Later Yeats: the Noh Plays and After

Abstract

Anyone who has seen the formal and alien effect of a Noh company performing the plays will realise that the text alone could have conveyed little of this effect to Yeats, and the compiler Fenollosa’s notes on the salient points of performance can hardly have recreated the image and atmosphere for him. However, this is not ultimately relevant to what Yeats was doing: he was not after all a Japanese scholar aiming for an authentic reconstruction or imitation of the Noh models, but wished to make use of its conventions for his own purposes. His notes betray also a desire to get as far as possible from the commonplace limitations of the folk play:

I have found my first model — and in literature if we would not be parvenues we must have a model — in the ‘Noh’ stage of aristocratic Japan. (V 415)