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Michael Valdez Moses

Modernism/modernity, Volume 11, Number 3, September 2004, pp.

561-579 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2004.0065

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v011/11.3moses.html

Access provided by University College London (UCL) (15 Jul 2014 14:32 GMT)

MOSES /

the rebirth of tragedy

561

The Rebirth of Tragedy:

Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National
Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of
Cuchulain

Michael Valdez Moses

MODERNISM

/ modernity

VOLUME ELEVEN, NUMBER

I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing

reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and
when you consider what comes before and after them
they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not
worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the
linnet.
W. B. Yeats, 1937

THREE, PP 561579.

2004 THE JOHNS

HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

I
Nearly all theorists of drama from G. W. F. Hegel to the
present assume that the advent of modernity increasingly renders classical forms of tragedy aesthetically moribund and politically irrelevant. According to this historicist view, the dramas
of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, but only as historical artifacts within the culture museum of modernity. They may inspire modern thinkers and artists, but their forms, themes, and
contexts cannot be revived except as an exercise in antiquarianism. Friedrich Nietzsche and W. B. Yeats provide striking, if rare
instances of the critic and dramatist who refused to accept the
historicist premises underlying the modern view of Attic tragedy. Nietzsche, no less than Hegel, regards the tragedies of
Aeschylus and Sophocles as antithetical to many of the values
and institutions of European modernity, but for that very rea-

11.3moses.

561

Michael Valdez
Moses is Associate
Professor of English at
Duke University, author
of The Novel and the
Globalization of Culture
(Oxford UP), and coeditor with Richard
Begam of the
forthcoming Modernism
and Colonialism: British
and Irish Literature,
1900-1939 (Duke UP).
His work in progress is
Nation of the Dead: The
Politics of Irish Writing
1890 to the Present.

11/29/04, 9:58 AM

M O D E R N I S M / modernity

562 son, in his The Birth of Tragedy, he looks to the modern operas of Richard Wagner as
both marking a genuine rebirth of the spirit of classical tragedy and heralding a revolutionary antimodern turn in the cultural history of modern Europe. Yeats, whose
dramatic and critical works were influenced by Nietzsche, attempted, in no less hubristic a manner, to effect a rebirth of premodern, ritualized, and aristocratic tragedy
within the apparently uncongenial confines of contemportary Irish politics. What Yeats
found so attractive in Nietzsche was a shared hostility, even repugnance, to what both
men considered the defining features of European modernity, and a common conviction that the forces of modernization might be resisted by bringing about a cultural
rebirth of the spirit of ancient tragic drama. Yeatss drama and theatre criticism thus
represent a sustained effort, a l Nietzsche, to resist the notion that aristocratic tragedy and ritual theater are historically irrecoverable.
Yeats saw his efforts to assist in the rebirth of ancient tragedy as an essential part of
a militant cultural and political program to free modern Ireland from imperial British
rule. Yeatss literary midwifery aimed to establish a free and independent Irish nation
that would offer a counterweight to the forces of (English or British imperial) modernity. Though nationalism itself might be said to be a distinctively modern ideology,
Yeats hoped to cultivate an independent Irish nation on nominally premodern or nonmodern grounds. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Yeats grew increasingly
disenchanted with the actual Irish Free State that emerged after 1921 and with the
forms of Irish nationalism that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly, his disappointment did not lead him to abandon, but rather to intensify his efforts to promote
an anachronistic form of dramatic tragedy, which he imagined would serve as a kind
of cultural counterweight to the increasingly modernizing Irish nation-state that came
into existence after formal independence. Yeatss continuing efforts to create a ritualistic, heroic, cultic, and antidemocratic form of dramatic tragedy from 1916 onwards
represented his vigorous attempt to cultivate an alternative form of Irish modernity
that was as much at odds with the British imperialism (and English culture) as it was
with the predominant and increasingly official strains of modern Irish nationalism of
the 1920s and 1930s.
As a founding member of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and later a leading
dramatist, co-director, manager, and polemicist for the Irish National Theatre Society
(founded in 1902 and better known after 1904 as the Abbey Theatre), Yeats looked to
an ancient form of tragic verse drama to play a leading, even decisive role in revivifying and remaking Irish national culture at a time when prospects for Irish Home
Rule, to say nothing of Irish national independence, were bleak. But despite his dominant position in the Abbey Theatre in its early years, Yeats ultimately found that his
own heroic verse tragedies were exceptional, rather than typical of the dramatic works
favored by the National Theatre Society. In 1937, reflecting back on his early career as
a dramatist for the Abbey, Yeats lamented, somewhat disingenuously: my audience
was for comedyfor Synge, Lady Gregory, for OCaseynot for me. I was content,
for I knew that comedy was the modern art.1 His disappointment with the direction
of the Abbey had led him in 1910 to limit his direct involvement in its daily manage-

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the rebirth of tragedy

ment. From 1910 until the mid-1920s, Yeats largely abandoned the Abbey as the primary venue for his dramatic works. Turning to coterie or private theatre (often staged
outside of Ireland), Yeats invented a distinctively avant-garde form of tragic drama
that reflected his deepening discomfort with the direction of Irish political nationalism in particular, and (from 1922 onward) with the institutions of the Irish Free State
in general.
If Yeats was ultimately unsuccessful in shaping the Irish national theater, to say
nothing of the Irish Free State, according to his own Nietzschean vision, his attempt to
found a new national culture on the basis of a tragic re-presentation of heroic Irish
legends and myths nevertheless provides a revealing instance of how a modernist experiment in reviving the anachronistic forms of aristocratic tragedy could be intimately
related to the twentieth-century political projects of anti-imperial struggle and state
formation. Yeatss decades-long career as a vociferous exponent of a conservative
nationalist cultural ideal (the term will prove less and less satisfactory in the course of
this essay), gave birth not only to a radically avant-garde form of dramatic practice, but
also to a surprisingly progressive and forward-looking cultural critique of the political
dangers and cultural deformations of modern nationalism. Exemplifying many of the
characteristic features of what Terry Eagleton has termed the archaic avant-garde,
Yeatss explicit rejection of dramatic realism, democratic aesthetics, and the tastes of
the contemporary commercial theater, his seemingly vain endeavor to recuperate
moribund forms of ritual theatre and aristocratic political tragedy, made possible not
only many of the most celebrated examples of modern Irish drama, but also a series of
prescient cultural interventions that resonate in unexpected ways with the most advanced postcolonial critiques of the nation-state.2

II
Yeatss indebtedness to Nietzsche is well documented and widely acknowledged.
As Roy Foster has noted, Yeats would have been introduced to Nietzsches thought at
least as early as 1896 through the reviews and essays of Havelock Ellis and Arthur
Symons.3 Symonss essay, Nietzsche and Tragedy, provided Yeats with a sympathetic
review and synoptic description of the main lines of argument of The Birth of Tragedy.
Here Yeats would have encountered for the first time Nietzsches theses that Attic
tragedy grew out of the Dionysian religious festivals, music, and ecstatic rituals of
pagan Greece, that the flourishing of Greek tragedy depended on a productive if unsustainable opposition between the Apollinian and Dionysian forces in ancient Greek
culture, that Greek tragedy had been undermined by the rationalism of Socrates and
the dramatic realism of Euripides (both harbingers of modernity), and that the spirit
of tragedy had been reborn in Wagnerian opera.4 Even if he did not encounter
Nietzsches work directly (which seems unlikely) and merely relied upon a secondhand knowledge of Nietzsches writings on classical Greek drama, Yeatss early critical
reflections on theater, tragedy, myth, ritual, and the revival of Irish culture are nonetheless deeply indebted to The Birth of Tragedy. In his essay of 1900, The Theatre,

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564 Yeats maintains that drama began in ritual, and it cannot come to its greatness again
without recalling words to their ancient sovereignty (EI, 170). Yeats opposes the modern
theatre of commerce to the remote, spiritual, and ideal poetic drama that he
hopes will be staged by the newly founded Irish Literary Theatre (a forerunner of the
Irish National Theatre Society) (EI, 166). For Yeats, Irish cultural conditions are particularly favorable for the revival of ritual theatre insofar as the audiences of Sophocles
most nearly resemble those Irish country folk who eagerly listen in Irish cabins to
songs in Gaelic or to some tale of Oisin and his three hundred years in Tir n nOg
(EI, 167). Yeats argues that a folk revival might be modeled on the cultural achievements of those urbane priests of the ancient world who transferred primitive pagan
rites performed in a natural setting to the hidden places of temples in the city (EI,
168). For Yeats, it is only through ritualized drama that the natural emotions of preurbanized (and premodern) country people can once more be set free in the contemporary theater.
In Ireland and the Arts (1901), Yeats argues that the modern arts have failed. As
the arts in ancient times were almost inseparable from religion, those Irish artists
who would revive them in the present age must conceive of themselves as a priesthood of an almost forgotten faith (EI, 2034). There are two passions on which this
new priesthood can found a religio-aesthetic renaissance: love of the Unseen Life
and love of country (EI, 204). For Yeats the return of the Irish spirit entails a selfconscious recovery of the Celtic myths and heroic stories of Ireland such as those of
Cuchulain, a recuperation not unlike that of Nordic myths in Wagnerian opera that
Nietzsche praises as a return to itself of the German spirit.5 If Bayreuth provides
modern precedent for an Irish cultural revival, Yeats also looks back to classical Greece
for inspiration. Contemporary political conditions in Ireland (such as imperial English
rule) will only intensify the Irish love of country, a passion shared by the ancient
Greeks. Yeatss ambitions are at once revolutionary and retrograde, populist and
antimodern: I would have Ireland re-create the ancient arts, the arts as they were
understood in Judaea, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome, in every ancient
land; as they were understood when they moved a whole people and not a few people
who have grown up in a leisure class and made this understanding their business.(EI,
206). Suggestively, the ancient arts flourished in a number of countriesIreland, Judaea,
and Indiacurrently under British imperial control.
It is an 1897 essay, The Celtic Element in Literature, in which he expressly praises
Wagner and the composers use of the ancient myths of Scandinavia, that Yeats seems
closest to the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy. Yeats enthusiastically describes those
ancient worshippers of nature whose supreme ritual was a tumultuous dance among
the hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers,
until they seemed the gods or the godlike beasts; it is in these ecstatic rituals that the
frenzied worshippers came nearer to ancient chaos (EI, 178). Whereas ancient peoples
delighted in tales and myths that ended in death, their modern counterparts respond to tales that end in marriage bells (EI, 182). Primitive rituals and ancient rites

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encouraged a popular love of tragedy, while modernity encourages only an all too
common taste for comedy and domestic concord. It is therefore no accident that all
the august sorrowful persons of literature, Cassandra and Helen and Deirdre, and
Lear and Tristan, have come out of legends and are indeed but the images of the
primitive imagination (EI, 182). Yeats thus looks to the popular Gaelic poetry of his
day (a surviving legacy of ancient Ireland) and to the fountain of Gaelic legends,
those concerning Deirdre, Cuchulain, Emer, Grania and Diarmuid, and Oisin, to provide the vivifying spirit of excess that will make the arts and imagination of Ireland
blossom once more (EI, 1857). Yeats insists that Irelands Celtic myths and Gaelic
legends have a regenerative power not only for modern Anglo-Irish literature, but also
for the whole of modern European literature. A return to ancient myth and ritual is
the predictable reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century, and the
materialism of the nineteenth century (EI, 187).
Yeatss serious commitment to an Irish national theater and to tragic verse drama,
which began with the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and his composition of a series of critical polemics in favor of a return to ancient ritual, myth, legend,
religion, and magic thus coincided with and was inspired by his introduction to
Nietzsches theory of tragedy. Both in his dramatic works and in his cultural criticism
Yeats called for a simultaneous repudiation of modernity (which he understood to be
characterized by rationalism, materialism, commercialism, science, mechanical philosophy, liberalism, secularism, and the rise of the middle class), and a rejection of
British imperial rule (which was the engine by which modernity had reached Ireland).
In the early days of the Abbey Theatre, Yeats took particular satisfaction in the fact
that the anachronistic laws that required the theater to hold a patent granted by the
English Parliament paradoxically freed it from de jure political censorship to which
English theaters were subject: we are better off so far as the law is concerned than we
would be in England. . . . In England there is a Censor, who forbids you to take a
subject from the Bible or from politics, or to picture public characters or certain moral
situations which are the foundation of some of the greatest plays of the world . . .
Oedipus the King is forbidden in London.6 Yeatss polemic figures Ireland as the potential home of ancient freedoms and classical tragedy as against the restrictive modern, conformist, puritanical, utilitarian, and middle-class commercial tastes of
Edwardian England. Indeed, as early as 1904, and again in 1909, Yeats hoped to stage
Oedipus the King at the Abbey as a political protest against British imperial authority.7
Yeats envisioned a newly independent Irish nation that might constitute a radical political alternative to British modernity. Despite his current reputation as a mere
cultural reactionary, Yeats nonetheless also oddly anticipates those postcolonial intellectuals and artists who defend the rights of minority cultures against the homogenizing threat of economic globalization and cultural imperialism. In his hands the
rebirth of tragedy promised to be at once a radically retrograde and a revolutionary
nationalist cultural phenomenon.

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566 III
The 1904 premiere of On Bailes Strand, which, along with Synges Riders to the
Sea and Lady Gregorys Spreading the News, inaugurated the Abbey Theatre as the
new home of the Irish National Theatre Society, represents Yeatss first major realization of the theatrical project he advocated in 1901: getting our [the Irish] Heroic Age
into verse (E, 78). The first of five verse dramas Yeats devoted to Cuchulain, the hero
of the Ulster or Red Branch cycle of Irish poetic sagas, On Bailes Strand met with
considerable public and critical acclaim. Not long after its premiere, Yeats wrote triumphantly in Samhain, the journal of the Irish National Theatre Society, Ireland in
our day has rediscovered the old heroic literature of Ireland, and she has rediscovered
the imagination of the folk (E, 183). In 1906, the same year that he significantly revised On Bailes Strand for a new Abbey production, Yeats contrasts the common
literary culture of the premodern past when the arts belonged to a whole people,
with that of the modern era (E, 209). Implicit in Yeatss polemic is his questionable
assumption that whereas predominantly oral premodern European cultures had been
characterized by an organic social and artistic unity, and were accessible to the poor
and the rich, the peasantry and the nobility alike, modern mass culture is increasingly
fissured and vertically stratified. In Yeatss view, an isolated intellectual aristocracy, a
leisured class, has in contemporary Europe, and especially in imperial Britain, cut
itself off from the world of the folk. This stratification of tastes is an unfortunate development akin to that which Nietzsche criticized in Euripidean drama and late Hellenic
culture as inimical to the tragic spirit of the earlier dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles:
it is due to the distancing of an increasingly hypertrophied and intellectualized audience from the folk beliefs, primitive passions, and religious ceremonies that gave birth
to Attic tragedy. Yeats lays the blame for this accelerating cultural disunity on the
engines of modernity: new technologies, such as the printing press, and the spirit of
commercethe dubious cultural benefits of imperial English rule (E, 2039).
On Bailes Strand is Yeatss attempt to bridge the cultural divide that threatens
contemporary Irish culture a result of the deleterious influence of modern English
culture on native Irish traditions. A drama featuring chanted or sung dialogue and
music, On Bailes Strand is a heroic tragedy written for the people, a play meant to
recuperate for a contemporary Irish audience the lost unity of a nearly extinct Gaelic
oral culture. And yet, as Yeats would have acknowledged, there is no simple turning
back, no unmediated return to the heroic world of the Irish legends or to the oral
culture of ancient Ireland before the coming of the English. Yeatss careful revisions of
a printed and published text, his need for a modern Irish theatrical venue in Dublin,
his reliance on sophisticated financial arrangements and licensing agreements to bring
the Abbey Theatre into existence, even his dependence on the English language, as
opposed to the Gaelic or Irish tongue as the basis of his dramatic art, all mark his
first major heroic verse tragedy as ineluctably a product of modern material culture.
Though ostensibly set during the Irish Heroic Age (the pre-Christian, Celtic epoch,
traditionally held to correspond chronologically with the beginning of the Christian

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era outside of Ireland), the play enacts a tragic historical conflict between, on the one
hand, an archaic and anarchic, premodern and stateless phase of Irish culture and,
on the other, an increasingly centralized, regulated, and routinized form of political
life, one that foreshadows the unappealing features of modernity in general, and the
British imperium and the modern Irish nation-state in particular.
Inspired by Lady Gregorys famous English prose translation (or more properly
redaction and free adaptation) of the Ulster cycle, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902),
On Bailes Strand dramatizes a political struggle between Conchubar, King of Uladh,
and Cuchulain, King of Muirthemne. The dramatic action initially turns on Cuchulains
reluctance to swear an oath to Conchubar, who claims the title of High King of Ireland
for himself and his heirs. Cuchulain argues for a radical untrammeled form of personal freedom, one untempered by the rule of law and intrusive administrative oversight of a High King: Ill not be bound / Ill dance or hunt, or quarrel or make love, /
Wherever and whenever Ive a mind to (ll. 1779).8 By contrast, Conchubar argues
for the values of political unity, stability, and order, for peace and security: I would
leave / A strong and settled country to my children (ll. 1812). Cuchulain dismisses
Conchubars political vision of a centralized, safe, and domesticated Ireland in scathing terms:
And I must be obedient in all things;
Give up my will to yours; go where you please;
Come when you call; sit at the council-board
Among the unshapely bodies of old men;
I whose mere name has kept this country safe, . . .
Must I, that held you on the throne when all
Had pulled you from it, swear obedience
As if I were some cattle-raising king?
[ll. 18394]

By contrast with the epic hero, whose romantic yearnings and lyrical celebration of
individual liberty more nearly reflect Yeatss own artistic sensibility, Conchubar seems
singularly prosaic and tediously legalistic. Nonetheless, Yeats endows the High King
with sufficient rhetorical power to call to mind the rare worth of hard-fought Irish
political unity, of the political benefits of binding all subjects to the rule of law, and
above all, of the profound responsibilities incumbent on those would-be founders of a
nation who would merit the gratitude of future generations in a free and independent
Ireland. In proper Hegelian fashion, the play dramatizes a conflict between two ethically defensible, if politically incompatible, alternatives.
If we were tempted to see in Cuchulain simply the carefree spirit of the artist as
against the doleful responsibilities of political life, it would be well to recall that Yeats
told Joseph Holloway in April of 1905 that he had Charles Stewart Parnell in his mind
when he wrote On Bailes Strand.9 Cuchulain must not be reduced to a merely aesthetic antagonist of Conchubars prosaic version of political duty. Whatever his affinities for the ethos of decadent aestheticism, he is no less a political hero who em-

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568 blematizes an increasingly outmoded form of social life, one incompatible with the
new administrative centralization championed by the High King. When Cuchulain
describes a state of affairs in which he would be reduced to just another flabby councilman and cattle-raising king in the boardrooms of Emain Macha (the site of
Conchubars court), he prophetically foreshadows the sort of Ireland promised to its
people by progressive English liberals such as Gladstone, (or later by de Valera): a
country of domesticated middle-class merchants, shopkeepers, strong farmers, and
law-abiding (and docile) citizens who looked unfavorably upon the amorous libertinism,
social hauteur, and individual liberties characteristic of a Parnell (or a Cuchulain); a
nation of respectable patriots who would happily put behind them the violent heroic
struggle required to make Ireland an independent domain.
Cuchulains tragic fate in On Bailes Strand follows as a direct consequence of his
decision to accede to the demands of Conchubar and to swear an oath of allegiance to
the High King. While an oath to a monarch might seem a quaint and highly artificial
plot device drawn from the mists of Irish antiquity, the matter would have resonated
for Yeatss Edwardian audience. In 1906 (the year in which Yeats revised On Bailes
Strand) all Irish subjects were still bound by their allegiance to an English king (a
matter of intense debate and a contributing cause of civil strife after 1921 because the
citizens of the Irish Free State had to swear an oath to the British crown under the
terms of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty); even radical Irish nationalists, such as Arthur
Griffith, journalist, cofounder of the Sinn Fin party, and vocal critic of many of the
Abbey Theatres dramatic productions, had argued for a dual monarchy for Ireland,
thereby lending a contemporary political significance to the matter of an oath of allegiance.10 In any event, it is the exclusive and exacting terms of his oath to Conchubar
that prove to be Cuchulains undoing. Shortly after Cuchulain pledges his allegiance to
the High King, he encounters an impetuous young warrior from Alba (Scotland) who
has killed an Irish soldier guarding the coast against foreign intruders, and who challenges Cuchulain to ritual combat. Cuchulain demurs because he intuits that the young
man is his own (illegitimate) son by Aoife, Queen of Alba. Conchubar insists that
Cuchulains oath binds him to fight on the High Kings behalf, against all enemies,
both domestic and foreign. Despite Cuchulains initial defiance of the King and his
desire to befriend the young man, Conchubar ultimately persuades the hero that he
has been bewitched, and prevails upon him to honor his oath. In a frenzy, Cuchulain
slays the young man, only to discover, too late, that he has killed his only son and
potential heir. Overcome with grief and incipient madness, Cuchulain seeks revenge
on Conchubar, but succeeds only in rushing madly into the sea, where he vainly does
battle with the waves until he is mastered by their violence.
In its day, On Bailes Strand was hailed as a modern tragic masterpiece of the new
Irish National Theatre. Irish patriots such as Padraic Pearse, a poet and friend of Yeats,
who would ultimately distinguish himself during the 1916 Easter Rebellion as commander in chief of the Irish Volunteers and president of the Provisional Irish Republic, adopted Cuchulain as a heroic symbol of Irish national identity. And yet, On Bailes
Strand, despite its celebration of Cuchulain as the heroic symbol of an emergent Irish

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national identity, suggests that modern political independence will be achieved only at
the cost of what is most inspiring and admirable in the ancient Irish character.
Cuchulains tragedy is that he must sacrifice what is most noble in himself, his aristocratic autonomy, for the sake of a homogenized national collective. In Nietzschean
terms, the Apollinian hero and representative of the emergent state must be sacrificed to the Dionysian forces, here represented by Cuchulains madness and by the
waves themselves, which in Irish mythology, represent the divine and destructive powers
of the sea god, Manannn, and his daughter, Fand of the Sidhe.
There is tragic irony in the fact that Conchubar exaggerates the immediate threat
to his realm from Aoife and Alba. By virtue of his libertinism and his ethos of individual freedom and aristocratic liberty, Cuchulain has established a material (and biological) basis for union with a foreign race. Cuchulain would forge an alliance with his
illegitimate son, one based on personal preference, class affiliation (he is impressed by
the young mans aristocratic bearing and noble speech), consanguinity, and a common
disregard for the law, sovereign political authority, the geographic limits of nations,
and matters of state. Cuchulain represents an alternative form of Irish independence
and of Irish culture that comes into tragic conflict with Conchubars more modern,
practical, and restrictive form of national identity: an archaic, aristocratic, and cosmopolitan conception of community. Moreover, Conchubars political conservatism ironically serves only to subvert the order of his government. He risks civil strife with one
of his strongest and most loyal supporters, while fomenting a needless and bloody
conflict between his newly unified kingdom (Ireland) and a foreign power (Alba), a
nation with which his own people have occasionally enjoyed friendly and even intimate relations.
AlbaScotlandwas the land from which came many of those Anglo-Irish Protestant families who forcibly settled Ulster during the plantations of the seventeenth century. In Yeatss day, Scotland was regarded as a center of Protestant (and unionist)
political sentiment. In terms of his divided personal and political allegiances, Yeatss
Cuchulain is rather like his creator, who despite his impressive credentials as an Irish
nationalist (he was a one time member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a Fenian
organization devoted to attaining political independence through physical force) nevertheless spent much of his life happily living and working in imperial England. More
generally, Cuchulain resembles those Anglo-Irish Protestants (Bram Stoker, Oscar
Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Yeats), whose
cultural, personal, and even political connections with a land ruled by another queen,
Victoria, were frequently at odds with their support of greater political autonomy for
Ireland.
If Yeats relished the opportunity to defy British imperial authority, he was also concerned with the censoriousness of certain Irish nationalist and Roman Catholic intellectuals who yearned to exercise unofficial authority over the productions of the Irish
National Theatre. The Anglophobic jeremiads of D. P. Moran, a leading journalist,
author of The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, and outspoken advocate of a Gaelic (speaking) and Roman Catholic Irish nation, or the political chauvinism and economic pro-

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570 tectionism of Arthur Griffith and Sinn Fin (meaning Ourselves Alone), were notable instances of the competing exclusionary nationalist movements against which
Yeats inveighed. In his 1903 essay, An Irish National Theatre, Yeats argued strenuously against any form of nationalist or religious ideology that would restrict the artistic liberty of the Abbey Theatre. In language that might have been applied to the
heroic ethos of Cuchulain in On Bailes Strand, Yeats maintains that (dramatic) literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep all its freedom(E, 117). He
defends the commitment of the Irish National Theatre to produce foreign masterpieces at the Abbey and the right of its dramatists to derive inspiration from foreign
models, as against those who would restrict its fare to works of purely Irish origin and
subject matter (E, 122).
The ultimate triumph of Yeatss On Bailes Strand depends on the paradoxical fact that
Cuchulain epitomizes a heroic conception of the Irish national character by tragically
resisting the political and cultural norms of the High King of Ireland and his court,
rather than happily conforming to them. Cuchulains insistence on personal liberty, his
aristocratic disdain for mere security and stability, his singular attachment to the nonpolitical activities of love, music, song, and dance, and, above all, his cosmopolitan, as
opposed to an exclusionary and xenophobic, conception of patriotism and nationhood,
all denote him as the exceptional Irish hero par excellence. And it is precisely this
exceptional character that necessitates his tragic fate. Yeatss play thus dramatizes the
tragic tension between the Apollinian and Dionysian elements present in Irish culture: the spirit of the nation as the exceptional political individual, the aristocratic
patriot and rebel (Cuchulain or Parnell) versus the spirit of the nation as a transindividual
collective of average Irishmen, of ordinary (middle-class) subjects who require the
periodic sacrifice of the individual hero and political martyr to insure their security.
In the wake of the riots ignited by the premiere of Synges Playboy of the Western
World at the Abbey in1907 (Moran and other nationalist intellectuals criticized the
play for its alleged obscenity, its lack of patriotism, its inaccurate, irreligious, and demeaning portrait of the Irish people), Yeats defended the nationalist credentials of the
Irish National Theatre Society. He noted (with some satisfaction) that nationalists and
unionists alike had attacked the Abbey. But his most energetic polemic consisted in
defining the artist as a heroic figure who finds himself tragically in conflict with his
own people, his own nation. Yeats insisted that the truly extraordinary and representative artist defines the national character of his people in the face of popular animosity
and public controversy (E, 2379). Yeatss version of the Nietzschean culture-hero
bears a striking resemblance to his Cuchulain of On Bailes Strand. Both the greatest
artist and greatest epic hero of the Irish nation are inevitably (if only temporarily) the
enemies of the people; their greatest success consists in their tragic struggle to define
the nation against the popular will, to impose a form upon the nations identity. For
Yeats, the tragic conflict, at once Hegelian and Nietzschean, between hero and people
ennobles and destroys the singular individual who ultimately gives shape to the national character; this tragic agon threatens to subvert even as it saves the community,
which requires the sacrifice of the hero that paradoxically defines the nations identity.

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571

IV
In April of 1916, a mere three weeks after T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound attended the
premiere in the drawing room of Lady Cunards London home of Yeatss At the Hawks
Well, a play inspired by Japanese Noh drama featuring Cuchulain, Padraic Pearse
stood before the General Post Office in Dublin where he read aloud the Proclamation
of the Irish Republic to the Irish people. That Yeats should have achieved a formal and
generic breakthrough in the modern English-language theater at almost the exact
moment as his friend and fellow poet, Pearse, played a leading role in mounting the
Easter 1916 rising, invites an investigation into the relationship between Yeatsian avantgarde drama and the anticolonial struggle in Ireland.
Whereas, the brilliance of Yeatss poetry after 1914 does not chiefly depend upon
its formal innovation and technical innovation, Yeatss dramas of the same period are
radically experimental works that struck even Beckett as revolutionary. In his first series of so-called dance plays, which includes At the Hawks Well (1916), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), and The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), Yeats employed masks
for some actors, highly stylized face makeup for others (so that their faces might resemble masks); minimalist and often discordant music (often relying upon only drum,
gong, flute, and zither); a virtually empty stage with abstract or symbolic non-naturalistic props; the absence of a curtain to mark scene changes; nonspeaking parts for
dancers; compact and economical physical gestures, as well as dance movements mimicking those of marionettes or Bunraku puppets; and highly stylized rhymed and
blank-verse spoken, sung, or chanted as the scene demanded. Yeatss collaborations
with an impressive array of contemporary artists enhanced the high modernist texture
of these plays. Among those who made particularly notable contributions to their staging over two decades were the Japanese actor, Michio Ito, who was trained in Noh
drama, Ninette de Valois, who described her choreography as a form of abstract expressionism, the Dutch sculptor Hildo van Krop, who provided a famous set of fullhead masks for the players, George Antheil, who composed music that Yeats praised
as heroic and barbaric and strange, and Edmund Dulac, who designed masks, costumes, and wrote the musical score for the first private performance of At the Hawks
Well.11
Significantly, Yeatss turn to high modernist theatrical experimentation did not signal his abandonment of tragedy, nor of the Celtic myths, nationalist histories, and folk
materials that had characterized his earlier plays for the Irish National Theatre. At the
Hawks Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer are the third and fourth of Yeatss five
plays to make use of the Ulster cycle, and both feature Cuchulain as their protagonist.
But if Yeats once again relies on Irish mythic and legendary materials, his avant-garde
dance plays signal a new and decisive development in his conception of tragic theater
and its cultural and political function. Explicitly cultivating a small private coterie audience, Yeats reconceives of the theatre as occupying a ritual space that is sometimes
inside, sometimes outside the body politic, but in any case one that no longer conforms to the traditional dimensions of an Irish national theatre. Yeats intended his

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572 avant-garde theater to be the center of an aristocratic religio-aesthetic cult; its intricate ceremonies and refined theatrical mysteries will enact a tragic spectacle, but at a
critical remove from the public space of an emergent Irish nation. Rather than directly provide the ritual basis of a revivified Irish culture, this new dramatic cult will
maintain a more mediated, distanced, if still significant symbolic relationship with the
emergent postcolonial nation-state. Yeatss theatrical cult will project an alternative
vision of community, one knowingly at odds with the actual state of the Irish nation
and with modernity more generally. Yeats thus seems to embrace that very thing, the
mystery cult, which Nietzsche had argued both preceded and followed (in a late decadent form) the historical apex of Attic tragedy.
In April of 1916, in one of his most famous essays of drama criticism, Certain
Noble Plays of Japan, Yeats described his revolutionary conception for a new form of
drama:
I am writing with my imagination stirred by a visit to the studio of Mr. Dulac . . . I saw
there the mask and head-dress to be worn in a play of mine by the player who will speak
the part of Cuchulain, and who, wearing this noble, half-Greek, half-Asiatic face, will
appear perhaps like an image seen in reverie by some Orphic worshipper . . . I have
written a little play [The Hawks Well] that can be played in a room for so little money that
forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price. There will be no scenery, for three
musicians, whose seeming sunburned faces will, I hope, suggest that they have wandered
from village to village in some country of our dreams, can describe place and weather,
and at moments action and accompany it all by drum and gong or flute and dulcimer.
Instead of the players working themselves into a violence of passion indecorous in our
sitting-room, the music, the beauty of form and voice all come to climax in pantomimic
dance.
In fact, with the help of Japanese plays translated by Ernest Fenollosa and finished by
Ezra Pound, I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect, and symbolic, and
having no need of mob or Press to pay its wayan aristocratic form. When this play and
its performance run as smoothly as my skill can make them, I shall hope to write another
of the same sort and so complete a dramatic celebration of the life of Cuchulain planned
long ago. [EI, 22122].

This passage suggests both continuities and divergences in Yeatss long-contemplated cycle of Cuchulain plays. Yeats has apparently abandoned the very notion of a
public national theater. For what could be less in keeping with his previous goals for
the Irish National Theatre than a private performance before a cosmopolitan group of
international artists and well-to-do patrons of the arts staged in the drawing room of a
wealthy English aristocrat? Even in the early years of the Irish Literary Theatre, Yeats
had defined the dramatic art of a new priestly caste in contradistinction to what he
derisively referred to as the orthodoxy of the commercial theater unfortunately imported into Ireland from its financial and political overlord, England (E, 101; 81). But
even as he opposed commercial middle-class Victorian tastes, Yeats championed a
Peoples Theatre for Ireland (E, 244). In his early articles for the National Theatre
Society, Yeats specifically warned against plays about drawing-rooms and written for

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the middle-classes of great cities, for the classes who live in drawing rooms; moreover, he insisted on the imitation of nothing English (E, 97). However, by 1919,
Yeats felt that his early hopes for a national theater had met with discouragement and
a defeat; the Peoples Theatre that he, Lady Gregory, and Synge had envisioned had
proved ineffectual (E, 2503). Their attempts to meld Irish folklife with heroic nationalist feeling had failed; the modern world had proved more powerful than any propaganda (E, 253). To be sure, Yeatss characterization of this failure is self-serving,
and in the wake of the 1907 Abbey riots over The Playboy of the Western World,
freighted with his increasingly intense antidemocratic convictions. More particularly,
his (as it proved, temporary) abandonment of the Irish National Theatre, suggests that
his own distinctive brand of nationalism had failed to carry the day against its more
popular Irish competitors, versions of Irish nationalism with deeper roots in the actual
modern Irish Catholic populace, as opposed to the ancient folk Yeats had imagined.
Having failed to shape the Irish people according to his own heroic and nationalistic ideals, Yeats predictably turned his back on the very notion of a popular theatre: I
want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society
where admission is by favor and never to many (E, 254). Yeats blames the degraded
popular tastes of Ireland on Englands colonization and subsequent democratization
of his native country: Ireland has suffered more than England from democracy, for
since the Wild Geese fled who might have grown to be leaders in manner and in taste,
she has had but political leaders. . . . I seek, not a theatre but the theatres anti-self.12
Yeatss notion of the theatres anti-self was the recuperation of a ritualized aristocratic form of drama that was at once premodern and non-Western. It may surprise us
that the outlines of an avant-garde cultural project aimed at resisting the encroachments of modernity, counterbalancing a strong bias in favor of Western cultural values, transgressing the artistic and cultural tastes of the bourgeoisie, challenging the
religious prejudices of a pious middle class, subverting a commercial and capitalist
ethos, and envisioned by an artist with impressive anti-imperialist credentials should
take such a politically disturbing and antiprogressive form. But such is the nature of
Yeatss revolutionary conception of drama.
In Certain Noble Plays of Japan Yeats provides a counter-imaginary to the popular theater of Ireland prior to the Easter Rebellion: Noh was made a necessary part of
official ceremonies at [the Shoguns court] at Kioto, and young nobles and princes,
forbidden to attend the popular theatre, in Japan as elsewhere a place of mimicry and
naturalism, were encouraged to witness and perform in spectacles where speech, music,
song, and dance created an image of nobility and strange beauty (EI, 229). Not withstanding Yeatss preference for an antipopular, nonrealistic, aristocratic dramatic form,
his yearning for an aesthetic rootedness in folkways abides. The god, goddess, or
ghost that often appears at a crucial juncture in Noh drama reminds Yeats at times of
our own Irish legends and beliefs, which, once it may be, differed little from those of
the Shinto worshipper. . . These Japanese poets, too, feel for tomb and wood the emotion, the sense of awe that our own Gaelic-speaking country people will sometimes
show when you speak to them of Castle Hackett or some holy well (EI, 232). And

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574 despite its formal derivation from the exotic dramatic traditions of Tokugawa Japan
and the necessity of first staging it in the alien environment of a London drawing
room, his new form of ritual theatre, Yeats hopes, might yet be naturalized in the Irish
landscape at some future date: For some weeks now I have been elaborating my play
in London where alone I can find the help I need . . . yet it pleases me to think that I
am working for my own country. Perhaps some day a play in the form I am adapting
for European purposes may excite once more, whether in Gaelic or in English, under
the slope of Slieve-na-mon or Croagh Patrick, ancient memories (EI, 236).
In his quest for a ritual theatre at home in the Irish natural landscape, one that
might serve his country, Yeats reinvents a form of drama in which the distinctions
among political, aesthetic, and religious practices are collapsed in ceremonies of the
elite court or the mystery cult. Yeats remarks, with evident enthusiasm, these [Noh]
plays arose in an age of continual war and became a part of the education of soldiers.
These soldiers, whose natures had as much of Walter Pater as of Achilles, combined
with Buddhist priests and women to elaborate life in a ceremony, the playing of football, the drinking of tea, and all great events of State, becoming a ritual (EI, 235). The
convergence of Irish folk beliefs and Shinto religious rituals is significant for Yeats, not
least because Celtic and Shinto religious traditions are premodern and non-Christian.
A theatre based on non-Christian rituals and premodern (pre-Reformation) ceremonies would, at least theoretically, be free from the sectarian religious rancor between
Irish Catholics and Anglo-Irish Protestants that plagued the Irish National Theatre
Society; a dramatic movement founded by an elite group of Anglo-Irish Protestants
for a national citizenry that was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. But if Yeats fancied
that his revitalized and Celticized Noh theatre might suppress certain forms of Hibernian sectarian conflict, the plays he wrote for this new cultic theatre were, no less than
those he had written for the Abbey, rooted in a fundamentally tragic conception of
Irish political history.

V
By the beginning of April 1916, when Yeats undertook his first crucial steps in his
avant-garde theatrical revolution, his interest in political drama seemed on the wane.
However, the events of Easter week changed utterly his artistic ambitions, and once
more imparted to his subsequent dance plays the urgency and power of political tragedy. Yeats was taken aback by the fact that he, an avowedly nationalist Irish poet, had
been in England enjoying the comforts of Sir William Rothensteins Gloucestershire
estate while his fellow Irish poets (Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh) had sacrificed
their lives as leaders of the Rising in Dublin.13 It was in his third attempt at the avantgarde form of the tragic dance play, The Only Jealousy of Emer, that Yeats found his
most stage-worthy vehicle for representing, however indirectly and allegorically, the
changed political conditions of revolutionary Ireland. Written at the end of 1917 and
the beginning of 1918 (for private production), first published in 1919, originally performed in a public theater in Amsterdam in 1922, subsequently produced at the Ab-

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bey in 1926, and later revived there in 1929 under Yeatss supervision in a substantially
revised prose version, The Only Jealousy of Emer marks Yeatss attempt to link retrospectively his Cuchulain plays in a logical narrative sequence. Whereas Yeats had kept
relatively close to the Irish source material for his earlier three Cuchulain plays (On
Bailes Strand, The Green Helmet, and At the Hawks Well), in The Only Jealousy of
Emer he freely adapts the Irish sagas for his own purposes. In this play, Cuchulain has
apparently expired as a consequence of his fight with the sea at the close of On Bailes
Strand. Having once been the active and undaunted protagonist of Yeatss earlier
Cuchulain plays, the Irish national hero now lingers helplessly between the world of
the living and the dead. Why, we may ask, in the immediate aftermath of the 1916
Rising, at the historical moment when the endlessly deferred goal of Irish nationhood
seemed finally at hand, does Yeats represent Cuchulain as a vague specter? Why should
Yeatss heroic representative of Irish national identity suddenly seem a less substantial,
less worldly, less politically potent figure in 1919 than when he first graced the stage of
the Abbey in 1904? Surely it is ironic that when The Only Jealousy of Emer was published in January of 1919 the Irish War of Independence was beginning, and that by
the time Cuchulain returned in his grave clothes to the Abbey in 1926 the Irish Free
State had been in existence for four years.
The dramatic crux of The Only Jealousy of Emer concerns the tragic choice that
Emer, Cuchulains wife, must make. To resuscitate Cuchulain, and bring his ghost
back from the realm of the dead, Emer must renounce before Bricriu of the Sidhe any
claim to her husbands love. So that she may break the spell that the otherworldly
Woman of the Sidhe (Fand) has cast upon the Ghost of Cuchulain (who is not the
same character as Bricriuwho is called the Figure of Cuchulain), Emer relinquishes
all claims on the heros affection, surrendering first place in his heart to her earthly
rival, Cuchulains young mistress, Eithne Ingube, who has failed to revive the seemingly dead hero. I would suggest that by 1918, when Yeats completed the first version
of the play, and had refined his revolutionary conception of an aristocratic cultic
theatre, at a time when he had for many years ceased to be either at the center of Irish
nationalist politics and had been living for all intents and purposes in his adopted
country, England, he has come to understand that his powers to summon up an Irish
national identity out of his imagination, to impose that vision by virtue of his creative
will on the people of Ireland, to define in real terms the political culture of a new and
independent Irish state, has ebbed away. He for the first time acknowledges that he
must forgo his heroic or aristocratic vision for the Irish nation. In terms of the dramatic action of the play, for Cuchulain to be revived as a representative of the Irish
nation, his beloved Emer must give him up to a new generation of suitorsyounger,
more vibrant, less reflective, more materially interested, less spiritually elevated, better attuned to the realities and demands of (implicitly modern) political existence.
That is to say, in order to preserve Cuchulain as a national symbol, Yeats must, like
Emer, give him up to the young nationalists who have been his rivals, who have stolen the affections of the nation from him. Once more the Nietzschean formula seems
pertinent: the Yeatsian dramatic cult serves the nation by performing the sacrifice of

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576 its own heroic demigod. The god must die in order to be reborn; the cult must will the
destruction of its own sacred figure in order that he might be transformed into a nationalist icon that serves the mundane aims of modern Irish politics.
In 1918, Yeatss position vis vis the emergent Irish nation was not quite so desperate as The Only Jealousy of Emer might suggest or as the dramatist might have feared.
From 1922 until 1929 Yeats served in the Irish Senate, and having won the Nobel
Prize in 1923, he could legitimately claim to wield cultural influence in the Ireland of
the 1920s and 1930s. But it is characteristic of Yeatss senatorial speeches that he generally sounds like any another late nineteenth-century liberal politician and not the
ferociously nationalistic and antimodern artist and critic he was during the early years
of the Irish National Theatre Society. Nevertheless, The Only Jealousy of Emer seems
cannily accurate in anticipating the increasingly insurmountable divide between a
Yeatsian ideal for an Irish national culture and the actual postcolonial nation-state
that emerged in the 1920s and the 1930s. The poignancy of Cuchulain and Emers fate
issues from the tragic choices they both make. If Emer must give up Cuchulain as her
own, Cuchulain must abandon his pursuit of the ideal hawk-woman, the otherworldly
woman of the Sidhe, for whom he has yearned since the days of his youth. In the
original 1919 version of the play, the Ghost of Cuchulain finally turns his back on the
Woman of the Sidhe in favor of Emer. But as he returns to the contemporary world of
the living he (unwillingly) forgets both Fand and Emer (and his love for them); he
awakens in the arms of his youthful if superficial mistress, Eithne Inguba (who herself
remains oblivious to the otherworldly tragedy enacted before the eyes of Emer and
the audience).14 Cuchulains heroic stature is accordingly diminished. He settles for a
real life mistress, young and attractive, but also vain, ignorant, silly, and possessing
an unwarranted faith in her own powers and talents, rather than pursuing an ideal
relationship that transcends the confines of the mundane domestic world. The Only
Jealousy of Emer thus points to Yeatss recognition that in achieving a laudable worldly
goalbringing Cuchulain back to life, achieving a real measure of political independence for Irelandcertain ideal poetic, aristocratic, and heroic possibilities must be
foreclosed. However much Yeats once contributed to the cultural construction of a
national ideal as a poet and dramatist in the early days of the Irish National Theater
Society, the political realization of that ideal requires, at least in the dramatic economy
of the play, that the one who has yearned longest and most passionately for its
instantiation, will in the end, feel alienated and cast aside. Just as the reborn Cuchulain
is only a diminished version of his former self, so too the national ideal is a lesser thing
for having been embodied. What has been lost in the act of incarnation is the freedom
and poetic possibilities of a noble, if archaic and therefore unachievable, form of cultural and national identity.

VI
In the twilight of life, Yeats returned one last time to dramatize the figure of
Cuchulain. At the time of his death in 1939, Yeats left completed a final Noh play on

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the death of Cuchulain.15 Not produced until 1949, and then not by the Abbey, The
Death of Cuchulain is a postmodern work avant la lettre; like Becketts plays, it selfconsciously hybridizes theatrical styles, modes, and genres.16 It is a peculiarly selfreflective and intertextual drama that comments upon Yeatss earlier Cuchulain plays
and on the political uses which the Irish Free State had made of the Cuchulain myth
in the 1930s. But if Yeats anticipates postmodern theatre, he also achieves something
of the tragic atmosphere and intensity of his earlier plays. Like the last work of Sophocles,
Oedipus at Colonus, which Yeats adapted for the Abbey Theatre in 1927, The Death of
Cuchulain dramatizes the apotheosis of the tragic hero, who willingly resigns himself
to death and transfiguration. It fittingly concludes in the present day (1939) with the
literal monumentalization of Cuchulain as the heroic political symbol of the modern
Irish nation. In many respects, Yeatss final play recapitulates and reworks the
antimodern theories of tragedy that he developed forty years before under Nietzsches
influence. It stages the ritual sacrifice of the Apollinian hero, executed by a wretched
representative of a degraded folk, an old beggarly blind man and the dramatic double
of Conchubar from On Bailes Strand, who now returns to slit the dying Cuchulains
throat for a mere dozen pennies. As in a Dionysian rite, the Irish Goddess of War, the
Morrigu, directs the slaughter of Cuchulain and ceremonially offers his severed head
to Emer, who concludes the play with a ritual dance in praise of the sanctified hero.
If Yeats offers a final and remarkably literal reenactment of the Dionysian ritual, he
shockingly frames his cultic tragedy with two modern scenes. The play opens with
an Old Man, who resembles the aged Yeats, inveighing against his audience. He rages
against the vile age in which he lives, describes himself as out of fashion and out of
date like the antiquated romantic stuff the thing [the play] is made of, and announces
that he will produce a drama called The Death of Cuchulain for a small select audience
who know Homer and the old epics and Mr. Yeats plays about them. He emphatically rejects a modern mass audience comprised of people educating themselves out
of the book societies and the like, sciolists, pickpockets and opinionated bitches. He
concludes his diatribe against modernity by cursing his audience and spitting in disgust before them (ll. amm). This Brechtian or Beckettian introductory scene is structurally complemented by a concluding scene in which a ragged Irish Street-Singer of
the late 1930s performs a song the harlot sang to the beggar-man (l. 196). Surprisingly, out of the mouth of the urban folk of the present day come verses celebrating
Cuchulain:
Are those things that men adore and loathe
Their sole reality?
What stood in the Post Office
With Pearse and Connolly?
What comes out of the mountain
Where men first shed their blood?
Who thought Cuchulain till it seemed
He stood where they had stood?

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578

No body like his body

Has modern woman borne,
But an old man looking back on life
Imagines it in scorn.
A statues there to mark the place
By Oliver Sheppard done.
So ends the tale that the harlot
Sang to the beggar-man.
[ll. 21227]

In the final words of his dramatic career, Yeats calls to mind the fact that in 1935 the
Irish government erected a bronze statue of the dying Cuchulain, designed by Yeatss
friend, the sculptor Oliver Sheppard, in the General Post Office in Dublin, former
headquarters of the Irish rebels during the 1916 Rising, site of some of the fiercest
fighting during Easter week, and a national landmark sanctified by the blood of Irish
political martyrs. The mystery revealed in these final ironic verses is that it is Yeatss
Cuchulain who stood with Pearse and Connolly in the GPO; it is Yeats himself who
thought Cuchulain till it seemed / He stood where they had stood. Paradoxically, the
Yeatsian cult of Cuchulain has triumphed in the end, or at any rate, Yeats has succeeded in reappropriating the political and nationalist symbols of the Irish Free State
into his own heterodox, anachronistic, and ironized form of Irish cultural nationalism.
Sheppards statue attests not only to the sacrifice of the political martyrs of 1916, who
first proclaimed the Irish nation, but also to the fact that Yeatss tragic hero has come
to be officially acknowledged by the Irish government as the very symbol and abiding
spirit of the Irish Free State. Yeats, the Irish tragedian who had rejected the modern
Irish nation-state in favor of the ancient cult, because the Irish folk refused to conform
to his untimely antimodern and antidemocratic ideal of Irish culture, paradoxically has
become the father of modern Ireland. The Yeatsian rebirth of tragedy brings forth, in
the end, the spirit of postmodern irony.

Notes
1. W. B. Yeats, An Introduction for my Plays, in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan,
1961), 52930; hereafter abbreviated as EI.
2. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso,
1995), 273319.
3. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 159, 272.
4. Arthur Symons, Nietzsche and Tragedy, in Plays, Acting, and Music (London: Duckworth and
Co., 1903), 912. Symonss essay in the same volume, The New Bayreuth, emphasizes as in
Nietzsches interpretation, the Dionysiac element in Wagners operatic works; see Plays, Acting,
and Music, 188.
5. (EI, 209) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 121 .
6. W.B Yeats, The Irish Dramatic Movement: 19011919 in Explorations, (New York: Macmillan,
1962) 1312; hereafter abbreviated as E.

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7. For Yeatss comments on how the English ban inspired him to stage Oedipus the King at the
Abbey, see The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews, ed. Colton
Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2000), 21920, 244; also see David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark,
Explanatory Notes, in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume II: The Plays, 884, 886. Yeatss
plan was not realized until 1926, long after the ban on Oedipus had been lifted in England.
8. Unless otherwise noted, all references and citations to Yeatss plays are to The Collected Works
of W. B. Yeats: Volume II: The Plays, ed. David Clark and Rosalind E. Clark. References to line
numbers from the plays are included parenthetically in the body of this essay. Clark and Clarks edition of On Bailes Strand reflects the substantial revisions Yeats made to the play in 1906.
9. See Richard Allen Cave, Commentaries and Notes, in W. B. Yeats, Selected Plays (New York:
Penguin, 1997), 300, and David Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, Explanatory Notes, 849. Charles
Stuart Parnell, the scion of a leading Anglo-Irish Protestant family, was the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster and the leading advocate of home rule for Ireland in the 1880s.
Parnell died in 1891, not long after scandal wrecked his political career and hopes for home rule.
10. Griffith made his case for dual monarchy in his book of 1905, The Resurrection of Hungary: A
Parallel for Ireland.
11. For Ninette de Valoiss description of her dancing and Yeatss characterization of Antheils
music, see Richard Allen Caves Commentaries and Notes, 321 and 334.
12. (E, 257) The Wild Geese were those leading Irish Catholic aristocrats and soldiers who left
Ireland in the eighteenth century in the wake of Penal Laws that stripped Roman Catholics in Ireland
of virtually all civil and political rights. The great majority sought service under Catholic monarchs in
Spain and France.
13. See Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 227.
14. In Yeatss revisions of the play after 1924, he eliminates Cuchulains role in his own resurrection. In all later verisions of the play, it is solely Emers renunciation of Cuchulains love for her that
effects his return from the dead. For a comparison of the various texts, see The Variorum Edition of
the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach and Catharine C. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966),
52865.
15. Richard Allen Cave, 379.
16. Robert Allen Cave, 381.

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