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The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats
s/t: new edition with five additional plays
The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), The Pot of Broth (1904), The King's Threshold (1904), The Shadowy Waters (1911), Deirdre (1907), The Green Helmet (1910), On Baile's Strand (1904), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), The Hour-Glass (1914), The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), The Player Queen (1922), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), Calvary (1920), The Cat and the Moon (1926), Sophocles' King Oedipus (1928), Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (1934), The Resurrection (1931), The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1934), A Full Moon in March (1935), The Herne's Egg (1938), Purgatory (1939), The Death of Cuchulain (1939)
The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), The Pot of Broth (1904), The King's Threshold (1904), The Shadowy Waters (1911), Deirdre (1907), The Green Helmet (1910), On Baile's Strand (1904), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), The Hour-Glass (1914), The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), The Player Queen (1922), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), Calvary (1920), The Cat and the Moon (1926), Sophocles' King Oedipus (1928), Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (1934), The Resurrection (1931), The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1934), A Full Moon in March (1935), The Herne's Egg (1938), Purgatory (1939), The Death of Cuchulain (1939)
446 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1953
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About the author
W.B. Yeats
1,978 books2,543 followersWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 4, 2009
Yeats really is a talented poeet, this could not be argued against by many with much success. However when it comes to writing plays, Yeats beautiful lyrical style of poetry does not translate well to stage drama. Yeats says of these plays in the introduction that they are for readers as well as hearers, though I cannot imagine many doing well in either format. The Land of the Heart's Desire is however quite enjoyable.
December 31, 2014
You can see my edits of Yeats' plays here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
November 24, 2022
A not-very-read volume, not sure why; perhaps because many of these plays are very difficult, less from 'obscure' prose and more from the sheer incoherency behind Yeats' intentions. Often it's pretty difficult to figure out what he meant by all this, and why he'd take so much time working on these ridiculous masques, farces and romantic hallucinations -- a big chunk of these are from approximately 1895 to 1915, where he otherwise poetized very little. His hope was that these translucent, histrionic mythopaeics would speak to the average Irish theatre-goer, that the gaelicized verse mangled out of Milton, Shelley and Blake would awaken the latent Celtic consciousness, and that all others would come to partake in his pointed spiritual obsessions with Cuchulain, Oisin and other favorite folkloreisms. In a way it did, but more due to his compatriots Synge and Lady Gregory and Maud Gonne, both for her theatrical rhetoric and for her incitations to riot -- indeed it is she whom many of these plays are really about.
Indeed many of these arise as psychodramas involving the symbology of the fatalist poet, the immanent wilderness (mythological figures, lurking apocalypses, violent politics), and the woman who symbolized Ireland to everyone and merely Gonne to Yeats. My thesis has been that the Irish revival as a whole was a mere catalyst to Yeats in his monomanic love for Gonne (hence the darker, 'polite meaningless words' politics of Yeats post-marriage). In the Countess Cathleen and Deirdre, written in the peak years of Gonnemania this drama unfolds, as in a countless number of short single-act mirages; the King's Threshold forgoes the woman for the symbol of the eschatological poet surrounded by the blind horrors of the political. Only in old age, with the ridiculous Herne's Egg, does he create such a one with a proper conclusion -- no artist but the comic ineptitude of the King Congal contrasted with the zoophile high priestess, gatekeeper of all the mythos (this being Yeats' liminal belief all his life, but one he could only understand after having escaped his decades of bachelorhood), and the nonsense victory of the birdlover lady is cast comically, and not hysterically like tragedies of the self-lamenting virgin Yeats.
Some other things -- almost-imitations of Shaw (Unicorn from the Stars) and Synge (Player Queen), a number of Noh plays eagerly extrapolated from Ezra Pound's thoughts, half a dozen attempts at a coherent tragedy about Cuchulain -- all (save for a single Seance play about the resurrected amours of Jonathan Swift) taking place in the same fabulist atmosphere, wild visions, liebestods, inserted songs and bizarre costumes. I don't think he ever gets it quite right, too non-commital, too reliant on staging and (hopefully) receptive audiences, too similar to the solipsist attitude of the poet that never works in poetic plays. Perhaps I am too critical -- these are still fascinating and memorable to read, microcosmic puppet plays of the same conflicts abstractly faced in Yeats' poems proper ... in this way they're like Eliot's plays. Perhaps in a world where these were read as often and widely as mr Yeats would have liked, we would resultingly have the collective magic in our psyches to appreciate this. One perne on its own does not make a gyre.
Indeed many of these arise as psychodramas involving the symbology of the fatalist poet, the immanent wilderness (mythological figures, lurking apocalypses, violent politics), and the woman who symbolized Ireland to everyone and merely Gonne to Yeats. My thesis has been that the Irish revival as a whole was a mere catalyst to Yeats in his monomanic love for Gonne (hence the darker, 'polite meaningless words' politics of Yeats post-marriage). In the Countess Cathleen and Deirdre, written in the peak years of Gonnemania this drama unfolds, as in a countless number of short single-act mirages; the King's Threshold forgoes the woman for the symbol of the eschatological poet surrounded by the blind horrors of the political. Only in old age, with the ridiculous Herne's Egg, does he create such a one with a proper conclusion -- no artist but the comic ineptitude of the King Congal contrasted with the zoophile high priestess, gatekeeper of all the mythos (this being Yeats' liminal belief all his life, but one he could only understand after having escaped his decades of bachelorhood), and the nonsense victory of the birdlover lady is cast comically, and not hysterically like tragedies of the self-lamenting virgin Yeats.
Some other things -- almost-imitations of Shaw (Unicorn from the Stars) and Synge (Player Queen), a number of Noh plays eagerly extrapolated from Ezra Pound's thoughts, half a dozen attempts at a coherent tragedy about Cuchulain -- all (save for a single Seance play about the resurrected amours of Jonathan Swift) taking place in the same fabulist atmosphere, wild visions, liebestods, inserted songs and bizarre costumes. I don't think he ever gets it quite right, too non-commital, too reliant on staging and (hopefully) receptive audiences, too similar to the solipsist attitude of the poet that never works in poetic plays. Perhaps I am too critical -- these are still fascinating and memorable to read, microcosmic puppet plays of the same conflicts abstractly faced in Yeats' poems proper ... in this way they're like Eliot's plays. Perhaps in a world where these were read as often and widely as mr Yeats would have liked, we would resultingly have the collective magic in our psyches to appreciate this. One perne on its own does not make a gyre.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews