Abstract
The Cuchulain plays are Yeats’ major treatment of the Celtic saga materials he thought to be central to a sound Irish nationalism and a sense of the unity of Irish culture. In imagery and ritual form, the play cycle owes a great deal to Yeats’ vain attempts in the nineties to create the ceremonies of an Irish Mystical Order. Something of the nature and purpose of the Cuchulain plays is revealed in a comment made by Yeats in 1929 about a prose adaptation of The Only Jealousy of Emer, then being prepared for the Abbey stage. In a letter to Sturge Moore Yeats said: ‘I always feel my work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith.’1 The remark connects the plays with a project Yeats tells of in the Autobiographies.
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Notes
W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, Correspondence 1901–1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) p. 156.
W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1966) pp. 253–4.
W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962) p. 7.
W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972) pp. 123–4.
W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962) pp. 266–7.
Virginia Moore, The Unicorn (New York: Macmillan, 1954) p. 27.
W. B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose 1, ed. John P. Frayne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) pp. 130–37.
Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn (River Falls: Hazel Hills Corporation, 1970) p. 23.
For a concise account of the Jungian view of “individuation” see Carl Jung, et al., Man and his Symbols (New York: Dell Publishing Co, 1968) pp. 157–254.
John Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (London: Williams & Norgate, 1892) pp. 553–4.
Birgit Bjersby, The Interpretation of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W. B. Yeats (Upsala: A. B. Lundequista Bokhandeln, 1950) p. 43.
Richard Ellman, Yeats — The Man and the Masks (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948) pp. 124–5.
W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961) pp. 167–8.
Morton Irving Seiden, William Butler Yeats — The Poet as A Mythmaker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1962) pp. 46–7.
Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1962) p. 470.
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© 1974 Reg Skene
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Skene, R. (1974). The Ritual of a Lost Faith. In: The Cuchulain Plays of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02220-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02220-5_1
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