The Countess Cathleen

Abstract

This was Yeats’s first play and his constant reworkings of it — the date, 1892, refers only to the first version — demonstrate not only his painstaking apprenticeship to the craft of the playwright but also the special affection of a parent for the first-born. Even in 1923, when he had come to a just appreciation of its deficiencies, he said it gave him more pleasure in the memory than any of his plays (PC vi).