Early Plays

Abstract

This play occupies a unique place among Yeats’s work for the theatre in that he returned to it again and again, rewriting and revising it more often than any of his other plays. Yeats first came across the subject matter while collecting folk material for Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), but he later discovered that it had come originally from Léo Lespès Les Matinées de Timothé Trimm (1865). The plot is a simple story of Christian piety and the triumph of charity in a straight contest with the forces of evil. During a famine the Devil contrives to remove all possibility of alleviating the people’s suffering. His followers, disguised as merchants, offer to buy souls, but the countess sells her own to ransom theirs. In every revision, however, Yeats enlarged upon the theme as well as the significance of the action by insisting on wider and more detailed symbolism. Instead of the original peasant-poet, Kevin, who adores the idealised countess, a courtly poet-hero, Aleel, figures in each scene of the final version. Cathleen’s desire to act in the world outside herself and fulfil her duty towards her fellow men is balanced by Aleel’s desire to subdue her active will and draw her into a subjective and ideal anarchy of the spirit.