W.B. Yeats and the Poetics of the Theatrical Vacuum

Robert Pike graduated with an M.A. in English Literature from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. He was a 2022-2023 Global Irish Studies Fellow.  

As a theatre-maker, my work largely consists of spending time in empty spaces (as Peter Brook’s 1968 book would put it) with a group of collaborators, discovering the most exciting and impactful ways to fill them for the benefit of audiences. The task of a production team is to collectively dream dramatic worlds and translate them into an accessible material event: one subject to our common laws of time, space, and matter. I came to my graduate studies in literature at Georgetown to better understand the machinations that underwrite the typical foundation of those dreams: the play text. In Western theatrical practice, everything stems from the script’s status as a textual artifact, a template composed through language that guides the theatre artist as they capture that ephemeral thing that we call a play and manifest it within the confines of a given space. My pursuit to understand the ways that literature can teach us to fill that space led me to the theatrical strategies of William Butler Yeats and his unique approach that positions vacancy not as an aesthetic detriment, but as a potent instrument of unceasing theatrical value.

A lesser-known pursuit of the preeminent Irish poet, the extensive dramatic theory and practice that Yeats contributed in his nearly fifty-year engagement with the stage, can be understood through the trajectory that ultimately led to the poet’s embrace of theatrical emptiness. In the early part of his theatrical career, Yeats constructed his poetic drama with a closer fidelity to the dominant modern modes of theatrical representation: realism and naturalism. The persistent influence of these approaches (present to our own day) traces its lineage to the works of turn-of-the-century naturalists such as Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. As displayed in the photograph of the 1879 production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in figure 1, the elaborate visual stylings of naturalism call for the artist to reproduce a living room onstage and mold characters under the auspices of the modern discipline of psychology. Through this effort, the naturalist takes Hamlet’s advice to the players—“to hold, as twere, the mirror up to nature”—literally (3.2.1869-70). Choosing to populate every inch of the empty space in this way bespeaks naturalistic art’s relationship to its audience. The photographic demeanor of the naturalist and realist purports a tacit claim of authority in their representational method. As a mirror that accurately reflects the life of its subjects, it reinforces the machinations of the world in its approach and leaves little space for wonder.

While the peasant cottage settings of 1894’s Land of Heart’s Desire and 1902’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (see figure 2) do not negate the symbolist overtones and faery whimsy that distinguish Yeats’s style from his realist contemporaries, my research focuses upon the period of Yeats’s dramatic career in which he advances his most radical break from the naturalist/realist theatre of modernity. Seeking innovation from ancient sources such as the Irish oratory tradition as exemplified by Raftery, the mythopoetic heights of Greek tragedy, and, most saliently, the trappings and cadence of Japanese Noh Drama, Yeats fashioned a new “drama, distinguished, indirect, and symbolic” that cast off the expectations that realism enforced. Introduced to Yeats by Ezra Pound, Noh is a 14th-century art form that tells of encounters between gods, ghosts, and man through the high theatrical conventions of masks, dance, music, and poetry. Starting with the 1916 dance drama, At the Hawk’s Well, the plays that Yeats generates during this period eschew specific scenic charge for “any bare space” (Plays 207). Complementing this visual vacancy, Yeats crafts the text of his narrative choruses to solicit the audience’s imagination. In the empty space of 1919’s The Only Jealous of Emer, the Chorus member’s first spoken words prompt this act saying:

I call before the eyes a roof

With cross beams darkened by smoke

A fisherman’s net hangs from a beam

A long oar lies against a wall. (Plays 282)

 Rather than fill the stage with the couches and psychology of realism, Yeats evacuates the playing space of all except poetry and the idyllic materiality of dancing forms and theatrical masks. The aesthetic sparseness is foretold by Yeats in the 1910 essay The Tragic Theatre, where he imagines a dramatic paradigm that shows that “[i]f the real world is not altogether rejected, it is but touched here and there, and into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm, balance, pattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance” (Essays 243).

This creative cavity that Yeats offers audiences to inhabit is what I find so electrifying about his method. Yeats’s dance dramas entrust audiences to complete the theatrical circuit, to exercise their own imaginations through a ritualistic format that turns the performance event from a passive experience to an active exchange. This method proposes that what the artist puts into the empty space does not have to be a mirror for the audience’s actual eyes. Rather, it can serve as the flint that ignites their mind’s eye to fantastical possibilities. In this way, Yeats’s conception of stagecraft is a unique contribution to what Peter Brook terms “the Holy Theatre… The Theatre of the Invisible – Made – Visible” (42). Leaving the aesthetic space open, Yeats demonstrates not only suggestive powers of theatre-making, but also the immense creativity of spectating. 

Photo of “Bricriu, god of discord, forces Eithne to depart in terror” by courtesy of Theater Instituut Nederland (Cave 79)

Augusta Gregory in the role of Cathleen ni Houlihan, March 21, 1919. (Smythe)

Sources

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. 1st Touchstone ed., Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Cave, Richard Allen. Collaborations : Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats. Dance Books, 2011.

Innes, Christopher. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. Routledge, 2000, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203137413.

Shakespeare, William, and Charlton Hinman. “The Tragedy of Hamlet.” The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile: Based on Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library Collection, W.W. Norton, New York, 1996. 

Smythe, Colin. “Augusta Gregory in the Role of Cathleen Ni Houlihan.” Playing Catheleen Ni Houlihan, New York Public Library, New York City, 6 Mar. 2020, https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/section-7-they-came-swallows/item/3595. 

Yeats, W.B. (William Butler). The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats. Macmillan, 1935.

—. Essays and Introductions. Macmillan, 1961.