 and in London at the Haymarket Theatre on 27 January 1892.
11. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus dates from ca. 430–425 B.C.
12. After the political satire in Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register for 1736 (1737) by the English writer Henry Fielding (1707–54), the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), introduced the Licensing Act of 1737. The Lord Chamberlain became licenser of theatres in London and Westminster and in other places of residence of the sovereign: penalties were to be imposed on the performance for hire anywhere in Great Britain of plays not licensed by him, and it was required that a copy of every new play proposed to be performed should be sent to him for approval.
13. The Sign of the Cross by the English actor and writer Wilson Barrett (1846–1904) was performed in London from 4 January 1896 to 30 January 1897.
14. Douglas Hyde’s Dráma Breite Críosta, translated by Lady Gregory as The Nativity, was performed at the Ursuline Convent in Sligo on 8 December 1903. The Sligo Champion noted on 19 December 1903 that “if the presentation of the play was good, the staging of it by those responsible for that department was perfect” (1). The play was not produced at the Abbey Theatre until 5 January 1911.
15. Fionn mac Cumhaill is the hero of the Ossianic cycle of Irish heroic tales and the father of Oisín; Patrick is St. Patrick.
16. John Milton’s Samson Agonistes was published in 1671. In Greek mythology Heracles (Hercules in Roman mythology) is renowned for his strength.
17. The English poet is untraced. Jack and the Beanstalk is an English folktale.
18. Gírle Guairle (Hurly Burly, 1904) by Father Patrick S. Dinneen.
19. The play is untraced and apparently unpublished.
20. Seaghán na Scuab (Sean of the Brushes) by the Irish writer Tomás O hAodha (1866–1935) was performed at the Oireachtas on 1 and 6 August 1904. The United Irishman for 20 August 1904 claimed that “On all sides it is conceded that ‘Seaghan na Sguab’ is the best Irish drama we have had yet . . .” (1), explaining in its issue for 6 August 1904 that the play was “founded upon the old story of the broom-maker from Cork who became unexpectedly Mayor of Limerick” (1).
21. An Doctúir (The Doctor) by Seamus O’Beirne was performed at the Oireachtas on 1 and 6 August 1904.
22. The Connacht Feis was held in Galway on 17–19 August 1904. The play performed was An Deoraidhe (The Exile, 1905) by E. L. O’Toole. The Galway Observer for 20 August 1904 noted that the “Irish play, ‘The Exile,’ by the Galway Gaelic Leaguers, evoked much enthusiasm, the evils of emigration being most effectively presented in the piece” (3).
23. Slightly misquoted from the version in Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish by Lady Gregory Including Nine Plays by Douglas Hyde (Dublin: Hodges Figgis; London: John Murray, 1903), 240–41. A less accurate text had also been included in the 1903 Samhain.
24. In the Táin Bó Cuailgne, Mebd (Maeve), Queen of Connacht, steals a bull from the Ulstermen in order to have a bull to rival that of her husband, Ailill. Cruachan was the ancient capital of Connacht.
25. Yeats found Goethe’s remark in Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, translated by Bailey Saunders (New York and London: Macmillan, 1893), 59. Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, ?1493–1541) was a Swiss alchemist and physician. Although Yeats quoted this sentence in several contexts, it remains untraced.
26. The plays produced on 26 March 1904 at the Royalty in London were Synge’s Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, Padraic Colum’s Broken Soil, and Yeats’s The King’s Threshold and The Pot of Broth. Although the reviews were generally favorable, Yeats noted in a letter of 31 March [1904] that “A good many of the critics complain that my King’s Threshold lacks action . . .” (CL3 561).
27. Lady Gregory’s plays were Kincora and Hyacinth Halvey.
28. Sigrid by the Irish barrister and writer W. Kingsley Tarpey (1858–1911) had been approved for performance on 12 March 1904 while Yeats was returning from his American lecture tour; in the event, it was never produced at the Abbey Theatre. His Windmills had been performed by the Stage Society in London on 16–17 June 1901. The play by the Irish playwright William Boyle (1853–1922) was The Building Fund.
29. The St. Louis World’s Fair, billed as “The Greatest of Exhibitions,” was held from 30 April to 1 December 1904. Augustus Thomas (1857–1934), a playwright and former St. Louis journalist, had suggested to Yeats that any performances by the Irish National Theatre Society would be overshadowed by the more popular attractions of the fair (CL3 499n1).
30. Margaret Wycherley (1884–1956) was an American actress.
31. The Duchess of Malfi by the English dramatist John Webster (ca. 1578–ca. 1632) was written 1612/1613 and published in 1623.
32. Sir Walter Ralegh (?1554–1618), English courtier, explorer, and writer; and Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), English courtier, soldier, and poet.
1. Yeats presumably refers to the controversy about the bigotry of the press between AE and David Patrick Moran (1871–1936), editor of The Leader, which began with an article by AE in the September 1904 issue of Dana and continued in The Leader until 15 October 1904. In the Bible, Martha and Mary are sisters of Lazarus; Martha is at first uncertain about the nature of Christ’s divinity.
2. Yeats refers to “Ethics and Economics” by “Ċ,” published in The Leader for 8 October 1904 (104–6). The slight misquotation is from p. 105.
3. The Irish orator and barrister John Francis Taylor (1850–1902) was described by Yeats in Reveries Over Childhood and Youth as “an obscure great orator” (Au 101), noting in a later draft of his Autobiographies that Talyor “knew nothing of poetry or of painting, though he seemed to know by heart whole plays of Shakespeare and all the more famous passages in Milton, and was deeply read in eighteenth-century literature. He understood alone eloquence, an impassioned pleading. He sometimes gave me an impression of insanity” (Mem 53). Taylor’s speech comparing the Irish to the Jews and the English to the Egyptians is discussed at some length in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).
On 11 May 1899, T. P. Gill (1858–1931), the editor of the Dublin Daily Express, gave a dinner in honor of the Irish Literary Theatre. In Dramatis Personae, Yeats recalled that in his speech Taylor suggested that William O’Brien had made “the sacrifice of Mr. Yeats’ Countess Cathleen, damning his soul for his country” (Au 314).
4. Although Yeats told the American lawyer and patron of the arts John Quinn (1870–1924) on 15 April 1904 that Lady Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon “goes into rehearsal almost at once” and again on 25 April 1904 that it would be produced “next month” (CL3 580, 586), in fact it was not performed until 9 March 1907. The untraced criticism must have been based on the text published in The Gael (New York) in November 1903.
5. In “Il conte di Carmagnola. Tragedia di Alessandro Mazoni. Milano,” first published in Über Kunst und Altertum (September 1820), Goethe stated that “for the poet no person is historical, it is his pleasure to create his moral world and for this purpose he renders to certain persons in history the honour of lending their names to his creations.”
6. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is based on Sir John Oldcastle (d. 1417), a leader of the Lollards, an heretical sect that adopted the ideas of John Wycliffe (ca. 1320–84).
7. The Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed (d. ?1580) and others was a major source for Shakespeare’s History Plays. Bolingbroke became King Henry IV after deposing Richard II. The quotation is untraced. Yeats also described Richard II as “ ‘too friendly’ to his friends” in “At Stratford-on-Avon,” first published in The Speaker (11 and 18 May 1901) and included in a shortened form in Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903).
8. See Four Old Irish Songs of Summer & Winter, edited by Kuno Meyer (London: David Nutt, 1903); the poems are sometimes ascribed to Fionn. Although Chaucer is not especially known for his references to trees, Yeats is perhaps thinking of the short catalogue of trees in The Knight’s Tale.
9. The “old cabalistic writer” has not been traced. In his Journal for 9 February 1909, Yeats referred to “that fall into the circumference the mystics talk of” (Au 355); and in “Art and Ideas,” first published in The New Weekly (20 and 27 June 1914) and included in Essays (London: Macmillan, 1924), he cited “the fall of man into his own circumference.” It is a common idea in mystical tradition that man’s loss of unity with God moves him from the center to the circumference, God being a circle whose center is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere. The Blake quotation is from his Public Address (1809–10): “Princes appear to me to be Fools Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools they seem to me to be something Else beside Human Life.”
10. In Shakespeare’s King Richard III (performed 1591, printed 1597), Richmond defeats Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth and becomes King Henry VII. Cervantes’s Don Quixote was published in parts in 1605 and 1615.
11. Prophecies offered in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue (40 B.C.). Jason and the Argonauts sailed in search of the Golden Fleece; Troy was sacked by the Greeks at the end of the Trojan War.
12. Ludovico Arisoto (1474–1533) was an Italian poet, best known for his Orlando Furioso (1516; revised 1532). In 1522 he was commissioned to suppress an insurrection in the mountain district of Garfagnana; he succeeded and remained as governor of the province for three years.
13. References to Shakespeare’s Macbeth (performed 1606; published 1623), Antony and Cleopatra (1623), and Coriolanus (1623).
14. “ego absolve te” (“I absolve thee”), said by the priest in the Roman Catholic Church rite of penance, signifying and enacting the forgiveness of sins by God.
15. In Antony and Cleopatra, the dying Antony is brought to the monument in which Cleopatra has taken refuge and dies in her arms. Explorations (1962) replaces Yeats’s “tower” with “monument.” At the end of Coriolanus, the title character is publicly killed by Aufidius. In the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai.
16. Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London, his father was the Italian patriot Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854). Swift (1667–1745) was born in Ireland but spent considerable time in England, and only a relatively small portion of his work is directly connected with Irish matters.
17. St. Columbanus (?543–615) was born in Leinster but left Ireland ca.590. His Sermon V begins “Oh human life, feeble and mortal, how many have you deceived, beguiled, and blinded! While you fly, you are nothing, while you are seen, you are a shadow, while you arise, you are but smoke. . . . You are the roadway of mortals, not their life, beginning from sin, enduring up till death . . . you have allotted all your travelers to death.”
18. Vathek, an Arabian Tale by the English writer William Beckford (1759–1844) was written in French but translated with the author’s assistance by Samuel Henley and published in English in 1786.
19. The Irish scholar Edward Dowden (1843–1913) held the Chair of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin from 1867 until his death. On 5 September 1871, Dowden sent Whitman a letter telling him that he “will name some of your friends on this side of the water whom I know myself.” A letter from Whitman to Dowden on 18 January 1872 refers to a group of letters from these people, apparently sent by Dowden. There were ten admirers, including Dowden; in addition to him and to Yeats’s father, at least two others were Irish.
20. James Russell Lowell (1819–91), American poet and essayist.
21. “Highland Mary” by Robert Burns was first published in 1799, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (often considered by others one of his best poems) in 1786.
22. Chaucer was described as the “father of English poetry” in the Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) by John Dryden and as the “well of English undefyled” in Book IV of The Faerie Queene (1596) by Edmund Spenser.
23. In 1892 Yeats was involved in a dispute with the Irish nationalist Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903) over control of a series of books to be called the “New Irish Library.” Duffy eventually prevailed. Frederick York Powell (1850?1904), Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, lived near the Yeatses in Bedford Park in London.
24. The English poet Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), immensely popular in his own time.
25. Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Edmund Burke were all born in Ireland but spent most of their lives in England.
26. In 1898 Yeats engaged in a debate with the Irish essayist “John Eglinton” (William Kirkpatrick Magee, 1868–1961), initiated by Eglinton’s “What Should be the Subjects of a National Drama?”, published in the Dublin Daily Express for 18 September 1898. Eglinton rejected Irish myth and saga as proper subjects for a national school of drama.
27. Possibly “The Development of the French Drama,” International Quarterly 7 (March-June 1903): 14–31, by the American writer and critic Brander Matthews (1852–1929). Although Matthews does not comment on Phèdre, he discusses Andromaque and quotes the French critic Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) on the emergence of drama under Louis XIV: “French tragedy appeared, as Taine has told us, ‘when a noble and well-regulated monarchy, under Louis XIV., established the empire of decorum, the life of the court, the pomp and circumstance of society, and the elegant domestic phases of aristocracy’; and French tragedy could not but disappear ‘when the social rule of nobles and the manners of the antechamber were abolished by the Revolution’ ” (25–26).
28. Salammbô (1862) by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) is set after the first Punic War and deals with the revolt against Carthage by its unpaid mercenary army. The title character, as a priestess, is the daughter of the leader of Carthage. In a letter to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve on 23–24 December 1892, Flaubert argued that no one could say whether Salammbô was portrayed realistically because it is impossible to get to know an Oriental woman since one cannot spend time in her company.
29. Along with the Ibsen, the Norwegian political leader and writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) was primarily responsible for the rise of Norwegian drama.
30. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was published in 1820. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas plucks the Golden Bough before beginning his journey to the Underworld; the scene is depicted in a famous painting by the English artist J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851).
31. In Book I of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Lucifer (Satan) rouses the spirits of the other defeated rebellious angels. The “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” by the French poet François Villon (?1431–?1463) is included in Le grand testament (1461). In Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (1623), Timon’s epitaph expresses his hatred of mankind.
1. See pp. 173–75.
2. In his curtain speech after the first production of The King’s Threshold on 8 October 1903, Yeats outlined his plans for the Irish National Theatre Society and argued that it should produce foreign masterpieces as well as Irish plays. Annie E. F. Horniman was sufficiently impressed so as to make her offer of a theatre. Horniman had designed the costumes for the production.
3. Racine’s Phèdre and Andromaque were both first performed in 1677.
4. Les Trente-six situations dramatiques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1895) by Georges Polti (1868–?).
5. A Doll’s House (1879) was first produced in London by the Player’s Club on 22 June 1903.
6. The English writer Sir Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898–1910. Arthur Bingham Walkley was the drama critic for The Times (London). The English drama critic and playwright William Archer (1856–1924) was largely responsible for introducing Ibsen’s plays in England.
7. Not a quotation from A Doll’s House but apparently Yeats’s parody of Ibsen’s style as translated by William Archer.
8. Yeats is most likely referring to Beerbohm’s “Mr. Pinero’s Literary Style,” published in The Saturday Review for 24 October 1903. Beerbohm argued that in realistic drama “the words must be far easier, more colloquial and familiar, than the words of the ordinary writer. . . . The first essential is that the persons must speak in the manner of human beings.” Thus, “whereas in ordinary writing style is the perfect expression of the writer’s self, in plays it is the perfect expression of various selves.” In “Mr Street, Playwright,” published in the Saturday Review for 4 February 1905, Beerbohm replied to Yeats’s remark: “The other day, in an essay about the Irish Literary Theatre, Mr. W. B. Yeats quoted me as saying that no modern play could have style. . . . But, as I was careful to suggest, aptness of phrase and beauty can be smuggled in.”
9. In his Public Address (1809–10), Blake argues that “Nor can an Original Invention Exist without Execution Organized & minutely Delineated & Articulated Either by God or Man.”
10. Falstaff is a character in several plays by Shakespeare.
11. Untraced.
12. Yeats is recalling another passage from Blake’s Public Address: “Princes appear to me to be Fools Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools they seem to me to be something Else beside Human Life.”
13. Ibsen’s Ghosts (published 1881, performed 1882) was first produced by the Independent Theatre Society at the Royalty in London on 13 March 1891.
14. Yeats is quoting from Blake’s Jerusalem (1804–20): “They enquire after Jerusalem, in the regions of the dead / With the voices of dead men, low, scarcely articulate, / And with tears cold on their cheeks they weary repose.” Maeterlinck’s Aglavaine and Sélysette (1896) was produced in London at the Court Theatre on 15, 17–18, 22, and 24–25 November 1904. Yeats had reviewed Alfred Sutro’s 1897 translation of the play in The Bookman (London) for September 1897 (UP2 51–54).
15. Yeats left for an extended lecture tour in America on 4 November 1903, returning on 16 March 1904.
16. As in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1623).
17. From Blake’s Auguries of Innocence (ca. 1804–10), correctly “should doubt.”
18. David Garrick (1717–79) was an English actor and playwright. The first Dublin playhouse constructed after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 was the Smock Alley Theatre in 1662. Yeats refers to its co-founder, John Ogilby (1600–1676), Master of Revels in Ireland.
19. The Way of the World by William Congreve was produced in London on 17–19 April 1904 at the Court Theatre and again on 7–12 November 1904 at the Royalty. Lady Wishfort was played by the American actress Mrs. Theodore Wright (Alice Austin, d. 1922). She had played Mrs. Alving in the first performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts mentioned earlier in this essay.
20. Yeats is quoting from the second speech by Lady Wishfort in act 5, scene 1 of The Way of the World.
21. Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611–60) translated the first three books of the French writer François Rabelais (ca. 1494–ca. 1553).
22. The most popular plays by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) were The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777).
23. Gargantua is the giant hero of a series of popular burlesque romances featuring well-known characters from the Arthurian legends. Rabelais offers his version of the birth, education, and military prowess of the figure in Gargantua (1534–35).
24. In “Stage Management in the Irish National Theatre,” published in Dana for September 1904, George Moore (writing under the pseudonym “Paul Ruttledge,” the main character in Yeats’s Where There is Nothing) criticized the stage management of W. G. Fay in comparison with the “miraculous” stage management of the French actor and manager André Antoine (1858–1943), the founder of the Théâtre Libre in Paris in 1887. The German religious reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) was highly critical of the Catholic Church.
25. This quotation from Antoine is untraced. Yeats perhaps learned of it from Frank J. Fay, who had studied Antoine’s career, or from George Moore, who had been in contact with Antoine in Paris.
26. E. D. A. Morshead’s abridged translation of Aeschylus’s Orestian Trilogy was produced by the Benson Company at the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival in late April-early May 1904; Yeats probably attended the matinée performance on 30 April 1904.
27. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” is the opening of “The Star” in Rhymes for the Nursery (1806) by the English writers Jane Taylor (1783–1824) and Ann Taylor (1782–1866).
28. Late in 1900, Yeats began a series of recitals in which poetry was chanted by the English actress Florence Farr (1869–1917) to the accompaniment of musical notes. In 1901 the English musician Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) constructed for the experiments a psaltery, a lyre-shaped instrument of twenty-six strings; this was first used in public at Yeats’s lecture on “Speaking to Musical Notes” in London on 10 June 1902.
29. Gilbert Murray’s translation of Hippolytus (428 b.c.) by Euripides, with Florence Farr leading the chorus, was first produced at the Lyric Theatre in London on 26 May 1904.
30. Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) was an English actor, producer, author, editor, and stage designer. Yeats had been interested in working with Craig for some years; eventually Craig provided a set of screens for the Abbey Theatre, first used in January 1911.
31. Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) was a Swiss scene designer and theatrical producer. In 1902–1903 he was working on a production of scenes from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde to be performed at the private theatre of the Countess René de Béarn in Paris; this proved too difficult, however, and thus the production on 25 March 1903 consisted of scenes from Robert Schumann’s Manfred and Georges Bizet’s Carmen. For a time he collaborated with the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871–1949), who was experimenting with a new form of stage lighting. Yeats mentions the work of Fortuny in “The Theatre of Beauty,” first published in Harper’s Weekly for 11 November 1911 (LAR 129–33).
1. The site of the productions of the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903.
2. Philip Carr (1874–1957), English drama critic and producer, attempted to revive Elizabethan and Jacobean plays in authentic productions.
3. In his essay “On Beauty” the English writer Francis Bacon (1561–1626) observed that “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” Yeats had referred to this passage in an 1892 review, ascribing it to “the Elizabethan,” and had cited it without ascription in a 1901 essay. He finally cited the correct author in a speech to the Poetry Society of Chicago on 1 March 1914 (UP2 412). It has been argued that Yeats took the reference from Poe’s “Ligeia” (CL2 448n6), but this assertion overlooks the 1892 quotation. Yeats’s first published allusion to Poe is not found until 1898.
4. Lady Gregory’s play was Hyacinth Halvey, William Boyle’s, The Eloquent Dempsy.Padraic Colum revised Broken Soil as The Fiddler’s House, but this was not performed at the Abbey Theatre (it was first produced by the Theatre of Ireland at the Rotunda on 21 March 1907). John Millington Synge’s play was The Playboy of the Western World.
5. A translation of The Well of the Saints by the German critic and translator Dr. Max Meyerfeld (1875–1952) was produced at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on 12 January 1906. A translation of The Shadow of the Glen by the Czech actor and stage manager Karel Mušek (1867–1924) was produced at the Bohemian National Theatre in Prague on 7 February 1906. A translation of Cathleen ni Houlihan by the Irish playwright Tomás Ó Ceallaigh (Father Thomas O’Kelly, 1879–1924) was performed in the Rotunda at the Oireachtas in Dublin on 14 August 1905. The text had been published in five consecutive issues of The United Irishman (11 February-11 March 1905) and in book form in the same year by M. H. Gill & Son, Dublin.
6. This particular maxim is untraced. However, in a volume which Yeats owned, Hjalmar Boyesen’s A History of Norway from the Earliest Times with a New Chapter on the Recent History of Norway by C. F. Keary (London: T. Fisher Unwin; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), the discussion of the attempt “to build the intellectual life of the people upon a strictly national basis” notes that “The national literature, under the lead of men like Björnstjerne Björnson and Henrik Ibsen, is moving in the same direction, its language being continually enriched from the dialects, and its themes largely drawn from the ancient sagas and the life of the people” (535–36). In Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: A Study in Norwegian Nationalism (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1944), Harold Larson quotes Bjørnson’s recollection in 1880 of the early days in the establishment of the modern Norwegian theatre: “I began within the ring of the saga and the bonde [freehold farmers], in that I let the one illustrate the other, which at that time was new” (32).
7. The National Schools educated primarily the lower and working classes.
8. Yeats refers to Mrs. Grogan in The Building Fund.
9. From “St. Luke the Painter,” part of the sonnet sequence “The House of Life” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82).
10. Killaloe, a village in County Clare, was the site of the stronghold of Brian Bóroime (Brian Boru, 941–1014), King of Ireland, the main character in Lady Gregory’s Kincora, first produced at the Abbey Theatre on 25 March 1905.
11. Cuchulain kills his son in On Baile’s Strand.
12. In the “G” version of the Prologue (1394) to The Legend of Good Women, the God of Love complains of Chaucer’s treatment of women in both Troilus and Crisyede (ca. 1385–88) and The Romaunt of the Rose (ca. 1370–75), a translation of part of the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose by Chaucer and others (typically attributed entirely to Chaucer prior to the work of the scholar W. W. Skeat in the late 1890s).
13. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), German historian, poet, and dramatist.
14. Gerald Griffin (1803–40), Irish playwright, novelist, and poet; Charles Joseph Kickham (1828–82), Irish novelist, poet, and political activist.
15. James Clarke Hook (1819–1907), English genre painter and etcher, best known for his seafaring pictures.
16. Caste by the English playwright Thomas William Robertson (1829–71) was first produced in 1867. Yeats refers to the production at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on 19–21 October 1905. The leading actor, the English comedian and manager Sir John Hare (1844–1921), was absent in order to attend the funeral of the English actor Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905).
17. Martin Cosgar is a character in Padraic Colum’s The Land, Shan Grogan in William Boyle’sThe Building Fund, Nora Burke in John Millington Synge’sThe Shadow of a Glen, Gormleith in Lady Gregory’s Kincora.
18. Yeats refers to the French writer Jean Adrien Antoine Jules Jusserand (1855–1932). He is perhaps drawing on a passage in The Literary History the English People, trans. Elizabeth Lee (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895): “The French who were now living in England in large numbers, introduced there the taste for merry tales of trickery and funny adventures, stories of curious mishaps of all kinds; of jealous husbands, duped, beaten, and withal perfectly content, and of fit wives for such husbands. It already pleased their teasing, mocking minds, fond of generalisations, to make themselves out a vicious race, without faith, truth, or honour: it ever was a gab of theirs. The more one protests, the more they insist; they adduce proofs and instances; they are convinced and finally convince others” (1: 155).
19. In the “Discours de la tragédie et des moyens de la traiter selon le vraisemblable ou le nécessaire,” included in Trois discours sur le Poème dramatique (1660), the French dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606–84) discusses why terrible crimes—particularly incest—are required for successful tragedies.
20. From “To Althea: From Prison” by the English poet Richard Lovelace (1618–58).
21. The American ethnologist and folklorist Jeremiah Curtin (1836–1906) published Myths and Folklore of Ireland in 1890. The “Story of the Red-haired Man’s Wife” is included in Douglas Hyde’sSongs Ascribed to Raftery (Dublin: Gill, 1903), 206–19; Hyde explains that “everybody knows the old song of the Red-haired Man’s Wife. It is more than a hundred, or perhaps two hundred years old” (204–5). Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche (The Midnight Court) is a long poem written ca. 1780 by the Irish poet Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre (Brian Merriman, ?1745–1805). The Aislinge meic Conglinne (The Vision of Mac Conglinne) was composed in the twelfth century. In the Fled Bricrenn (Feast of Briciu), a tale of the Ulster cycle from the eighth century, the mischief-maker Bricriu Nemthenga (Poison-Tongue), creates dissension between three Ulster heroes, Cú Chulainn, Lóegaire Buadach, and Conall Cernach; Yeats’s play The Green Helmet (first published in 1908 as The Golden Helmet) is based on this tale.
22. Yeats had studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin from May 1884 to April 1886. Yeats described John Hughes (1865–1941), later a well-known Irish sculptor, as one of “certain elder students who had authority among us” (Au 90).
23. The Holy Family consists of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and her husband, Joseph.
24. Stefan Lochner (?1410–51), a German painter; Yeats refers to his Madonna of the Rose Bower (1450).
25. Yeats refers to the penultimate paragraph of “Notes” from the 1902 Samhain (see p. 19).
26. In the opening paragraph of the Satyricon (ca. A.D. 63–65) by the Roman writer Petronius Arbiter (A.D. ?66–), Encolpius complains that “our hapless youngsters are turned into total idiots in the schools of rhetoric, because their eyes and ears are trained not on everyday issues, but on pirates in chains on the sea-shore, or on tyrants signing edicts bidding sons to decapitate their fathers, or on ocular responses in time of plague urging the sacrifice of three or more maidens. These are nothing but verbal gob-stoppers coated in honey, every word and deed sprinkled with poppy seed and sesame!”
27. The art collector and critic Sir Hugh Percy Lane (1875–1915) was a nephew of Lady Gregory. His Loan Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the Royal Hibernian Academy on 21 November 1904. Giovanni Segantini (1858–99) was an Italian painter. His technique, known as divisionism, consisted of applying strokes of unmixed pigment to the canvas, allowing the viewer at a sufficient distance to combine the colors optically.
28. Heroes of Homer’s Odyssey, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
29. Yeats alludes to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) and a character in several plays by Shakespeare.
30. The Spirit of the Nation was a collection of mainly patriotic poems and ballads collected from The Nation, first published in 1843; a second part was issued in 1844 and an enlarged edition in 1845. By 1870 the collection was in its fiftieth printing.
31. Moore had been born and raised a Catholic but declared himself a Protestant in 1903.
32. In Conservations of Goethe (1836–48), the German writer Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) recalls him saying “Schiller’s Wallenstein is so great that there is nothing else like it of the same sort; yet you will find that even these two powerful helpers—history and philosophy—have injured parts of the work, and hinder a purely poetical success” (23 July 1827); and “I have always kept myself free from philosophy” (4 February 1829).
33. In the essay “Peace in Life and Art,” first published in Merry England for September 1892, the English poet Coventry Patmore (1832–96) argued that “peace . . . is the common character of all true art.” The essay was collected in Religio Poetae Etc. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1893). Yeats may have had his attention drawn to the passage by his friend the English poet and critic Arthur Symons (1865–1945), who in his “Coventry Patmore” in the New Review for 30 January 1897 explained that for Patmore, “peace . . . was the sign of great art” (75).
34. The quotation is untraced. In a draft of his autobiography, Yeats recalled that the English writer Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867–1902) “said, quoting I know not what Catholic saint, ‘God asks nothing from even the highest soul but attention’ ”; and in an October 1909 entry in his journal, Yeats asked “Can one reach God by toil? He gives himself to the pure in heart. He asks nothing but attention” (Mem 36, 234).
35. Thomas à Kempis (?1380–1471), a German monk and writer, is traditionally credited with the authorship of the Imitation of Christ. Yeats has elevated him to sainthood. The quotation is untraced.
36. Tara, a hill in County Meath, is the ancient seat of the High Kings of Ireland.
37. The review in The United Irishman for 17 January 1905 noted that “We are glad to find that Mr. Yeats has come to recognize two truths which we pointed out—that the arts lose something of their sap when cut off from the people as a whole, and that if his theatre is to live, it must be moulded by the influences which are moulding the National life at present.” Moreover, Yeats “has come to agree that what we insisted as the essential of the theatre—that it should be moulded by the influences which mould the national life—was wise and right. We trust he will come to agree with us that only by turning their backs on London can Irishmen of letters serve as reasonably, Ireland and their own souls” (5).
38. Yeats’s edition of A Book of Irish Verse was first published in 1895 and in a revised version in 1900, both by Methuen & Co. in London. In the Introduction to the 1895 text, Yeats noted that “Except these mystics [Charles Alexandre Weekes and AE] and Prof. Dowden at an odd moment, no Irishman living in Ireland has sung excellently of any but a theme from Irish experience, Irish history, or Irish tradition” (xxv). In 1892 Yeats was involved in a dispute with Sir Charles Gavan Duffy over control of a series of books to be called the “New Irish Library.” Duffy eventually prevailed.
39. Ideas of Good and Evil, which includes essays dating from 1895 to 1902, was published in 1903. The Celtic Twilight: Men and Women, Dhouls and Faeries was published in 1893 and in an expanded edition (without the subtitle) in 1902.
40. Not exactly. Among Lady Gregory’s papers in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library is a one-page typescript fragment of this essay, numbered 13 and corresponding to the conclusion. It shows various holograph corrections and revisions. For instance, the penultimate paragraph of the typescript ended up in revised form as the second paragraph of the essay. Moreover, the last sentence of the published version is a holograph addition, and it is followed by another sentence which Yeats did not publish: “After all dictating gives one a certain vitality as of vehement speech.”
As so little pre-publication material for Samhain has survived, one has to wonder if Lady Gregory deliberately saved this single page of typescript so that Yeats’s exaggeration could eventually be documented. . . .
1. Unless the essay was later revised, the reference to the Dublin production of Beerbohm Tree’s version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest establishes the date of composition as no earlier than ca. 15 May 1905, nearly five months after the opening of the Abbey Theatre.
2. Yeats attended a ceremony on 26 August 1900 to unveil a memorial to Antony Raftery. As noted in the Tuam News for 31 August 1900, as part of the festivities Yeats “delivered a masterly ovation in support of the spread of the Irish language, and, alluding to the poet they were honouring, said that when kings and rulers would be forgotten, the memory of the poor poet would ever be alive, enshrined in the hearts of the people.”
3. Yeats’s text essentially follows that in Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis; London: John Murray, 1903), 37. A somewhat different version is included in Douglas Hyde’s Songs Ascribed to Raftery (Dublin: Gill, 1903), 41.
4. Alexander Dumas père (1802–70), French novelist and playwright, and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), Scottish novelist. Both are best known for their historical fiction.
5. In occult tradition, the Smaragdine or Emerald Tablet was found on the dead body of Hermes Trismegistus (a clumsy translation of “Thoth the very great,” the Egyptian god of the moon, wisdom, and learning).
6. Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne (ca. 1544–97), chief of the O’Byrnes of Wicklow, fought against the English. An O’Loughlin as his companion is untraced. The O’Loughlins (ó Lochainn) were an important clan in the ancient district of Thomond (Tuathmhumhan), now most of County Clare and parts of County Limerick and County Tipperary. In his essay “Away,” first published in the Fortnightly Review for April 1902, Yeats discusses “one O’Loughlin” of County Clare who was taken by the fairies every night “for seven years” (LAR 70). Cú Chulainn is the hero of the Ulster cycle of heroic tales. Fionn, hero of the Ossianic cycle, is described as “golden salmon of the sea, clean hawk of the air” in “Oisin’s Laments” in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men (London: John Murray, 1904), 457.
7. The legendary English outlaw is variously placed from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries.
8. Possibly a local saying, as it is not listed in the standard compilations of proverbs.
9. A coin worth ten shillings (50 percent of a pound).
10. The reason for the revision is unclear. Although described elsewhere in Arthurian legends, the death of Gawain is not narrated in Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Parzival, which Yeats had cited earlier in Samhain as well as below in this essay. Additionally, perhaps Yeats had been reminded that although Gawain is the hero of the earliest Arthurian tales, in later versions he is treated less favorably and is eclipsed by Launcelot. The “Table” in Yeats’s comment is the legendary Round Table of King Arthur.
11. In The Nine Worthies of London (1592), the English writer Richard Johnson (1573–?1659) chronicles the lives of nine important figures.
12. The musical The Girl from Kay’s by the Irish born “Owen Hall” (James Davis, 1853–1907) and others, first produced in London from 11 November 1902 to 23 January 1904, was performed in Dublin on 24–29 April 1905 at the Gaiety Theatre, opposite an Abbey Theatre production of William Boyle’sThe Building Fund and the revised version of Yeats’sThe King’s Threshold. Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) was an English actor and manager. His elaborate production of Shakespeare’sThe Tempest, mockingly retitled by YeatsThe Girl from Prospero’s Island, was offered at the Theatre Royal in Dublin on 15–20 May 1905—“The entire production, with all the scenic effects, direct from His Majesty’s Theatre, London,” where it had been produced from 14 September 1904 to 19 January 1905.
13. The friend was Annie Horniman, the theatre the Abbey.
14. The English writer Thomas Percy (1729–1811) published a three-volume collection of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1876.
15. In biblical tradition, the fruit of the Forbidden Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was an apple.
16. “The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer” by the English poet Thomas Hood (1799–1845) was first published in The Gem for 1829.
17. In her essay on “Raftery” in Poets and Dreamers, a revised version of “The Poet Raftery” from the Argosy (January 1901), Lady Gregory refers to “The truths of God that he strove in his last years, as he says, ‘to have written in the book of the people’ ” (21–22). She also recalls the tale that having performed at a wedding, Raftery “went to bed after, without them giving him a drop to drink; but he didn’t mind that when they haven’t got it to give” (35). However, according to the account of “The Wedding at Shlahaun Mor” in Douglas Hyde’s Songs Ascribed to Raftery, Raftery was not in fact present at the wedding. Moreover, in the poem Raftery depicts himself as less than content: “They left Raftery the poet go to sleep without a drop” (257).
18. Yeats apparently refers to an Egyptian love song from Harris Papyrus 500 in the British Museum, later translated as “The Love-lorn Sister” by Terence Gray in ‘And in the Tomb were Found . . .’ (1923):
I am come to prepare my snare with my hands,
My cage, and my hiding place, for all the birds of Puanit.
They swoop upon the Black Land, laden with incense.
The first which cometh, he shall seize my worm-bait,
Bearing from Puanit the fragrance which he exhales,
His claws full of sweet-smelling resins.
My heart desires that we take them together, I with thee alone.
Yeats directly alluded to the poem in “The Child and the State” (1925): “I am thinking of an Egyptian poem, where there are birds flying from Arabia with spice in their claws” (LAR 197).
19. In “Dreams that have no Moral,” first published in the expanded edition of The Celtic Twilight in 1902, Yeats recounts a story told by an “old man” at the end of which Bill and Jack, raised as brothers although they had different mothers, “lived happily after, and they had children by the basketful, and threw them out by the shovelful. I was passing one time myself, and they called me in and gave me a cup of tea” (Myth 125, 137).
20. A particularly maleficent Faery, described by Yeats as “a fool of the forth” in “The Queen and the Fool,” an essay first published as “The Fool of Faery” in The Kensington for June 1901 and included in the 1902 expanded edition of Celtic Twilight (Myth 112).
21. The translation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Villon’s “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” was first published as “The Ballad of Dead Ladies,” one of “Three Translations from François Villon, 1450,” in his Poems (1870).
22. “Words and Music,” Musical News (11 February 1905): 129. The anonymous writer was less than impressed by Yeats’s experiments in speaking verse to the accompaniment of the psaltery: “Mr. Yeats is evidently an enthusiast on the results attained by Miss Farr’s methods, although we gather that the critics found the effect very monotonous, which, indeed, is not surprising to learn” (130).
23. Aucassin and Nicolette is a thirteenth-century French courtly story, composed in alternating prose and songs. Gilbert Murray’s translation of Hippolytus (428 B.C.) by Euripides, with Florence Farr leading the chorus, was first produced at the Lyric Theatre in London on 26 May 1904; his translation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women (415 B.C.) was first produced at the Court Theatre in London on 11 April 1905.
24. The Earthly Paradise by the English writer, designer, and socialist William Morris (1834–96) was published in 1868–70. It is composed in Chaucerian meters.
1. There were five numbers of The Arrow, from 20 October 1906 to 25 August 1909.
2. In Dublin, London, and Paris, respectively.
3. Adapted from “The Shepheards Wives Song” (1590) by the English writer Robert Greene (1558–92): “Ah what is love? It is a pretty thing, / As sweet unto a shepheard as a king. . . .”
1. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist was performed in 1610 and printed in 1612; his Volpone was performed in 1605–6 and printed in 1607.
2. John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World opened at the Abbey Theatre on 26 January 1907 and ran until 2 February 1907. Only about eighty people were present for the second performance on 28 January 1907. The debate about the play was held at the Abbey Theatre on Monday, 4 February 1907. Even at the first performance, Christy Mahon’s reference to “drifts of chosen females standing in their shifts [underclothes]” provoked considerable hissing. Many of the reviewers attacked the play as a libel upon the Irish character.
3. On 3 February 1907, the Sunday Independent (Dublin) noted that “After a stormy week ‘The Playboy of the Western World’finished up his career for the present in the Abbey Theatre last night. He left the stage amidst quite a thunder of applause from a crowded house” (1).
4. Total receipts for the week were £55.10s.
1. During the Abbey Theatre tour of Glasgow, Birmingham, Cambridge, Oxford, and London, 11 May-15 June 1907, The Playboy was produced only in the latter three cities (10, 12, 14 June).
2. Young Ireland was a nationalist group established in October 1842.
3. The most prominent Young Ireland writer was the poet Thomas Osborne Davis (1814–55). In an essay in The Bookman for July 1895, Yeats commented that “countless ballad-writers, who combined a little of Gaelic manner with a deal of borrowed rhetoric, . . . created that interesting, unsatisfying, pathetic movement which we call in Ireland ‘the poetry of Young Ireland’ ” (UP1 362).
1. The Abbey Theatre performed in Galway at the Galway Great Exhibition of Irish Manufactures on 16–19 September 1908. Yeats offered a lecture in connection with the performance on 18 September 1908, summarized in the Connacht Champion for 26 September 1908 under the headline “Hypnotised. / W. B. Yeats on Commercial Conquest. / National Theatre’s Aim” (13). The paper noted that “The production of the Irish plays was a great success, and at each performance hundreds had to be turned away.”
2. Count Florimond de Basterot (1836–1904); his house was at Duras, a promontory in County Clare. Quotation not traced.
3. In Balzac’s Un grand homme de province à Paris (A Distinguished Provincial at Paris, 1839), Étienne Lousteau tells Lucien de Rubempré that “Actresses will pay you likewise for praise, but the wiser among them pay for criticism. To be passed over in silence is what they dread the most; and the very best thing of all, from their point of view, is criticism which draws down a reply; it is far more effectual than bald praise, forgotten as soon as read, and it costs more in consequence. Celebrity, my dear fellow, is based upon controversy.”
4. Utilitarianism, developed primarily by the English theologian William Paley (1743–1805) and the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), argued that any act should produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
5. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), English historian and poet.
6. Yeats had offered the motion to establish a National Literary Society at a public meeting on 9 June 1892. Katharine Tynan (1861–1931) was an Irish poet and novelist. The essay by Lionel Johnson was included in Poetry and Ireland: Essays by W.B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson (Churchtown, Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1908).
7. James Clarence Mangan (1803–49), Irish poet.
8. The most prominent Young Ireland writer was Thomas Osborne Davis. In an essay in The Bookman for July 1895, Yeats commented that “countless ballad-writers, who combined a little of Gaelic manner with a deal of borrowed rhetoric, . . . created that interesting, unsatisfying, pathetic movement which we call in Ireland ‘the poetry of Young Ireland’ ” (UP1 362). The Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) published Castle Rackrent in 1800.
9. John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World; Charles Joseph Kickham (1828–82), Irish novelist; Michael Banim (1796–1874), Irish novelist; John Banim (1798–1842), Irish novelist and playwright; Anne Radcliffe (1764–1823), English novelist; Gerald Griffin (1803–40), Irish novelist and playwright; William Carleton (1794–1869), Irish novelist.
10. Charles Lever (1806–72), Irish novelist. The Greek philosopher Socrates (?470–?399 B.C.) stressed the importance of self-knowledge.
11. With the assistance of Lady Gregory, Yeats began collecting folklore in the summer of 1897.
12. The aphorism is untraced. Both the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) argued that history is essentially biography. The French sense of posé suggests seriousness and gravity.
13. From the second entry in The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, translated by Bailey Saunders (New York and London: Macmillan, 1893): “How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking, but by doing” (59).
14. The Flemish painters Hubert van Eyck (?1370–1426) and Jan van Eyck (?1390–1441).
15. In “Il conte di Carmagnola. Tragedia di Alessandro Mazoni. Milano,” first published in Über Kunst und Altertum (September 1820), Goethe stated that “for the poet no person is historical, it is his pleasure to create his moral world and for this purpose he renders to certain persons in history the honour of lending their names to his creations.”
16. The German theosophist and mystic Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) experienced a religious epiphany in 1600 when a ray of sunlight reflected into a pewter dish produced an ecstatic vision of Godhead penetrating all existence.
17. The Italian artist Antonio Mancini (1852–1930) had painted Yeats’s portrait in 1907. Yeats had been photographed by the Dublin photographer James Lafayette (James Stack Lauder, 1853–1923) in 1894 and ca. 1899 (and would be again in 1924).
18. Presumably Das moderne Drama (1852) by the German literary historian Herman Hettner (1821–82), a short book which was an important influence on Ibsen.
19. In Balzac’s Les Comédiens sans le savoir (The Unconscious Mummers, 1846), the artist Dubourdieu has been “driven crazy” by the ideas of the French philosopher and socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837); he describes his painting (not a statue) of an “allegorical figure of Harmony” with six breasts and, at her feet, “an enormous Savoy cabbage, the Master’s symbol of Concord” (Savoy is a region in France). Bixiou suggests that “When every one is converted to our doctrine, you will be the foremost man in your art, for the ideas which you put into your work will be comprehensible to all—when they are common property. In fifty years’ time you will be for the world at large what you are now for us—a great man. It is only a question of holding out till then.” However, Léon de Lora objects that “while opinions cannot give talent, they inevitably spoil it. . . . An artist’s opinion ought to be a faith in works; and his one way to success is to work while Nature gives him the sacred fire.”
20. Presumably the Irish actor J. Dudley Digges (1874–1947), who played the Wise Man in the first production of The Hour-Glass on 14 March 1903, although he and several others resigned from the Irish National Theatre Society in protest over the production of John Millington Synge’s In the Shadow of a Glen on 8 October 1903.
21. Two-thirds of Rome burned in July 64 while the Emperor Nero (37–68) was in Antium, according to legend playing on his violin.
22. Yeats refers to his Cathleen ni Houlihan and two plays by Lady Gregory.
23. The potential donor’s confusion is understandable, as the National Literary Society had agreed to sponsor the Irish Literary Theatre at a meeting on 16 January 1899. The Irish Literary Theatre was superseded by the Irish National Theatre Society on 1 February 1903.
24. La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) was the title given by Balzac to his collected stories and novels, published from 1842 to 1846 with a supplementary volume in 1847. In the Preface (1842), Balzac argued that since he was attempting to portray all of society, it was inevitable that “some part of the fresco represented a guilty couple.”
25. At the end of Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, Michael Gillane leaves to join the 1798 Rising against the British. In Lady Gregory’s Dervorgilla, the title character’s love for Diarmuid results in the Norman invasion of Ireland. Patrick Sarsfield (d. 1693), who fought against the English, is a major character in Lady Gregory’s The White Cockade.
In “L’Épicier” (“The Grocer”), which Yeats could have read in Pictures of the French: A Series of Literary and Graphic Delineations of French Character by Jules Janin, Balzac, Cormenin, and Other Celebrated French Authors (London: W. S. Orr, 1840), Balzac explained that “. . . the Grocer’s wife is virtuous. Rarely does conjugal unfaithfulness afflict him. His lady has neither will to betray him, nor occasion . . .”; and that “. . . true it is, that the Grocer’s lady is faithful, and that nowhere is Hymen more honoured than by those of her class” (13). “L’Épicier,” first published in La Silhouette for 22 April 1830, was significantly revised and expanded for Les Français peints par euxmêmes (1840) and eventually collected in Balzac’s La Femme de soixante ans (1846–47)
26. The Abbey Theatre presented a special matinée performance on 4 September 1908 for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was meeting in Dublin. Yeats’s speech was published in a special Program on 8 September 1908; the final two paragraphs are included here.
27. In the Bible, Adam, the first man, numbers and names the creatures in the Garden of Eden.
28. In Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men (London: John Murray, 1904), Oscar declares that “The best music is the striking of swords in a battle” (312).
1. Le Théâtre du peuple (1903) by the French writer Romain Rolland (1866–1944) was translated by Barrett H. Clark as The People’s Theatre (London: G. Allen Unwin, 1919). “A People’s Theatre” was first published in The Irish Statesman for 29 November 1919 (1.23: 547–49) and 6 December 1919 (1.24: 572–73).
2. The Daily Mirror was a London newspaper. The “Red Terror” refers to the series of mass executions by the Russian government which began in the summer of 1918.
3. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish scientist, mystic, and religious writer. See especially The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugal Love; After which follow the Pleasures of insanity relating to Scortatory Love (1768), translated A. H. Searle (1876), revised by R. L. Tafel (1891) (London: Swedenborg Society, 1891) 73–75, 320–21. A year earlier, in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), Yeats noted that the dead “make love in that union which Swedenborg has said is of the whole body and seems from far off an incandescence” (LE 25).
4. Untraced.
5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (performed 1602, printed 1603 and later).
6. The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) formulated the concept of ewige Wiederkehr (“eternal recurrence”), in which all life is understood as a continual pattern of birth and decay.
7. From “St. Luke the Painter,” part of the sonnet sequence “The House of Life” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
8. The National Schools educated primarily the lower and working classes.
9. John Galsworthy (1867–1933), English writer.
10. Untraced. Possibly the Irish writer and critic St. John Ervine (1883–1971) who had considerable conflicts with the Company during his brief tenure as Manager of the Abbey Theatre in 1915–16.
11. The role of Maurya in the first production of John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea on 25 February 1904 was played by the Irish actress “Honor Lavelle” (Helen S. Laird, 1874–1957); she left the Abbey Theatre late in 1905. The play is set on the Aran Islands.
12. Yeats refers to Book I, chapter three, of Dante’s Il Convito (The Banquet), an unfinished philosophical work written 1304–8. The Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) date from ca. 400.
13. Although Yeats often referred to Dante’s description of a “perfectly proportioned human body,” the precise phrase has not been traced. Several passages in Il Convito, however, suggest the concept (see LE 382n22).
14. In chapter VI of Smoke (1867) by the Russian novelist Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–83), Litvinov “was struck by a strong, very agreeable, and familiar fragrance, and saw in the window a great bunch of fresh heliotrope in a glass of water. Litvinov bent over them not without amazement, touched them, and smelt them. . . . Something seemed to stir in his memory, something very remote . . . but what, precisely, he could not discover” (ellipses in text). The flowers had been sent by his former beloved, Irina, to whom he had given a bouquet of heliotrope during their courtship some years earlier.
In Greek mythology, Paris is married to Helen, Peleus to Thetis.
15. In The Poetry of Robert Burns, edited by the English writer and critic Ernest William Henley (1849–1903) and Thomas F. Henderson (Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1897), it is argued that Burns “was the last of a school. It culminated in him, because he had more genius, and genius of a finer, a rarer, and a more generous quality, than all his immediate ancestors put together. But he cannot be fairly said to have contributed anything to it except himself.” Burns is contrasted with Keats, Shelley, and Byron, “new men all, and founders of dynasties” (4: 271). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) was an American poet.
16. Yeats refers to the Prologue to the anonymous psuedo-Chaucerian Tale of Beryn (15th/16th century), in which the Pardoner and the Miller, “countirfeting gentlimen,” comment on the stained glass windows in a church.
17. Plutarch (?46–120), Greek biographer and essayist, best known for his Parallel Lives.
18. Spiddal is a village in northwestern Galway. Yeats noted in an 1898 essay that there “the most talk nothing but Gaelic” (UP 2 74).
19. “The Grief of a Girl’s Heart” is included in “West Irish Ballads” in Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers (Dublin: Hodges Figgis; London: John Murray, 1903), 64–65.
20. Yeats seems to have invented this particular genre of Elizabethan poetry, perhaps working backwards from John Taylor (?1578–1653), “the water poet,” who had been a Thames waterman. All the Workes of John Taylor, the Water Poet, was published in 1630.
21. Yeats refers to Dante’s canzone entitled “Donne, ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Women, you who have an understanding of love”), which describes the principle of the “cor gentile” (“noble heart”). Yeats probably read the poem in the form in Dante’s Vita Nuova (ca. 1292).
22. Yeats refers to the attacks upon John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World at its first production at the Abbey Theatre, 26 January-2 February 1907.
23. Yeats was now experimenting with plays based on the Japanese Noh drama. Noh means “Accomplishment.” Yeats wrote the introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, Chosen and Finished by Ezra Pound (Churchtown, Dun-drum: Cuala Press, 1916). The essay was also published in Drama for November 1916 and was included in the expanded edition of The Cutting of an Agate (London: Macmillan, 1919).
24. Edmund Dulac (1882–1953) was an English artist and musician; Walter Morse Rummel (1887–1953) was an American musician.
25. William Blake’sThe Book of Thel dates from 1789.
26. Yeats refers to Molière’s Le Misanthrope (1666), 1.1, in which the courtier Alceste complains to his friend Philinte “I have seen and suffered too much. Court and city alive provoke me to fury. It fills me with depression—reduces me to utter despair to see men living as they do. I meet with nothing but base flattery, injustice, selfishness, treachery, villainy everywhere.”
27. Fedor Ivanovich Chaliapin (1873–1938), Russian bass singer.
28. At the Hawk’s Well was produced privately in Lady Cunard’s drawing room in London on 2 April 1916; the Young Man was played by the English actor Henry Hinchliffe Ainley (1879–1945). The rehearsal at which the American writer Ezra Pound (1885–1972) substituted has not been traced.
29. Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905), English actor; Tommaso Salvini (1830–1915), Italian actor. Both were renowned for their performances in Shakespeare’s plays.
30. After the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, many of the leaders (and soldiers) who had fought against the English left for the Continent, especially France, Spain, and Austria.
31. Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), Italian writer.
32. Henry Fielding (1707–54), English novelist and dramatist; Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), English writer; Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian writer; Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–81), Russian writer.
33. Blake did not say this. Yeats is most likely extrapola ting from the doctrines of contraries expressed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93): “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”
34. Yeats refers to his “The Phases of the Moon” and “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” both first published in the expanded edition of The Wild Swans at Coole (London: Macmillan, 1919). In the Introduction to A Vision (London: privately printed by T. Werner Laurie, 1925; issued to subscribers 15 January 1926), Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes, two characters from Yeats’s early fiction, discuss the discovery by Robartes of many of the doctrines expounded in the book. Aherne notes that on a “walking tour in Connaught” with Robartes, “words were spoken between us slightly resembling those in the ‘The Phases of the Moon’ . . .” (xx-xxi).
35. In A Vision, Yeats uses the figure of the gyres, a set of two interlocking cones, to symbolize the inherent tension between opposites on which reality is based.
36. “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” ll. 9–16 (P 172).
1. Printed without title and in italics (except for “1908”) opposite the first page of Samhain: 1901, in volume IV of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose (Stratford-on-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1908).
2. Although the revisions were minor in comparison to Yeats’s usual practice, there were significant changes, including the omission of various sections as well as the inclusion of two essays from The United Irishman and several footnotes. Yeats also does not mention that some of the material was taken from The Arrow. In addition, there were some verbal changes (see pp. 213–14).
3. Samhain was published each year from 1901 to 1906. The final regular Samhain, published in November 1908, appeared too late for inclusion in The Collected Works in Verse and Prose.
1. The Preface was printed before the Contents of the volume. The plays were The Countess Cathleen, first published in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892), though since much revised; The Land of Heart’s Desire, first published in The Land of Heart’s Desire (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894); At the Hawk’s Well, first published in Harper’s Bazaar (March 1917); The Only Jealousy of Emer and The Dreaming of the Bones, first published in Two Plays for Dancers (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1919); and Calvary, first published in Four Plays for Dancers (London: Macmillan, 1921).
2. Dáil éireann, the representative assembly of Ireland. The campaign by the Abbey Theatre for government support eventually resulted in an endowment of £850, announced by Yeats from the stage on 8 August 1925.
3. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (New York and London, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913).
1. The 1931 Edition de Luxe page proofs of Mythologies end with two “Notes.” The first, extracted from the “Notes” in Early Poems and Stories (London: Macmillan, 1925), concerns the prose fiction with which the volume began: The Celtic Twilight, first published as The Celtic Twilight: Men and Women, Dhouls and Faeries (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893), and revised and expanded as The Celtic Twilight (London: A. H. Bullen, 1902); The Secret Rose (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1897); The Tables of the Law [and] The Adoration of the Magi (London: privately printed, 1897); and Stories of Red Hanrahan, included in The Secret Rose but substantially revised with Lady Gregory’s assistance as Stories of Red Hanrahan (Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1904). After some white space, Yeats supplied this commentary on The Irish Dramatic Movement. Yeats is incorrect in stating that any material from Beltaine (1899–1900) is included. He also does not mention the inclusion in this version of The Irish Dramatic Movement of either the two letters from The United Irishman (done for the 1908 Collected Works) or “A People’s Theatre: A Letter to Lady Gregory,” first published in The Irish Statesman, 29 November and 6 December 1920, and included in Plays and Controversies (London: Macmillan, 1923).
In Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), Yeats’s remarks were printed as a “Note” opposite the first page of Samhain: 1901. However, the reference to “this volume” was incorrectly glossed as Plays and Controversies.
2. The “irascible friend” was perhaps the American writer Ezra Pound (1885–1972); Yeats had recently referred to Pound’s “irascible mind” in A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1929).
1. This issue of Beltaine included C. H. Herford’s “The Scandinavian Dramatists” (14–19), reprinted from the Dublin Daily Express. Herford argued that “Norway has led the way among the nations in acquiring possession of a living drama of classical rank as literature, for which the barriers of language and race have ceased to exist” (14).
The first two paragraphs of “Plans and Methods” are revised from the beginning of “The Irish Literary Theatre,” published in the Dublin Daily Express for 14 January 1899.
2. In addition to Ibsen and Maeterlinck, Yeats refers to the German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), and the Spanish playwright José Echegaray y Eizaguirre (1832–1916).
3. The Théâtre Libre, founded in Paris in 1877 by André Antoine, was the model for the Independent Theatre, founded in London in 1891 by J. T. Grein (1862–1935).
4. Edward Walsh (1805–50) was the editor of Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844) and Irish Popular Songs (1850).
5. The translation from Calderón (1600–1681) by the Irish journalist and writer Denis Florence MacCarthy (1817–82) was not produced by the Irish Literary Theatre.
6. Fiona Macleod was the pseudonym of the Scottish writer William Sharp (1856–1905); none of his plays was produced by the Irish Literary Theatre. Nor was Hugh Roe O’Donnell by Standish James O’Grady.
7. Yeats refers to Martyn’s The Heather Field.
8. Yeats’s play was The Countess Cathleen.
9. Yeats included in this issue of Beltaine two lyrics from The Countess Cathleen, “Impetuous heart, be still, be still” and “Who will go drive with Fergus now” (13). The first had been published as “The Lover to his Heart” in the special Christmas number of The Social Review (Dublin) for 7 December 1894. The latter was eventually published as a separate poem, “Who goes with Fergus?”, beginning in the 1912 edition of Poems (P 543, 39).
10. This issue of Beltaine included “The Countess Cathleen” (10–11) by Lionel Johnson. Johnson noted that “the date of its story is the later part of the sixteenth century” (10), which is in accord with the stage direction in the 1892 text: “The Scene is laid in Ireland in the Sixteenth Century.” However, in a note to the 1895 edition Yeats explained that he had mistakenly believed that the story on which the play was based “was indigenous Irish folklore; he has since heard that it is of recent origin.” The stage direction was thus revised to “The Scene is laid in Ireland and in old times” (VPl 3, 4, 178).
11. Calderón wrote a substantial number of autos sacramentales, sacred allegorical dramas on the Eucharist.
12. “The Abdication of Fergus Mac Roy,” in Lays of the Western Gael and Other Poems (London: Bell and Daldy, 1864) by the Irish writer Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810–86).
13. Most of these identifications follow those in the “Glossary” in Poems (1895), which included The Countess Cathleen. Lilith is a demon in Jewish tradition.
1. This essay was reprinted with slight revisions from The Dome for April 1899. With some further revision, it became part I of “The Theatre” in Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903).
2. The Irish physician, writer, and scholar John Todhunter (1839–1916) was a neighbor of the Yeats family when they lived in Bedford Park in London. Todhunter’s A Sicilian Idyll was first produced at the Bedford Park Social Club on 5 May 1890. Yeats favorably reviewed the play in several publications. A Sicilian Idyll was then produced at St. George’s Hall in London on 1 July 1890 and, along with Todhunter’s The Poison Flower, at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand in London on 15 July 1890. Yeats reviewed the later production favorably as well. In a letter to The Fortnightly Review for July 1923, Mrs. Todhunter denied that Yeats had any role in the production of A Sicilian Idyll: “There is no truth in Mr. Yeats’s statement that he caused Dr. Todhunter to produce the latter’s Sicilian Idyll; the play was written and produced without any intervention on his part, though he no doubt took an interest in the production, as several of the players were personally known to him” (163).
3. In addition to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ibsen, Yeats refers to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).
4. “Mr. Bridges’ ‘Prometheus’ and Poetic Drama” by the English poet and art critic Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), published in The Dome for March 1899: “the manager who bars” should be “the managers who bar” (203).
5. The poems are mentioned by Lady Gregory in Poets and Dreamers (Dublin: Hodges Figgis; London: John Murray, 1903), 48–49: “Another song I have heard was a lament over a boy and girl who had run away to America, and on the way the ship went down. And when they were going down, they began to be sorry they were not married; and to say that if the priest had been at home when they went away, they would have been married; but they hoped that when they were drowned, it would be the same with them as if they were married. And I heard another lament that had been made for three boys that had lately been drowned in Galway Bay. It is the mother who is making it; and she tells how she lost her husband the father of her three boys. And then she married again, and they went to sea and were drowned; and she wouldn’t mind about the others so much, but it is the eldest boy, Peter, she is grieving for. And I have heard one song that had a great many verses, and was about ‘a poet that is dying, and he confessing his sins.’ ”
Oisín, the poet-hero of the Fionn cycle of Irish tales, is lured by Niamh to Tír na nóg (Land of Youth) and stays there for several hundred years.
6. The Return of Ulysses by the English poet Robert Bridges (1844–1930) was published in 1890. Yeats wrote about it at length in “Mr. Robert Bridges,” published in The Bookman for June 1897 and reprinted as “The Return of Ulysses” in Ideas of Good and Evil.
7. From William Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810): “The Nature of my Work is Visionary or Imaginative it is an Endeavour to Restore what the Ancients called the Golden Age.”
8. Locrine (1887) by the English poet Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) was first produced by the Elizabethan Stage Society at St. George’s Hall in London on 20 March 1899.
9. Yeats refers to part of a chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (“Come praise Colonus’s horses, and come praise / The wine-dark of the wood’s intricacies” in his 1934 translation) and to Shakespeare’s Macbeth (performed 1606, printed 1623), 1.6.8, although the speaker is not Duncan but Banquo (speaking to Duncan) and “the pendent” should be “his pendent.”
10. Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), English painter.
11. In footnotes added to this essay when Ideas of Good and Evil was reprinted in Essays (London: Macmillan, 1924), Yeats noted that “I had Charles Ricketts in mind” as the painter and identified the orator as John Francis Taylor.
1. Blake did not say this directly, but he discusses the concept of “States” often in his work, as in Milton (ca. 1809–1810): “Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States. / States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease . . . .”
2. Both the Irish historian W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903) and the agricultural leader Sir Horace Plunkett (1854–1932) were Unionists.
3. This passage from the Irish poet William Allingham (1824–89) is untraced. In “Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland,” first published in the Leisure Hour for November 1889, Yeats introduced the same quotation by claiming that “An Irish poet was to write on his title-page later on [after 1845]: . . .” (UP1 152). In A Descriptive Catalog of Yeats’s Library (New York and London: Garland, 1985), Edward O’Shea notes that the inside front cover of Yeats’s copy of Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s A Memoir of the Life and Conquests of Art Mac-Murrogh, 2nd edition (Dublin: James Duffy, [1886]), has the same passage inscribed, assigned to “Allingham” and “followed by a brief entry deleted” (160; item 1187). There are other inscriptions relating to Irish materials on the back flyleaf and the inside back cover. O’Shea speculates that all the inscriptions are “possibly early WBY.” If so, then Yeats may have copied the passage from an inscription in one of Allingham’s personal copies of his work. I have been unable to verify O’Shea’s speculation about the handwriting.
4. Debates between the hero Oisí;n and St. Patrick about Christianity are common in the Fionn cycle of Irish tales.
5. Yeats refers to The Last Feast of the Fianna by the Irish writer Alice Milligan (1866–1953).
6. Yeats refers to Maeve by Edward Martyn and to The Bending of the Bough, a revision by George Moore, with some assistance by Yeats, of Martyn’s The Tale of the Town. Alfred T. Nutt (1856–1910) was an English publisher, folklorist, and Celtic scholar.
7. Ernest Renan (1823–92) was a French philosopher and historian. Yeats discussed his views on the Celtic race in “The Celtic Element in Literature,” first published in Cosmopolis for June 1898 and included in Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903).
8. Presumably a reference to the plays projected for 1900 in the May 1899 Beltaine, none of which were produced.
9. No further plays by Martyn were produced by the Irish Literary Theatre; his next work to be performed was An Enchanted Sea (1902), produced by the Players Club on 18 April 1904. George Bernard Shaw eventually wrote John Bull’s Other Island in 1904, but it was not accepted for production at the Abbey Theatre. It was produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 1 November 1904. The collaboration between Yeats and George Moore on Diarmuid and Grania (produced 21 October 1901; published 1951) was not without contention.
10. Yeats had finished a revised version of The Shadowy Waters in early January 1900; it was published in the North American Review for May 1900 but not produced by the Irish National Theatre Society until 14 January 1904.
11. This issue of Beltaine included “Is the Theatre a Place of Amusement?”(7–10) by Moore and “A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences” (11–13) by Martyn. Moore argued that “Artistic intelligence has dwindled in the last twenty years in England . . .” and that the English theatre has “declined to the level of a mere amusement” (8–9). Martyn claimed that “the great drama of England has given place to brutish and imbecile parade . . .” and that England was a “rank garden” (12).
12. From Shelley’s The Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840).
13. In addition to John Ruskin, William Morris, and Matthew Arnold, Yeats refers to the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881).
14. At the conclusion of his speech to the Irish Parliament on 14 February 1788 urging the commutation of tithes, the Irish politician Henry Grattan (1746–1820) praised the Irish people, noting “those principles not only of justice, but of fire, which I have observed to exist in your composition” and “those warm susceptible properties which abound in your mind, and qualify you for legislation.” The Speeches of the Rt. Hon Henry Grattan, ed. D. O. Madden (Dublin, 1845), 141.
1. In Martyn’s Maeve, Peg Inerny is an incarnation of Medb (Maeve), a legendary queen of Connacht.
2. Yeats describes Biddy Early (1798–1874) at length in “Ireland Bewitched,” published in The Contemporary Review for September 1899 (UP1 167–83).
3. Yeats offered a revised version of this anecdote in his essay “Away,” published in The Fortnightly Review for April 1902 (LAR 67–68). The friend is Lady Gregory; Cruachmaa is a hill in County Galway; Isabella Wood is in Coole Park.
4. The “old Gaelic poet” is untraced.
5. A somewhat different translation of this poem is included in the “Midhir and Etain” chapter in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men (London: John Murray, 1904), 96.
6. A character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (printed 1600 and 1619).
7. Yeats refers to “The Literary Movement in Ireland,” first published in the North American Review for February 1899 and in revised form in Ideals in Ireland, edited by Lady Gregory (London: at the Unicorn, 1901). The rest of the Beltaine essay follows the 1899 text closely, although the closing allusion to Blake is new. The episode is also recounted in “ ‘And Fair Fierce Women,’ ” a story added to the revised edition of The Celtic Twilight (London: A. H. Bullen, 1902). In The Trembling of the Veil (London: privately printed by T. Werner Laurie, 1922), Yeats ascribes this vision to Mary Battle (d. ca. 1907), a servant of his uncle George Pollexfen (1839–1910).
8. Maeve opens with Finola “reading from an old book”:
Every hill which is at this Oneach
Hath under it heroes and queens,
And fair fierce women.
The quotation is from a poem on the death of Dathi in The Book of the Dun Cow, an eleventh-century manuscript collection. Martyn would have found a translation by John O’Donovan in George Petrie’s “The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, Anterior to the Norman Invasion, Comprising an Essay on the Origin and Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland,” Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 20 (1845): 104–5. Yeats entitled one of the stories added to the 1902 The Celtic Twilight “ ‘And Fair, Fierce Women.’ ”
9. The “present queen” is Victoria (1819–1901), queen of England since 1837.
10. In his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), William Blake argued that “The face and limbs that deviates or alters least, from infancy to old age, is the face and limbs of greatest Beauty and perfection.”
1. In her essay “The Last Feast of the Fianna” in Beltaine (18–21), Alice Milligan noted that “I understand that Mr. W. B. Yeats has explained my little play as having some spiritual and mystical meaning, but to tell the truth I simply wrote it on thinking out this problem. How did Oisin endure to live in the house with Grania as a stepmother after all that had happened?” (20–21). Milligan is probably referring to Yeats’s comment on The Last Feast of the Fianna in “The Irish Literary Theatre, 1900,” published in The Dome for January 1900 and reprinted slightly revised in this issue of Beltaine—that the play “would make one remember the mortality and indignity of all that lives” (24). Yeats placed an asterisk after “mystical meaning” and added his commentary at the foot of the page.
1. This essay was reprinted with slight revisions from The Dome for January 1900. The first paragraph from “Dionysius the Areopagite” to the end later became part II of “The Theatre” in Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903). Part I of the 1903 essay had first been published as “The Theatre” in The Dome for April 1899 and had been reprinted in the May 1899 issue of Beltaine (20–23).
In “Is the Theatre a Place of Amusement?” printed in this issue of Beltaine, George Moore had argued that “The essence of the whole matter lies in the fact that the humour of the London theatrical public is an avid desire of amusement; and as the theatre relies on the humour of the London public, it has necessarily declined to the level of a mere amusement; to the level of a circus, a fair, a racecourse,” thus providing the opportunity to make “Dublin an intellectual centre” (9). Moore had also criticized the current state of the English theatre in his Preface to The Bending of the Bough.
2. In biblical tradition, after their exile from Egypt the Jewish people wander for several months in the wilderness before arriving at the sacred mountain of Sinai, on which Moses receives the Ten Commandments from God.
3. Dionysus the Areopagite was supposedly an Athenian converted to Christianity at Athens by St. Paul. The works ascribed to him, including The Celestial Hierarchy, the source of Yeats’s quotation, almost surely date from the early sixth century A.D. Yeats first learned of this phrase from Charles Johnston (1867–1931), a fellow student at the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin, although in A Vision (1937) he claims that Lionel Johnson “was fond of quoting from Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘He has set the borders of his nations according to his angels. . . .’ ”
4. Yeats is perhaps recalling an anecdote about the Greek playwright Euripides (ca. 485–406 B. C.) by the Roman writer Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.-A.D. 65) in his Letter to Lucilius: “When these last verses had been uttered in a tragedy of Euripides, the whole people arose with one accord to throw out both the actor and the play until Euripides himself leapt into the middle of the stage begging them to wait and see what kind of end the admirer of money would come to.”
5. From Blake’s Milton (ca. 1809–10): “Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery / Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years. / For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great / Events of Time start forth & are conceived in such a Period / Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery.”
6. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (performed 1611, published 1623), the infant Perdita is abandoned on the sea coast of Bohemia.
1. Untraced.
2. The play by Alice Milligan was The Last Feast of the Fianna. The Bending of the Bough was a revision by George Moore, with some assistance by Yeats, of Martyn’s The Tale of the Town.
3. Slight misquotations of speeches by Jaspar Dean in act 4, Arabella in act 5, and again Jaspar Dean in act 4.
4. In “The Irish Literary Theatre” in the Irish Times for 21 February 1900, the reviewer complained of Moore’s play that “story there is none, plot there is none. Of dull, dry, insipid, unnatural, wretchedly commonplace conversation there is an immensity . . . (6).
5. The Irish Daily Independent reviewed the play in “Irish Literary Theatre: George Moore’s Brilliant Play,” in the issue for 21 February 1900. Yeats’s quotation is accurate (5). In the issue for 22 February 1900, the Irish Daily Independent published a general account of the Irish Literary Theatre, entitled “The Literary Theatre” (4). Yeats’s quotation is not present. Although the article offered a very favorable assessment of the movement, it was not quite as optimistic as Yeats suggests: “. . . though no Shakespeare has yet arisen to give Ireland drama which takes admiration captive, there is hope that out of the new literary movement there may come dramatic seed which, like the small grain in the parable, shall grow until it spring into the greatest tree in the forest of pure literature” (4).
6. The Times (London) review of The Last Feast of the Fianna and Maeve noted that “There was a crowded house, and the plays were enthusiastically received” (20 February 1900: 7). Yeats is quoting from “Mr. George Moore’s New Play,” The Observer (London), 25 February 1900: 6. It is possible that both notices were by the same individual. The Times noted that “It is doubtful, however, whether the play will appeal to an audience which is unfamiliar with the sources of its inspiration,” and The Observer commented that “. . . I rather question whether it would be appreciated in London. . . .”
1. Yeats refers to the ellipses in the preceding section (see p. 9).
2. Both the text of Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope) and an English translation by Lady Gregory were included in this issue of Samhain. This section was the penultimate paragraph of “Windlestraws.”
3. The bound volume of Beltaine was probably available sometime in the third week of May 1900. In a letter apparently misdated [2 June 1900] in the Collected Letters, Yeats told Lady Gregory that “I send you the bound ‘Be[l]taines’. They look well, & should sooth our guarantors if at any time we think it worth sending them” (CL2 532). However, this dating (based on a postmark) does not accord with some contemporaneous references to Lady Gregory’s scissors. Lady Gregory had dinner with Yeats at Woburn Buildings in London on 3 May 1900 (CL2520). On 13 May 1900 she wrote Yeats that she had left behind her “little folding scissors” and asked that they be sent to her at Coole Park (CL2 526n1). Yeats’s “[2 June 1900]” letter begins “I have not been able to find the scissors anywhere. Are you certain you left them here? (CL2 532; n1 reads “See p. 497,” but there is no reference there to the scissors). On [20 May 1900], however, Yeats had begun his letter to Lady Gregory by telling her “I send the scissors . . .” (CL2526). The letter enclosing the bound Beltaine must therefore date from between 14 or 15 May, when Yeats would have received Lady Gregory’s request for the missing implement, and its return on 20 May. Apparently the April issue of Beltaine was not available until ca. [12 May 1900], as on that day Yeats sent copies to Lady Gregory (CL2525). Thus the production of the separate issue and the bound volume was simultaneous, with the bound volume available about a week later.
1. Moore had argued in “The Irish Literary Theatre” that the production of The Countess Cathleen “met with every disadvantage. Here is a list which must not, however, be considered exhaustive:—First, the author’s theory that verse should be chanted and not spoken . . .” (12). Yeats placed an asterisk after “chanted” and added his commentary at the foot of the page.
1. “St. Mark’s Lane” is an error for St. Martin’s Lane, as Yeats noted in a letter of 2 November 1902 (CL3 259n1 is incorrect).
1. Standish James O’Grady published his History of Ireland: The Heroic Period in 1878. AE had noted that “Mr. O’Grady in his youth had the epic imagination, and I think few people realise how great and heroic that inspiration was . . .” (12). Yeats placed an asterisk after “O’Grady” and added his commentary at the foot of the page. AE’s essay was first published in The United Irishman for 3 May 1902. Yeats’s note was attached when the essay was excerpted both in Samhain and in the All Ireland Review for 1 November 1902. Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–98) was an English painter and designer. Neither his comment nor that by William Morris has been traced.
1. Yeats refers to the following item in this issue of Samhain, “The Reform of the Theatre,” a revision of an essay first published in The United Irishman for 4 April 1903. Yeats gave the lecture between the productions of his The Hour-Glass and Lady Gregory’s Twenty-five by the Irish Literary Theatre on 14 March 1903. This and the next section are the conclusion to “Notes.”
2. Blake did not make such a statement. Yeats is perhaps vaguely recalling his remark in the “Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds” (ca. 1798–1809) that “The difference between a bad Artist & a Good One Is the Bad Artist Seems to Copy a Great Deal: The Good one Really Does Copy a Great Deal”; and Palamabron’s prayer in Milton (ca. 1809–10) “O God, protect me from my friends, that they have not power over me. . . .”
3. The frontispiece to this issue of Samhain was a portrait of William G. Fay by John Butler Yeats. Fay’s brother and collaborator was Frank J. Fay.
1. This interpolation comes at the end of “First Principles” and precedes “The Play, the Player, and the Scene.”
2. This interpolation comes at the end of “The Play, the Player, and the Scene” and precedes the date of “December, 1904.” The text of In the Shadow of the Glen begins on the next page.
1. Yeats sent a version of this letter to AE on 8 April 1904, warning him “You need do nothing about it except hold your tongue absolutely. We must not let the slightest rumour get out until we have secured our patent” (CL3 572).
2. On 29 July 1904 Annie Horniman wrote to George Roberts to thank him for forwarding the letter of acceptance, commenting “I am rather amused at the Irish lettering of some of the names & am much obliged to you for your translations” (CL3 596n1). Like his wife, Mary Walker (Máire Nic Siúbhlaigh), Frank Walker acted under his Irish name (Proinsias Mac Siúbhlaigh). The other signators not mentioned elsewhere in The Irish Dramatic Movement are James Sullivan Starkey (“Seumas O’Sullivan,” 1879–1958), poet, editor, and sometime actor (as in the 1904 production of Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters, as the Helmsman); Udolphus (“Dossie”) Wright (1887–1942), an electrician, stage manager, and sometime actor; the actress Mary Garvey (Márget Ní Ghárbhaigh, d. 1946); the actress Vera Esposito (“Emma Vernon”); Dora L. Ainnesley, a Dublin music teacher who was associated with the Irish National Theatre Society but never played in a production; George Roberts (1873–1953), a Dublin publisher active in the Irish National Theatre Society; Thomas Goodwin Keohler (after 1914, Keller), a solicitor, poet, and theosophist who had worked with the Fays since 1901; Harry F. Norman (1868–1947), a theosophist and a founder-member of the Irish National Theatre Society; and the Irish writer Stephen Gwynn (1864–1950), who in 1904 was Secretary of the Irish Literary Society. An Craoibhín Aoibhín, the pseudonym of Douglas Hyde, is usually translated “The Pleasant Little Branch.” Patrick Colm(Pádraig MacCuilim) eventually settled on Padraic Colum as his usual name.
The small capitals in the text have not been reproduced. The periods (or in one instance, a comma) after many of the signatures have also been deleted. Other corrections, including “Augusta” for “Agusta,” are listed in the “Corrections and Regularizations” section of “Textual Emendations and Corrections” (pp. 229–31).
1. Yeats’s remarks follow the reprinting of a favorable commentary on the Irish National Theatre Society by A. B. Walkley in his “Chronique Théatrale/L’Année Théatrale en Angleterre,” published in Le Temps (Paris) for 25 July 1904 (1–2). In the September 1903 issue of Samhain, Yeats had reprinted Walkey’s “The Irish National Theatre,” another favorable assessment, from The Times (London) of 8 May 1903. An editorial in The United Irishman for 17 October 1903 argued that “Irishmen as Irishmen should take no criticism from the enemy, Briton or West-Briton. And with scorn they should reject praise from either source. . . . With regret . . . we observe that Mr. W. B. Yeats includes in Samhain a flattering notice of the Irish National Theatre Society from the London Times . . .” (1).
2. The Irish journalist and politician Frank Hugh O’Donnell (1848–1916) had harshly attacked The Countess Cathleen in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal (Dublin) on 1 April 1899. This and another rejected letter were published in a pamphlet entitled Souls for Gold!: A Pseudo-Celtic Drama in Dublin (London: Nassau Press, 1899) shortly before the first production of the play on 8 May 1899. O’Donnell further attacked Yeats and his work in The Stage Irishman of the Pseudo-Celtic Drama (London: John Long, 1904). Although true to the spirit of O’Donnell’s diatribes, the quotation is not found in either publication and has not been traced. Foster incorrectly quotes the passage as a description of Yeats (209).
3. Described by Yeats as a “Hebrew saying” in “Verlaine in 1894,” published in The Savoy for April 1896 (UP1 399); presumably derived from Exodus 33.20: “thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see and live.”
1. Yeats omitted the opening of this essay from the text in The Irish Dramatic Movement. The cover of The Arrow showed a design by the Irish artist Elinor Monsell (1878–1954) of Queen Maeve, armed with a bow and arrows, and an Irish wolfhound. The design had been used on the cover of the program for the opening of the Abbey Theatre and became its crest.
2. The list consisted of The Canavans, The Gaol Gate, Hyacinth Halvey, The Rising of the Moon, Spreading the News, and The White Cockade by Lady Gregory; The Playboy of the Western World, Riders to the Sea, and The Shadow of the Glen by John Millington Synge; The Building Fund, The Eloquent Dempsy, and The Mineral Workers by William Boyle; Teach na mBocht by Douglas Hyde, translated by Lady Gregory as The Poorhouse and first produced by the National Players at the Samhain Festival in Molesworth Hall, 31 October 1905; Cathleen ni Houlihan, Deirdre, and On Baile’s Strand by Yeats; Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui, translated by Lady Gregory as The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Racine’s Les Plaideurs, “translated from the French” as The Pleaders; Fand by the English writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; and Sophocles’ Antigone, translated by Robert Gregory. It was noted that the “list includes seven Plays to be produced for the first time on any stage” ([6]). Neither Antigone nor The Pleaders was produced at this time by the Abbey Theatre.
3. The revised version of The Shadowy Waters was produced at the Abbey Theatre on 8 December 1906; Robert Gregory designed the set and supervised the lighting. The Jackdaw by Lady Gregory was produced at the Abbey Theatre on 23 February 1907; the revised version of her Kincora (1905) was produced at the Abbey Theatre on 11 February 1909. Neither Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex nor Racine’s Phèdre was produced by the Abbey Theatre at this time.
1. Presumably Standish James O’Grady; quotation untraced.
1. The Irish Peasant (Dublin), a weekly newspaper, carried a short review of the first production of Lady Gregory’s Hyacinth Halvey on 19 February 1906 in its issue for 24 February 1906. Unfortunately, the issue for 3 March 1906, which presumably included the article which Yeats quotes by “Pat” (a regular contributor), is missing from the microfilm copy in the National Library of Ireland and the British Library newspaper collection at Colindale.
1. The listing of the revival by the Abbey Theatre on 10 November 1906 of The Doctor in Spite of Himself, a translation by Lady Gregory of Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui, indicated that the play would now be “rehearsed from the directions of M. Jules Truffier, Sociétaire of the Comédie Française.” Truffier (1856–?), a French actor and dramatist, had supplied a prompt copy of the play (Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the first Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, edited by Ann Saddlemyer [University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982], 142n2).
2. In “The Deserted Abbey,” published in The Leader (Dublin) for 28 April 1906, “Chanel” (Arthur Clery) commented that “How far the ‘low comedy,’ or broad farce of the play as presented, was due to Molière, how far to Lady Gregory, and how far to the actors I cannot say, as I do not happen to have read the original. But if it be due to Molière, it is the first failure of his I have come across. Unless Lady Gregory desired to show the superiority of her own plays—and Hyacinth Halvey is a hundred times a better play—there was no special reason for producing in the Abbey Theatre a performance fit only for a pantomime or a music-hall ‘sketch’ ” (151).
3. Yeats refers to William Boyle’s The Eloquent Dempsy.
4. Yeats refers to John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea, Lady Gregory’s The Gaol Gate, and his own Cathleen ni Houlihan. The music was composed by the Irish musician Arthur Darley (1873–1929).
5. The italicized paragraphs were most likely written not by Yeats but by Frederick J. Ryan, the Secretary of the National Theatre Society, Ltd. The lack of 6d. seats had been a matter of considerable controversy from the opening of the Abbey Theatre. This italicized material is reprinted at the end of the notes in next issue of The Arrow (24 November 1906) as well.
1. Yeats is perhaps referring to the controversy over the reorganization of the Irish National Theatre Society into the Irish National Theatre Society Limited on 22 September 1905, which resulted in the departure of several of the leading actors by the end of the year. An editorial in The United Irishman for 10 March 1906, for example, complained that “The National Theatre Society, Limited, is a body run in the interest of one person, Mr. W. B. Yeats, who has proved himself capable of absorbing for his own personal ends the disinterested work of a large number of people given on the understanding that they were aiding in a work which was devoted primarily to the development of the highest interests of nationality in this country. . . . Everybody will be sorry for the conversion of our best lyric poet into a limited liability company” (1).
2. In German theatre programs a guest of the Company is usually listed with “a. G.” attached to the name, for als Gast, “as a Guest.”
3. “Miss Darragh” was the stage name of the actress Florence Laetitia Marion Dallas (d. 1917). She had played Salomé opposite Florence Farr as Herodias in a single performance of Salomé by Oscar Wilde, produced by the Literary Theatre Society in London on 10 June 1906. She had played Lady Althea in a production of The Walls of Jericho by the English dramatist Alfred Sutro (1863–1933) at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, 2 October-25 November 1905.
4. When the revised version of The Shadowy Waters was first produced at the Abbey Theatre on 8 December 1906, it was accompanied not by William Boyle’sThe Building Fund but by the first production of The Canavans by Lady Gregory (when this issue of The Arrow was printed, The Canavans was scheduled to be produced along with Deirdre on 24 November 1906). The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge was not produced until 26 January 1907, after the production of Lady Gregory’sThe White Cockade on 9 December 1906.
5. In 1876 the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) founded a theatre in Bayreuth for the production of his operas. The Arrow used a quotation from Wagner as the epigraph to each issue.
1. Lady Gregory’sCuchulain of Muirthemne was published by John Murray (London) in 1902.
2. In Greek mythology, the abduction by Paris of Helen from her husband, Menelaus, results in the Trojan War.
3. Armagh is a town and district in Ulster.
4. Arthur Darley (1873–1929) was an Irish musician. Robert Gregory (1881–1918), Lady Gregory’s son, had studied at the Slade School of Art in London.
1. The Shadowy Waters was first published in The North American Review for May 1900. A revised version was published in 1906 and an acting version in 1907.
2. The play was first produced by the Irish National Theatre Society on 14 January 1904. Yeats was in America at the time, though he was quite aware of the planned production. The reviews were not positive.
1. The following essay in this issue of Samhain, “Literature and the Living Voice,” had been published in The Contemporary Review for October 1906. By “opening of the Theatre” Yeats presumably refers to the opening of the Abbey Theatre on 27 December 1904.
2. Yeats refers to “Dates and Places of the First Performances of Plays produced by the National Theatre Society and its Predecessors” ([36]). The version from the 1908 Samhain is reprinted below (pp. 203–6).
3. Yeats refers to Sir Frank Robert Benson.
1. Yeats omitted the opening sentences of “The Controversy Over The Playboy” from the revised version of the essay in The Irish Dramatic Movement. In The Arrow, “The Controversy Over The Playboy” was followed by “Previous Attacks on Irish Writers of Comedy and Satire,” in which Yeats reprinted negative comments on John Millington Synge from The United Irishman for 11 February 1905; on William Boyle from The United Irishman for 6 May 1905; on Padraic Colum by “Pittite” from The United Irishman for 31 October 1905; and on Boyle and Synge by J. Bull from The Leader for 15 December 1906. This section was followed by “Answers to Some of the Criticisms from the ‘Samhain’ of 1905,” in which Yeats included two slightly revised sections from the 1905 Samhain.
2. William Boyle withdrew his plays from the Abbey Theatre on 31 January 1907 in protest over the production of John Millington Synge’sThe Playboy of the Western World, although he had other complaints against the Directors of the Abbey as well.
1. Yeats omitted the first two, part of the third, and the final paragraph of his speech from the excerpt included in the version of “The Controversy Over The Playboy” in The Irish Dramatic Movement. A series of disturbances occurred during the production of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World from 26 January to 2 February 1907. An open discussion of the play was held in the Abbey Theatre on 4 February 1907.
2. In a letter published in the Freeman’s Journal (Dublin) on 4 February 1907, William Boyle, quoting from William Archer, complained that “Because there is no censor in Ireland, this ‘decent-minded public’ proceeding to do what Mr. Archer calls ‘its duty,’ results in several people being denounced to the police and fined by a reluctant magistrate” (4).
3. Sinn Féin was the nationalist party.
4. The production of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen by the Irish Literary Theatre on 8 May 1899 aroused some relatively minor protests (at least in comparison to those of 1907); some police were present in the theatre.
5. Various groups were involved in celebrations to commemorate the 1798 Rebellion. Yeats was President of the ’98 Centennial Association of Great Britain and France, established by the London Young Ireland Society.
6. Presumably a group different from the thirty students at the National University of Ireland (not including James Joyce) who had published a letter attacking the play in the Freeman’s Journal for 10 May 1899.
1. All but the opening sentence of the first paragraph of “[Notes]” was included in The Irish Dramatic Movement as “On Taking The Playboy to London”; the second paragraph was not reprinted. Yeats refers to his speech published in The Arrow for 23 February 1907.
2. Yeats wrote this essay while in Italy in early May 1907. In the event, the Abbey Theatre tour of 11 May–15 June 1907 included not only The Shadowy Waters but also Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Hour-Glass, and On Baile’s Strand.
Cú Chulainn is the hero of the Ulster cycle of tales and the central figure in the Táin Bó Cuailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley).
3. Although Yeats also attributed this thought to the French writer and literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69) at least four other times, in fact it is found in Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (London: Strahan, 1863) by the Scottish writer Alexander Smith (1829–67): “And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.” Style itself is defined as “the amalgam and issue of all the mental and moral qualities in a man’s possession, and which bears the same relation to these that light bears to the mingled elements that make up the orb of the sun” (43). Smith’s remarks come in a discussion of Montaigne, which perhaps explains Yeats’s ascription to another French writer.
1. Samhain had last been published in December 1906. The Arrow had begun publication on 20 October 1906.
2. The English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1865–1940) was honored with a special matinée performance by the Abbey Theatre on 25 October 1907, after which she announced that she would return in a year to play in Yeats’s Deirdre. She fulfilled her promise by performing in a production of Deirdre at the Abbey Theatre on 9 November 1908.
3. Yeats had seen Mrs. Campbell perform in London on 1 July 1904 opposite Sarah Bernhardt in a special matinée production (in French) of Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck.
4. “Ballade of Dead Actors” by William Ernest Henley, included in his A Book of Verses (London: David Nutt, 1888).
5. Yeats’s first book (aside from an offprint of Mosada in 1886) was The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.), published in January 1899. Holborn Viaduct is in London. Yeats retold this anecdote about William Morris in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), where he has Morris saying “You write my sort of poetry” (Au 135). An earlier version read “it is my kind of poetry” (Mem 21).
6. Yeats refers to “Matters Theatrical” in the Freeman’s Journal (Dublin) for 18 September 1908. The first quotation is inaccurate: the paper rather noted that “the Abbey seems destined to be the only stand-by left to us.” In the second quotation, which is accurate, the passage which Yeats omitted reads “. . . to lose, if warring actors and authors are to be brought together again, under a judicious management, to make the little theatre the permanent home of an intellectual Irish drama. Should these hopes not be fulfilled, would it . . .” (6).
7. Yeats refers to The Piper by the Irish writer “Norreys Connell,” the pen name of Conal Holmes O’Connell O’Riordan (1874–1948), and to John Millington’s Synge’sThe Shadow of the Glen, The Well of the Saints, and The Playboy of the Western World.The attack on The Shadow of the Glen was led by The United Irishman.
8. After their departure from the Abbey Theatre, William G. Fay, the Irish actress Brigit O’Dempsey (Fay’s wife), and Frank J. Fay undertook an American tour, under the sponsorship of Charles Frohman (1860–1915), an American manager and producer. They had permission to perform Lady Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon, Yeats’s The Pot of Broth, and AE’s Deirdre. Frohman was responsible for the false billing of the Company as the “Irish National Theatre Company,” although the Fays did not protest.
9. The play by William Boyle was The Building Fund.
10. The Fays resigned from the Abbey Theatre on 13 January 1908. Yeats’s letter was published in The Dublin Evening Mail for 14 January 1908 and in various newspapers on 15 January 1908, including the Irish Times (8).
11. The English actor and director William Poel (1852–1934) was the founder of the Elizabethan Stage Society. He recruited the Irish actress Sara Allgood (1883–1950) to appear in a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure by Annie Horniman’s Company. This was produced at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, on 11–18 April 1908, and at Stratford-on-Avon on 21–22 April 1908. Allgood had joined the Company in 1903. She performed in the first production of Lady Gregory’s Dervorgilla on 31 October 1907 and, among other roles, in revivals of Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, such as that on 19 February 1906.
An errata slip in later issues of the 1908 Samhain indicated that “Measure for Measure was not produced by the Elizabethan Stage Society, as stated in mistake on page 4, but by Miss Horniman’s company, in the Elizabethan fashion, with Mr. Poel as producer.”
12. On 30 March 1907, the Ulster Literary Theatre had performed at the Abbey Theatre The Pagan by “Lewis Purcell” (David Parkhill) and The Turn of the Road by the Irish actor and playwright “Rutherford Mayne” (Samuel Waddell, 1878–1967). Yeats was in London when the Ulster Literary Theatre again performed at the Abbey Theatre, on 24 April 1908.
13. The play was perhaps The Passing of the Third Floor Back by the English playwright and novelist Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859–1927), which had opened at the St. James’s Theatre in London on 1 September 1908 and ran until 13 February 1909. As noted by the reviewer in The Times (London) for 2 September 1908, the play takes place in “an ugly, squalid household” in a “vulgar London boarding-house” (11). Yeats may have decided to attend because of the presence in the cast of the English actor and manager Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson (1853–1937). A Mannequin d’Osier is a wicker mannequin.
14. The Corsican Brothers (1848) was adapted from the French of the novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas père (1802–70), by the Irish actor and writer Dion Boucicault (1820–90). Yeats may be referring to the production at the Adelphi Theatre in London, 9 September–3 October 1908.
15. Though many writers had made this argument, Yeats may be thinking of Shelley’s comment in The Defence of Poetry (1821; published 1840) that “it was as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.”
16. Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui was translated by Lady Gregory as The Doctor in Spite of Himself. Kiltartan is a barony near Coole Park; “Kiltartanese” refers to the style of speech in most of Lady Gregory’s plays.
17. The Independent Dramatic Company was founded in 1908 by a Polish artist, Casimir Dunin, Count de Markiewicz (1874–1932), who in 1900 had married the Irish artist and politician Constance Gore-Booth (1868–1927). On 9 March 1908 the Company had performed Count Markiewicz’s Seymour’s Redemption at the Abbey Theatre. The Theatre of Ireland was established on 13 June 1906, largely by individuals who had left the Abbey Theatre. On 22–23 May 1908 the Theatre of Ireland had performed at the Abbey Theatre The Miracle of the Corn by Padraic Colum, Maeve by Edward Martyn, and The Enthusiast by Lewis Purcell.
18. The 22–23 May 1908 performances by the Theatre of Ireland were on a Friday and Saturday. The Independent Dramatic Company was scheduled to perform at the Abbey Theatre on Thursday to Saturday, 3–5 December 1908.
19. Robert Emmet by the Irish writer Henry Connell Mangan was first performed by the National Players Society at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, on 31 October 1903; The United Irishman for 7 November 1903 described it as “the best Irish historical play staged” (1). The revival which Yeats attended has not been traced. St. Cecilia’s Hall is apparently an error for St. Teresa’s Hall, the site of numerous dramatic productions.
20. In addition to Thomas Davis, Yeats refers to John Mitchel (1815–75), Irish writer and patriot.
1. After this introductory paragraph, Yeats supplied revised texts for Deirdre, lines 149ff. and 289ff., with instructions for their placement. An almost identical text, with one additional change, appeared in Alterations in Deirdre, also published in November 1908 and inserted in the published copies of the play. Both passages were later subject to further revision.
1. This list is expanded from that first published in the 1906 Samhain and then updated as Appendix IV in volume IV of The Collected Works in Verse & Prose (Stratford-on-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1908). That Yeats compiled these lists is uncertain but not likely. What is almost surely the first state of the cover of the 1906 Samhain described the issue as “An Occasional Review, Edited by W. B. Yeats, containing Hyacinth Halvey by Lady Gregory, and Thoughts upon the Work of the Abbey Theatre, with list of plays produced by the National Theatre Society and its forerunners, by the Editor. Published in December, 1906, by Maunsel & Co., Ltd., Dublin; and sold for sixpence net.” What is presumably the second state reads “. . . Abbey Theatre, by the Editor, with list of plays produced by the National Theatre Society and its forerunners. The Sixth Number. Published by Maunsel & Co., Ltd., Dublin; and sold for sixpence.” It thus seems that Yeats was correcting the ascription of the list to himself. In any case, though, Yeats was responsible for the note to the 1908 Samhain version as well as the two paragraphs at the end of the Collected Works text: “In addition to these plays, many of which are constantly revived, translations of foreign masterpieces are given occasionally”; and “It was not until the opening of the Abbey Theatre that Lady Gregory, Mr. J. M. Synge, and Mr. W. B. Yeats became entirely responsible for the selection of plays, though they had been mainly so from 1903.”
The number and variety of textual problems in this list has called for rather extensive regularization. For example, most of the authors’ names end with a period, but some end with a comma or have no punctuation; all have been revised to end with a period. The 1900 publications have been listed in chronological order. Abbreviated names of the months have been expanded, and “By/by” has been resolved in favor of “by.” Although changes of such nature have not been recorded, corrections such as “Yeats” rather than “Yeates” are included in the “Corrections and Regularizations” section of “Textual Emendations and Corrections” (pp. 229–31). Three errors in dating and one other revision have been treated as specific emendations.
2. Incorrect. The production of Peter T. MacGinley’s Eilis agus an Bhean Déirce (Lizzie and the Beggarwoman) by the Daughters of Erin at the Antient Concert Rooms on 27 August 1901 has been overlooked (possibly the second production, but the first in Dublin).
3. Frederick Ryan was the Secretary of the Irish National Theatre Society.
1. The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet by George Bernard Shaw had been refused a license for production in England by the Lord Chamberlain, Charles Robert Spencer, Viscount Althorp (1857–1922), in his capacity as ex officio President of the Advisory Board for Censorship of Plays. It was then accepted by the Abbey Theatre and first produced there on 25 August 1909. Several Dublin newspapers had printed a statement by Yeats and Lady Gregory about the controversy on Saturday, 21 August 1909.
2. George Alexander Redford (d. 1916) was the Lord Chamberlain’s Reader of Plays. The Lord Lieutenant was John Campbell Hamilton Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen (1847–1934). William James Walsh (1841–1921) had been Archbishop of Dublin since 1885. The Dublin Horse Show, held each August, was a major social event. The English monarch was Edward VII (1841–1910).
3. The paper was The Nation (London), which had published on 29 May 1909 an essay supporting Shaw and attacking the censorship, reprinted in this issue of The Arrow.
4. The question of the censorship of plays was currently under discussion in the English Parliament.
1. After this sentence, Yeats printed an except from a letter by Shaw of 22 August 1909, followed by an essay supporting Shaw and attacking the censorship from The Nation (London) for 29 May 1909.
1. Shaw’s play was The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet.
1. Indeed, the 20 October 1906 Arrow begins “I have been so busy finishing Deirdre, a play in verse, that I have put off Samhain for a month or so. . . .”
2. Except for pages 121, 123, 125, and 127, which use as running head “THE UNITED IRISHMAN: 1903.”
3. Yeats was never quite content with this passage. When he reprinted part of the 1905 Samhain in The Arrow for 23 February 1907, he tried “weighed down by the conventional idealism.”
4. The compositor of Plays and Controversies would of course have had no way of knowing which page breaks coincided with a paragraph space and which did not, and apparently Yeats did not concern himself with the issue when reading proofs.
5. SR xxviii. As printed in the second edition, the last sentence makes no sense, and it was not corrected in the inserted Corrigenda. The material provided in brackets is taken from The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Phillip L. Marcus, Warwick Gould, and Michael J. Sidnell (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), xxix. The second edition corrects some errors, adds some information, and revises the order of the editors.
6. The red ink correction is cited in “Textual Emendations and Corrections.”
7. See SR xlii n46: “Mrs. Thomas Mark very kindly examined the pencilled notes, but could not say conclusively that any of them had been made by her husband.” Nevertheless, there are two or three queries in pencil that, to judge from the size of the hand, may be by Mark. But the crucial point is that Yeats did not respond to those queries; thus the possibility that they were present on the proofs when he reviewed them is altogether unlikely.
8. Although the proofs may have arrived later on 6 July 1932, Mark had not received them (sent under separate cover) when he acknowledged receipt of Yeats’s letter of the previous day (BL 55730/301); and the revised set of proofs was printed in Edinburgh on 8 July 1932 (SR xxxviii n44). As one does not imagine the printers of R. & R. Clark anxiously awaiting the arrival of The Flying Scotsman at Waverley Station on the morning of 8 July 1932, the proofs must have been on their way from London to Edinburgh no later than early on 7 July 1932.
9. Mrs. Yeats apparently did not return the 1931–32 proofs of Mythologies to Macmillan after she had received them in late June 1939, so Sutherland’s comments could not have been made thereafter.
10. These proofs have the same problem with the running heads as in Plays and Controversies and make further errors in the spacing between sections.
11. Mark would surely have reviewed and corrected the proofs of Essays before sending them to Mrs. Yeats on 26 June 1939. When a new proof of The Irish Dramatic Movement section was required because of the addition of the essay from the 1908 Samhain, Mark would simply have transferred his corrections to the new proof and also corrected the added essay, with the prospect of quickly sending this fourth proof to Mrs. Yeats.
12. Admittedly, one of the editors has argued elsewhere, especially in “Text and Interpretation in the Poems of W. B. Yeats,” Representing Modernist Texts, ed. George Bornstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 17–47, against the theory of “delegation”—i.e., that Yeats relied on his wife and Thomas Mark to tidy up his texts and that therefore their posthumous editing of the canon should be accepted. But leaving aside Emerson on consistency, the question of “First Principles” seems a special case, for at least three reasons: 1) the near simultaneous publication of volume four of the Collected Works and the 1908 Samhain; 2) the strong possibility that Yeats used sheets from the Collected Works as copy for the next printing; and 3) the apparent fact that he did not retain a copy of the 1908 Samhain in his library (certainly none was present in 1939, as Mrs. Yeats indicated in her 9 July 1939 letter to Mark, nor did the later inventory of the library by Edward O’Shea disclose one). On balance, then, the omission of “First Principles” seems an oversight rather than a considered judgment.
13. 13. Doubtless the first paragraph of “Events” would have been omitted. Yeats would presumably have also altered the title “First Principles,” as a 1904 essay of that name was already included in The Irish Dramatic Movement.
1. Although Mark retired in 1959 and was replaced by Lovat Dickson, he continued to consult on Yeats editions; the precise extent of his involvement with Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962) is unknown. The errors in the 1962 edition begin opposite the first page of text, where Yeats’s commentary on The Irish Dramatic Movement from the 1931–32 proofs is offered as a “Note”: the reference to “this volume” is incorrectly glossed as “[Plays and Controversies]” (p. [72]). Various errors continue until the final item in The Irish Dramatic Movement, where the last name of Walter Morse Rummel is given correctly on page 256 but as “Rummell” a page earlier.
2. On the Edition de Luxe proofs, Mark had placed “italics?” in the margin after “SAMHAIN: 1901.” Yeats at first canceled the notation and wrote “not italics unless I put the title on page,” but he then canceled his comment and wrote “Italics” in the margin. Yeats also accepted Mark’s suggested italics on THE ARROW.