Yale Elizabethan Club, a literary and social club for Yale University undergraduates, founded in 1911 with the support of Alexander Smith Cochran, who donated the nucleus of a library of Tudor and Stuart literary texts, including the entire collection of Shakespeare folios, *quartos, and *apocryphal plays formerly owned by Alfred Huth.
Susan Brock
Yale Shakespeare. This American pocket edition of the individual works started to appear in 1918, and a revised series was issued beginning in 1954. It was advanced for its time in featuring texts based where possible on the early quartos, and in adding no stage or scene divisions not in the original texts. It also preserved original lineation and punctuation as far as was practicable in a modernized edition.
R. A. Foakes
yard, the uncovered space around the stage at the open-air Renaissance playhouses. Spectators who stood in the yard paid the least to enter (usually 1 penny) and, at the cost of tired legs, had the best view. If rain started during a performance those in the yard were probably allowed to enter the galleries for the usual additional penny. Puns on the yard’s occupants and their intelligence are common, ranging from the mild ‘understanders’ to Hamlet’s *‘groundlings’ (3.2.11) which, as well as referring to the fact that they stand on the ground, may intentionally liken them to the ground-feeding fish of the same name which have large mouths and small bodies.
Gabriel Egan
Yates, Dame Frances Amelia (1899–1981), English academic, author of a long series of learned studies of the English and European Renaissance, particularly in areas of secret, occult, and recondite knowledge, such as The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979). Other works throw new light on the intellectual and philosophical background to Shakespeare’s plays, including theories of the Elizabethan stage: New Light on the Globe Theater (1966); The Art of Memory (1966); The Theatre of the World (1969); Astraea (1975); and Shakespeare’s Last Plays (1975).
Tom Matheson
Yates, Mary Ann (1728–87), English actress. She first acted at *Drury Lane with *Garrick in 1753 and subsequently played many Shakespearian heroines including Portia, Rosalind, Viola, Imogen, and Cleopatra, and Julia to her comedian husband’s Lance in Benjamin Victor’s adaptation of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1762). Famed for her dignified playing, she was painted as the Tragic Muse by *Romney, and as Volumnia for *Bell’s Shakespeare.
Catherine Alexander
Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), Irish poet and playwright, ‘the voice of Irish cultural consciousness coming to maturity’ (Roy Foster). The most obvious immediate influences on Yeats’s poetry are Blake, Maeterlinck, and the French symbolists; and on his plays the Noh tradition of Japan. But his attempt, with Lady Gregory and others, to establish an Irish Literary (later National) Theatre in Dublin, 1899, with Irish plays on Irish subjects, seems to reproduce something of Shakespeare’s patriotic creation of a similar English national identity through the use of native history, legend, and folklore. Yeats’s painter father read to him from boyhood, including Shakespeare, and he learned ‘to set certain passages in Shakespeare above all else in literature’. In his own essays on a literature beyond realism (a literature of symbolism, myth, and allegory), Yeats frequently takes Shakespeare as illustration and touchstone, as in ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ (1901), where Yeats refers to what he calls ‘Shakespeare’s myth’: ‘a wise man who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from his place, and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness’. Yeats’s earlier poems frequently echo Shakespearian phraseology, as well as receiving from the tragedies a series of fatalistic gestures in the face of heroic death; later poems of rage and madness in old age (much information about which comes from unpublished letters to his close woman friend Mrs Olivia Shakespear) certainly conjure images reminiscent of King Lear and the Fool.
Tom Matheson
Yonge, Bartholomew. See Montemayor, Jorge de.
Yorick is the name of the late King of Denmark’s long-deceased jester, whose skull Hamlet picks up, Hamlet 5.1.179. His much-quoted line on doing so, ‘Alas, poor Yorick…’ (5.1.180), has made this the most famous posthumous bit-part in world literature: one bardolater (André Tchaikowsky, a distinguished composer and pianist) even bequeathed his own skull to the RSC in the hopes of playing it after death.
Anne Button
York, Archbishop of. (1) Richard III. See Cardinal; Rotherham, Thomas. (2) In 1 Henry IV he joins Northumberland’s rebellion, but in 2 Henry IV he is tricked by Prince John into dismissing his forces (4.1) and executed (based on Richard le Scrope (c. 1350–1405)).
Anne Button
York, Duchess of. (1) Cicely Neville (1415–95) grieves for her sons Clarence and Edward IV (Richard III 2.2), but curses her other son King Richard 4.4.184–96. (2) She pleads for the life of her son Aumerle first with her husband York, Richard II 5.2, and then with King Henry, 5.3 (unhistorical).
Anne Button
York, Duke of. (1) For Richard Plantagenet (1411–60), 3rd Duke of York, see Henry VI Part 1; The First Part of the Contention; Richard Duke of York. (2) See Edward, Earl of March. (3) Edward Plantagenet (1373–1415), elder brother of Richard, Earl of Cambridge, and uncle to the Duke of York of the Henry VI plays, appears under the name of Duke of Aumerle in Richard II. As Duke of York in Henry V he is given the honour of leading the vanguard at Agincourt (4.3.130–2) but dies on the field (4.6.3–8). (4) Edmund de Langley (1341–1402) is depicted as an old man who finds his responsibilities as regent in Richard II burdensome. His support for Richard dwindles and it is he who announces his abdication and first hails Bolingbroke as King Henry (4.1.98–103). Despite the protestations of his wife the Duchess of York, he denounces his son Aumerle to King Henry, 5.3. (5) for Richard (1472–83), see Edward, Prince.
Anne Button
York, Mayor of. See Mayor of York.
Yorkshire Tragedy, A, a tragedy based on real-life murders committed in Yorkshire in 1605, which was included (among other *apocryphal works) in the *Third Folio, probably because Pavier and *Jaggard had published it as Shakespeare’s in 1608 and 1619. It is now attributed to Thomas *Middleton.
Sonia Massai
Young, Charles Mayne (1777–1856), English actor, less majestical than J. P. *Kemble, less passionate than Edmund *Kean, who made an impressive London debut as Hamlet (1807). Equally accomplished in comedy and tragedy, he played Falstaff, Cassius, Iago, and Macbeth.
Richard Foulkes
Young Cato. See Cato, Young.
Young Lucius. See Lucius, Young.
Young Siward. See Siward, Young.
Your Own Thing (1968), American rock *musical based on Twelfth Night; book by Donald Driver, music and lyrics by Hal Hester and Danny Apolinar. This curious specimen of psychedelic kitsch includes twelve numbers, some, such as ‘Coming Away, Death’, directly from songs in the play.
Tom Matheson
‘You spotted snakes’, the lullaby sung by the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.2.9. The original music is unknown; the only well-known setting is *Mendelssohn’s ‘Bunte Schlangen’ (1843), from his incidental music to the play.
Jeremy Barlow