Theatre Business

Abstract

Yeats’s involvement with practical nationalist politics culminated in the Tone Centenary. The following year, 1899, saw the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre. As the theatre prospered, Yeats perceived in his new work a way of dedicating his talents more effectively to the service of Ireland. A decade had passed since the death of Parnell, and Yeats had ‘spent much of my time and more of my thought these last ten years on Irish organisation’.¹ He now decided to devote himself to the organization of an Irish national theatre: a change not of aims but of methods.