Introduction

Abstract

Yeats quarrels with both of the assumptions which dominate dramatic criticism prior to the twentieth century: that the all-important end of drama is action, or alternatively character. The supremacy of action goes back to Aristotle, who, in tragedy in particular, regards the plot as the overriding consideration: ‘Thus the incidents and the plot are the end aimed at in tragedy, and as always, the end is everything. Furthermore, there could not be a tragedy without action, but there could be without character.’¹ The essence of the Aristotelian view is that man defines himself by action. He is what he does rather than what he feels. As John Jones expresses it: ‘Aristotelian man cannot make a portentous gesture of “I have that within which passes show” because he is significantly himself only in what he says and does.’² This leaves room for definition through speech as well as action. Aristotle goes so far as to say that ‘the plot should be so ordered that even without seeing it performed anyone merely hearing what is afoot will shudder with fear and pity as a result of what is happening’,³ but he does not envisage a production consisting only of mime or dumb-show. Character, thought, diction, music and spectacle are all additional constituents, but plot is the supremely important mode of revelation.

In poetical drama there is, it is held, an antithesis between character and lyric poetry, for lyric poetry — however much it move you when you read out of a book — can, as these critics think, but encumber the action. Yet when we go back a few centuries and enter the great periods of drama, character grows less and sometimes disappears, and there is much lyric feeling, and at times a lyric measure will be wrought into the dialogue, a flowing measure that had well befitted music, or that more lumbering one of the sonnet.

W. B. Yeats, ‘The Tragic Theatre’ (1910)