The Player Queen

Abstract

In September 1908 Yeats wrote to Florence Farr that he was in the worst stages — the dreadful opening work on the scenario in prose — of a new play, The Player Queen. He continued working at it in 1909, and by September 1914 it was almost finished. In May 1916 he was still working on it, especially the first half of the second act, and about a year later was revising it. When he published it in PPV he wrote this note:

I began in, I think, 1907 [an error for 1908], a verse tragedy, but at that time the thought I have set forth in Per Amica Silentia Lunae was coming into my head, and I found examples of it everywhere. I wasted the best working months of several years in an attempt to write a poetical play where every character became an example of the finding or the not finding of what I have called The Antithetical Self; and because passion and not thought makes tragedy, what I had made had neither simplicity nor life. I knew precisely what was wrong and yet could neither escape from thought nor give up my play. At last it came into my head all of a sudden that I could get rid of the play if I turned it into a farce; and never did I do anything so easily, for I think that I wrote the present play in about a month; and when it was performed at the Stage Society in 1919 I forgot that it was my own work, so completely that I discovered from the surprise of a neighbour, that, indignant with a house that seemed cold to my second act (since much reformed), I was applauding. If it could only have come into my head three years earlier. Since then the play has been revived twice at the Abbey Theatre.

It is the only play of mine which has not its scene laid in Ireland. While at work at the Abbey Theatre I had made many experiments with Mr. Gordon Craig’s screens (see The Tragic Theatre in The Cutting of an Agate), and both the tragedy I first planned, and the farce I wrote, were intended to be played in front of those screens. My dramatis personae have no nationality because Mr. Craig’s screens, where every line must suggest some mathematical proportion, where all is phantastic, incredible, and luminous, hare no nationality.