Abstract
A play evolves, Yeats wrote, rather the way philosophy unfolded in Christianity, becoming at first “life”, then “biography”, and finally “drama”. About the sequence of evolution, he was unequivocal: “A play passes through the same process in being written”, he said (Au 468). The pattern holds with his view of mimesis, a theory that justifies Platonic transmutation of life into art and vice versa.
At first,… there is a bundle of ideas, something that can be stated in philosophical terms; my Countess Cathleen, for instance, was once the moral question, may a soul sacrifice itself for a good end? but gradually philosophy is eliminated until at last the only philosophy audible, if there is even that, is the mere expression of one character or another. When it is completely life it seems to the hasty reader a mere story. (Au 468)
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Notes
David R. Clark, “Vision and Revision: Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen”, in The World of W. B. Yeats, ed. Robin Skelton and Ann Saddlemyer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965) pp. 140–58.
Sec Michael J. Sidnell, “Yeats’s First Work for the Stage: the Earliest Ver-sions of ‘The Countess Kathleen’”, in D. E. S. Maxwell and S. B. Bushrui (eds), W. B. Yeats, 1865–1965: Centenary Essays on the Art of W. B. Yeats (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1965) pp. 182–7.
Joseph Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from His Unpublished Journal “Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer”, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (Carbondale and Edwardsville, III.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967) p. 6, entry of Monday, 8 May 1899.
See G. J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979) pp. 65–9, 101.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1964) pp. 225, 226.
See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1959) pp. 68–9,
James Joyce, “The Day of the Rabblement”, in Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (eds), The Critical Writings of James Joyce (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989) pp. 68–9;
James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966) vol. 2, pp. 298, 321–2; vol. 3, p. 195 and n.
Erik Bradford Stocker, James Joyce’s Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Tx.: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1986) p. 264, item 556.
Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1972) pp. 261–70.
Peter Ure, Yeats the Playwright: A Commentary on Character and Design in the Major Plays (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963) p. 13 and n.
W. B. Yeats, (ed.), Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London: Scott, 1888; Wade 212)
W. B. Yeats (ed.), Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1918) pp. 248–51,
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Chapman, W.K. (1995). The “Countess Cathleen Row” of 1899 and the Revisions of 1901 and 1911. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 11. Yeats Annuals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23757-9_7
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