Reminiscences of Yeats

Abstract

My first meeting with William Butler Yeats was on the night of the last performance of A.E.’s Deirdre and Yeats’s K athleen Ni Houlihan,¹ the plays that were the first offerings of the National Theatre Society which eventually became the Abbey Theatre. I was the youth² who, in Deirdre, carried a spear and had a speech about Fergus whom Deirdre accused of ‘Bartering his honour for a feast’. I was a player and so was Maud Gonne who played Kathleen ni Houlihan, and who was a party to Yeats’s invitation to come to a hotel—his or hers—to discuss the draft of a play of mine. ‘My first meeting’ I say, but I had seen the poet at rehearsals and had more distant glimpses of him on platforms and on streets. A.E. and Yeats had furnished the initial plays of the theatre, but no other playwrights had shown themselves, and so Yeats was interested when Fay told him I was trying to write a play. I need to say how exiciting it was for a beginner to have himself put in the rank off a possible dramatist for national theatre.

The Yeats We Knew, ed. Francis MacManus (Cork: The Mercicr Press, 1965) pp. 13–24-Reprinted, with slight variations, from Tri-Qyarterly (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University) W. B. Yeats Centenary Issue, no 4 (Fall 1965) 71–6.