Modernists and the Theatre

The Drama of W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf

James Moran

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350145504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik im Drama

Modernists and the Theatre examines how six key modernists, who are best known as poets and novelists, engaged with the realm of theatre and performance. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archival material and fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran demonstrates how these literary figures interacted with the playhouse, exploring W.B. Yeats's earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound's onstage acting, the links between James Joyce's and D.H. Lawrence's sense of drama, T.S. Eliot's thinking about theatrical popularity, and the feminist politics of Virginia Woolf's small-scale theatrical experimentation. While these modernists often made hostile comments about drama, this volume highlights how the writers were all repeatedly drawn to the form. While Yeats and Pound were fascinated by the controlling aspect of theatre, other authors felt inspired by theatre as a democratic forum in which dissenting voices could be heard. Some of these modernists used theatre to express and explore identities that had previously been sidelined in the public forum, including the working-class mining communities of Lawrence's plays, the sexually unconventional and non-binary gender expressions of Joyce's fiction, and the female experience that Woolf sought to represent and discuss in terms of theatrical performance. These writers may be known primarily for creating non-dramatic texts, but this book demonstrates the importance of the theatre to the activities of these authors, and shows how a sense of the theatrical repeatedly motivated the wider thinking and writing of six major figures in literary history.

1

W.B. Yeats: Theatre and Shakespearean elitism

Reveries over childhood and youth

A concern with the theatre runs through W.B. Yeats’s long literary career. During his twenties, Yeats declared that he could ‘read almost anything which is written in dramatic form’.¹ As his ambitions widened in his thirties, he wrote that the ‘one thing I most wish to do is drama’.² During his forties, he boasted that human consciousness became clear to him ‘only by watching my own plays’.³ By his fifties, he declared more stridently: ‘I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a dramatist; I desire to show events and not merely tell of them’.⁴ Then, towards the end of his life, he published ‘An Introduction for my Plays’, stating that ‘I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung’.⁵ As David R. Clark puts it, ‘Yeats was a dramatist first’.⁶

Scholars have therefore tended to select a variety of different chronological starting points when examining Yeats’s dramatic ideas. A number of studies begin in 1899, when Yeats inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre with his play The Countess Cathleen.⁷ Other critics look later in Yeats’s career for the real significance of his drama, with David Holdeman observing that only in 1916 did Yeats ‘truly realize’ his ‘proto-minimalist vision of dramatic performance’.⁸ Anthony Roche makes a good case for regarding the first staging of Cathleen ni Houlihan on 2 April 1902 as the moment that ‘began for Yeats the history of collaboration with theatre makers that was to persist throughout the rest of his life’.⁹ However, as this chapter will show, Yeats had a long and less familiar history of theatrical collaboration before those dates. In the nineteenth century the author engaged in a process of dramatic exploration and network-building that had profound effects both on his own work and on the efforts of other theatrically minded modernists. By tracing Yeats’s concerns from his teenage years until the dawn of the twentieth century, we find a number of his key fascinations developing: with Shakespeare, with the performances of Florence Farr, and with the small-scale and the unpopular. Those concerns would repeatedly motivate Yeats’s dramatic thinking during his more mature stages of life.

Yeats’s instinct for live performance kicked in early. His sister Lily remembered that, as children, ‘We acted. We loved dressing up and had a sheet we hung across the room and did shadow plays. Willy was serious about it’.¹⁰ She also recalled her father’s encouragement: if she went ‘even to the letterbox at the end of the road, Papa expected to hear descriptions, adventures’.¹¹ As John Butler Yeats advised his son, ‘I believe poets will ultimately find their salvation in writing plays for the public theatre. In this medium the greatest poets have worked’.¹² Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, as soon as ‘Willy’ began writing at about the age of fifteen or sixteen, he understood ‘poetry’ to mean drama.

In those teenage years, Yeats began, as he later put it, ‘to write poetry in imitation of Shelley and of Edmund Spenser, play after play – for my father exalted dramatic poetry above all other kinds – and I invented fantastic and incoherent plots’.¹³ In addition, Yeats befriended the future editor of the New York Evening Sun Frederick Gregg, and the two set about devising verse drama when Yeats was about sixteen years old.¹⁴ After that, Yeats’s family grew accustomed to the ‘humming’ noise of Yeats penning his poetry, which demanded a compositional technique that, as R.F. Foster puts it, anticipated ‘the importance of chanting and invocation in his later work’.¹⁵

Yeats’s youthful discovery of drama accompanied his burgeoning sexual feelings. At the age of fifteen he visited the seaside, where he piled sand over his groin and then felt startled and disturbed to experience his first orgasm. After this, he felt left in ‘a continual struggle’ against the compulsion to masturbate – his hand twitching between his pen and his penis – and was thus primed, at the age of seventeen, to develop a powerful desire for his distant cousin, Laura Armstrong.¹⁶ She was about three years older than him, and according to A. Norman Jeffares: ‘He first saw her driving a dog-cart, her red hair flowing in the wind; he found her very attractive. She corresponded with him, signing her letters “Vivien”’.¹⁷ Yeats responded by writing drama for Armstrong, including a verse play in two acts called Vivien and Time, which he drafted between autumn 1882 and January 1884. The eighteen-year-old Yeats then rehearsed and staged the piece, with Laura playing the title role, at a judge’s house in Dublin.¹⁸

The audience for that first 1884 performance of Yeats’s drama initially saw only the author himself onstage, playing the lovesick character Clarin. Like a version of Orsino in Twelfth Night, Yeats sat and moaned in a thoroughly over-the-top way about his love for a Countess, whilst holding a ‘zittar’ in his hand. Armstrong then entered the scene, in the part of Vivien, and, upon immediately seeing Clarin, gave the exclamation, ‘A[h] most wondrous!’, a line filched from the love-struck Olivia at the end of Twelfth Night.¹⁹ The Shakespearean effect of this opening was bolstered by the prologue, in which Yeats dedicated the work to Laura Armstrong by comparing her to characters from The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.²⁰ As David R. Clark suggests, this first Yeats production – in its selective use of theatrical masks, its theme of lovers who desire one another but are kept apart, and its poetic language of ‘shadow’ and ‘souls’ – anticipates Yeats’s later Noh-style dramas.²¹

Sans Eyes

During the mid-to-late 1880s, Yeats also began an unfinished play – perhaps conceived as two plays – to which he gave various titles including Blind, The Epic of the Forest, and The Village of the Elms.²² This work remains unpublished, and exists only in an unruly manuscript at the National Library of Ireland. But this fragmented text again reveals just how extensively Yeats had been affected by Shakespeare. Indeed, one of Yeats’s proposed titles was lifted from As You Like It: at one stage he wished to call his play Sans Eyes. The rest of the material is also peppered with quasi-Shakespearean moments. For instance, Yeats creates his own version of the opening of Hamlet, where the spooked guards of Elsinore fear an apparition. In Yeats’s text we find the following:

First Trooper

Who goes there

3 Trooper

A friend

First Trooper

The pass word

3 Trooper

Alvar

2nd Trooper

What have you there

3 Trooper

I was busy trying to sleep in a hollow

of the cliff when I heard something moving and

howling well it was a spirit I started hither

and as I came round a turn of the path

I saw a white faced girl standing

beside a barrel cask of wine and I

for my hair was standing with fear

of the spirits would have fled [. . .]²³

At other times, Yeats’s script moves closer to King Lear. For example, the following passage recalls Lear’s denunciation of Goneril and Regan:

My curse upon their tawny hands

Light though my curse upon be sudden on their tawny brows

Curl up their skin

Send whirls of withering hail

On all springs blossoming, and draw

The black rot down

On dear dropped lambs

On the green globe of the young grape draw down the flies²⁴

Yeats later reflected on how an early exposure to Shakespeare influenced both his behaviour and his playwriting, declaring:

Some people say I have an affected manner, and if that is true, as it may well be, it is because my father took me when I was ten or eleven to Irving’s famous Hamlet. Years afterwards I walked the Dublin streets when nobody was looking, or nobody that I knew, with that strut Gordon Craig has compared to a movement in a dance, and made the characters I created speak with his brooding, broken wildness.²⁵

Yeats fails to estimate how many years he spent wandering around Dublin secretly doing his impersonations of Irving’s Hamlet, but does acknowledge that the influence was manifest in his stage characters as well as his own ‘affected’ manner.

Love and Death

Shortly after performing in Vivien and Time, the eighteen-year-old Yeats penned another play that has never been printed, the complete piece Love and Death.²⁶ This drama, finished in April 1884, is a tragedy about a twelfth-century princess who loves a malign kind of god called the ‘spirit hunter’, and under his influence is persuaded to commit a series of crimes, including sororicide and patricide. Once again, the play looks to Shakespeare, and is suffused with quotations from a broad range of his plays, although the principal debt is to Macbeth. Towards the beginning of Love and Death, Yeats presents three ghostly characters who predict future events and whose ghoulish rhyming couplets recall Shakespeare’s weird sisters.²⁷ There follow a number of linguistic parallels with Macbeth, before the close of Love and Death occurs in a royal banqueting hall, where, as with Shakespeare’s scene of Banquo’s ghost, there is an attempt to toast the ‘health’ of the assembly, although the monarch is a murderer who can now see an invisible spirit to whom everyone else in the hall remains oblivious.²⁸

The teenage Yeats had yet to plunge himself wholeheartedly into occult studies, but in Love and Death he took the subversive step of contrasting powerful and efficacious Shakespearean ghosts with the inadequacy of orthodox religious belief. At one point Yeats portrays a woman commenting ‘holy Mary be thou merciful’ and praying with rosary beads, only to have this character dismissed as one of the ‘fools’ who ‘talk of lofty things ye know not of’.²⁹ Here, in embryo, is the playwright who would look beyond conventional forms of Christianity for meaning and who would denounce Irish middle-class Catholicism as the religion of those who ‘fumble in a greasy till’.³⁰ Furthermore, this Shakespeare-inspired play Love and Death includes another significant poetic portent. When the princess at the heart of the drama is told that she is ‘far too fond of solitude’, she replies:

And I would like to live afar from here

Not great nor poor but rich enough for peace

In that bright land where old storks bring their young

Away from winter winds and winters woes

And I would have for lord some peaceful man

Who loved the people and their way and works

And he would build for me a home of brick³¹

This verse prefigures ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which Yeats wrote four years later, in December 1888, and which would become the urtext of Celtic poetic wistfulness. But here, in Love and Death, the poetry has no Irish context at all. Rather, Yeats envisaged the lines being spoken aloud by a princess who is about to launch on a killing spree and whose escapist vision ultimately involves, at the end of the play, a suicidal union with a phantom ‘of superhuman size’.³²

The Island of Statues

After Love and Death, Yeats then wrote another play for his cousin, Laura Armstrong, this time explicitly about a magical lake-isle. In fact, this play, The Island of Statues, was the first work by Yeats to be published, appearing in 1885. This time he intended Armstrong to play the part of an enchantress, the lead character who lives on the island, turns visitors to stone, and guards a special flower that has magical properties.³³ Yet, once again, Yeats’s play recalls Shakespeare’s work. At one point, Yeats’s enchantress falls in love with a female character who is attired as a male shepherd, mirroring the predicament of Olivia and Viola in Twelfth Night (Yeats’s enchantress even asks the cross-dressed character ‘Let me gaze on thee’, in an echo of Viola’s ‘let me see thy face’).³⁴ Elsewhere, Yeats’s fairy describes ‘the canker-worm on a milk-white rose’ just as Shakespeare’s sonnet 95 describes ‘a canker in the fragrant rose’.³⁵ Meanwhile, the knights who are trapped as statues on the island of Yeats’s play are revived in a way that recalls t...