Abstract
By the year 1902, Yeats’ theatrical work had begun to draw his attention from the search for rituals for an Irish Mystical Order. It was true, however, that his plans for an Irish theatre remained closely related to his plans for establishing the Order. He wished all his writings, his plays in particular, ‘to have a secret symbolic relation to these mysteries [of the Irish mystical order], for in this way I thought there would be a greater richness, a greater claim upon the love of soul, devotion without exhortation or rhetoric…’.1 Dramatic ritual for the Mystical Order and ritual drama for an Irish theatre tended to merge.
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Notes
A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats — Man and Poet (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949) p. 140.
Peter Ure, Toward A Mythology (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967) p. 16.
Leonard E. Nathan, The Tragic Drama of William Butler Yeats (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) pp. 116–17.
W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959) pp. 288–9.
W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1952) p. 398.
Curtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965) p. 180.
T. G. E. Powell, The Celts (London: Thames & Hudson, 1963) pp. 117–8.
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964) pp. 163–4.
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© 1974 Reg Skene
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Skene, R. (1974). The Burning Wheel of Love. In: The Cuchulain Plays of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02220-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02220-5_3
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