“Drama as Personal as a Lyric”: The Centrality of Wilde’s Concepts of Dance, Desire and Image to Yeats’s Developing Aesthetic (1916–1921)

Noreen Doody²

Chapter
First Online: 08 August 2018

172 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter looks at Yeats’s developing philosophical positions—Unity of Being, Choice and Chance—and explores the progressive growth of Wilde’s philosophical ideas and images within his thought.

The cold and passionate dance is a concept for which Yeats is heavily indebted to Salomé and this chapter discusses the image of the dancer as a central image in Yeats’s iconography. The dancer is inextricably bound up with Yeats’s concept of unappeasable desire, and Wilde’s thinking is shown to be fundamental to Yeats’s developing theories in this area.

In the dance plays Yeats develops the image of dance within the context of many of the other symbols and elements that he found in Salomé, using one in conjunction with the other, so that together they form a substantial and distinctive creative unit or pattern within his imaginative work that carries on from play to play and yields a rich reading of Yeats’s aesthetic.

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Notes

1.
Yeats’s interest in the Noh plays of Japan is, of course, also very much in evidence in these plays. See Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray, Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990). See also Yoko Sato, “‘At the Hawk’s Well’: Yeats’s Dramatic Art of Visions”. Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 24 (2009), pp. 27–36. Published by: IASILJAPAN. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27759624.
2.
Sylvia Ellis, “The Figure of the Dancer: Salome” in The Plays of W.B. Yeats and the Dancer, pp. 1–85.
3.
His daughter, Anne Yeats, said that while her father learnt to dance as a young man his interest in dance was confined to the use he made of it in his plays. Personal Communication (13th April 1999). Yeats noted, crossed out and later published the following sentence: “I know ~~nothing about dancing~~ …” N.L.I. Ms. 8773, Pref., Four Plays for Dancers in At the Hawk’s Well, p. 1.
4.
W.B. Yeats, The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade, p. 562.
5.
W.B. Yeats, “Preface to 87”, 30th May 1935 (Full Moon in March) in The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, pp. 1310, 1311.
6.
Anna MacBride White and A.N. Jeffares, eds., The Gonne Yeats Letters, p. 198 and note 3 to letter 147, p. 494.
7.
Stéphane Mallarmé, “Herodiade” in The Savoy No. 8 (Dec. 1896), trans. Arthur Symons (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896), pp. 67, 68.
8.
Arthur Symons, “The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias” in Images of Good and Evil (London: Heinemann, 1899), pp. 42–48.
9.
Rev . Stewart Headlam, Fabian Socialist and high-principled Christian, founder of the Church and Stage Guild (1879). He supplied half of Wilde’s bail (7th May 1895) and on his release from jail, met him and gave refuge to him in his home (19th May 1897). Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 77. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, pp. 438, 495.
10.
T.H. Gibbon, “The Reverend Stewart Headlam and the emblematic Dancer: 1877–1894” in British Journal of Aesthetics 5 (1965), p. 332.
11.
Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, p. 4.
12.
Sylvia Ellis, The Plays of W.B. Yeats and the Dancer, p. 6.
13.
Stéphane Mallarmé, “Considerations sur l’Art du Ballet de la Loie Fuller ” in The National Observer (13th April 1893).
14.
Arthur Symons, Studies in the Seven Arts (1906; rpt., London: Martin Secker, 1924), p. 246.
15.
Ian Fletcher, “Explorations and Recoveries 11: Symons, Yeats and the Demonic Dance” in The London Magazine: A Monthly Review of Literature, vol. 7, no. 6 (June 1960), ed. John Lehmann, p. 58.
16.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume V, ed. Joseph Donohue, p. 730.
17.
Ian Fletcher, “Explorations and Recoveries 11: Symons, Yeats and the Demonic Dance”, p. 58.
18.
Neil Mann, “There are four types of perfection attainable, and these only in certain Phases of incarnation: Self-Sacrifice (in Phases 2, 3 and 4), Self-Knowledge (in Phase 13), Unity of Being (in Phases 16, 17 and 18), and Sanctity (in Phase 27) (see AV B 95 & 100). Generally Unity of Being is used by Yeats to cover some or all of these, since it was the form that interested him most and which was personally possible to him.” “The Terminology of A Vision”.
http://yeatsvision.com/Terminology.html
19.
For interesting article on relation of soul to body see: Thomas M. Olshewsky, “On the Relations of Soul to Body in Plato and Aristotle” in Journal of the History of Philosophy , Volume 14, Number 4, October 1976, pp., 391–404.
20.
George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script. Volume 2 (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 78.
21.
W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. XIV, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, p. 212.
22.
Ibid., p. 61.
23.
W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The Original 1925 Version. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. XIII, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, p. 15.
24.
W.B. Yeats, The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 359. See also W.B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds (London: Elkin Mathews, 1899), pp. 73, 74.
25.
At Phase 3, not as Mask but as phase, there should be perfect physical well-being or balance, though not beauty or emotional intensity, but at Phase 27 are those who turn away from all that Phase 3 represents and seek all those things it is blind to. The Body of Fate, therefore, derived from a phase of renunciation, is “loss”, and works to make impossible “simplification through intensity”. The being, through the intellect, selects some object of desire for a representation of the Mask as Image, some woman perhaps, and the Body of Fate snatches away the object. Then the intellect (Creative Mind), which in the most antithetical phases were better described as imagination, must substitute some new image of desire; and in the degree of its power and of its attainment of unity, relate that which is lost, that which has snatched it away, to the new image of desire, that which threatens the new image to the being’s unity. If its unity be already past, or if unity be still to come, it may for all that be true to phase. It will then use its intellect merely to isolate Mask and Image, as chosen forms or as conceptions of the mind. W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The revised 1937 edition. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. XIV, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, p. 106.
26.
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume IV, ed.Josephine Guy, p. 177.
27.
W.B. Yeats, “Anima Mundi” in Per Amica Silentia Lunae in Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 27.
28.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 224.
29.
W.B. Yeats, “Wilde: The Happy Prince” in Prefaces and Introductions. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VI, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 150.
30.
W.B. Yeats, Per Amica Silentia Lunae in Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 15.
31.
Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew and David R. Clark, Druid Craft: the writing of The Shadowy Waters, Note 4, p. 323.
32.
W.B. Yeats, Poems 1899–1905 (London: A.H. Bullen, 1906), p. 21.
33.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume V, ed. Joseph Donohue, p. 729.
34.
Ibid., p. 604.
Salomé’s full realization comes about through the kiss, and the transcendent power of love and the ineffable symbolized in the moon beam. It cannot come about without the meeting of the spiritual and the carnal. See section: “Symbolist Theatre and Wilde’s Salomé” in Chap. 6.
35.
W.B. Yeats, Deirdre, Abbey Acting Script, p. 26.
36.
W.B. Yeats, Per Amica Silentia Lunae in Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, pp. 9, 11.
37.
W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 303.
38.
Ibid., p. 304.
39.
W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well. N.L.I., Ms. 8773(3), Fragment typescript of second version, chron. p. 3.
40.
Heather C. Martin, “Metaphors for Poetry” in W.B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1986), p. 21.
41.
W.B. Yeats, “Wilde: The Happy Prince” in Prefaces and Introductions. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VI, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 150.
42.
W.B. Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus” in Per Amica Silentia Lunae in Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 3.
43.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 241.
44.
W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 306.
45.
W.B. Yeats, “Per Amica Silentia Lunae”. Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 8.
46.
W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 305.
47.
W.B. Yeats, “Per Amica Silentia Lunae”. Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 15.
48.
Ibid., p. 14.
49.
Ibid., p. 12.
50.
Ibid., p. 15.
51.
W.B. Yeats, Calvary. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 333.
52.
Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known” in W.B. Yeats’s A Vision: Explications and Contexts, ed. Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson and Claire Nally, p. 31.
53.
W.B. Yeats, Notes to Calvary collected in The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 790.
54.
Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 70.
55.
W.B. Yeats, Per Amica Silentia Lunae in Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 7.
56.
N.L.I. Microfiche 30,789. (Ts. 5pp.) “Note on the Symbolism in Calvary”, p. 5.
57.
W.B. Yeats, Calvary. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 334.
58.
Alexandra Poulain, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 160.
59.
N.L.I. Microfiche 30,789 (Ts. 5pp.) “Note on the Symbolism in Calvary”, p. 3.
60.
W.B. Yeats, “What Then?” The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 302.
61.
W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. XIV, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, p. 162.
62.
Joseph Donohue, “Distance, Death and Desire in Salome” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby, p. 131.
63.
Chad Bennett, “Oscar Wilde’s Salome: Décor, Des Corps, Desire”. ELH , Volume 77, Number 2, Summer 2010 Project Muse.
64.
Sylvia Ellis, The Plays of W.B. Yeats and the Dancer, p. 70.
65.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume V, ed. Joseph Donohue, pp. 722, 723, 725.
66.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and the Cinema”, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 587, 591. See also Evans and Gamman’s “The Gaze Revisited” in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (London: Routledge, 1995); and, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
67.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume V, ed. Joseph Donohue, pp. 725.
68.
Joseph Donohue, “Distance, Death and Desire in Salome” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby, p. 131.
69.
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, p. 88.
70.
Terri Mester notes the Salomé-like qualities of the dancer, Helen, in one of Yeats’s last compositions “the long legged fly” (c.1938). Terri A. Mester Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Elliot, Lawrence, Williams, and Early 20th Century Dance (Arkansas: University of Arkansas, 1997), p. 64. See also Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image, p. 89.
71.
W.B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen in The Variorium Edition of the Plays of W.B Yeats, p. 57.
72.
W.B. Yeats, “The Fiddler of Dooney”. The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 74.
73.
W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire (London: Fischer Unwin, 1894).
74.
W.B. Yeats, The Shadowy Waters in Poems 1899–1905, p. 28.
75.
Ninette de Valois, Come Dance With Me: A Memoir (London: Dance Books, 1973), p. 88.
76.
W.B. Yeats, Deirdre (Unsorted mss. and tss. Entitled “14 other pp. of t.s. draft”), p. 12^r.
77.
Joseph Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, p. 75.
78.
N.L.I. Folder 1. Act 111, sc. 2, p. 20. Bradford: Draft 16, p. 24.
79.
N.L.I. Folder 1. Unnumbered page before p. 3. Bradford: Draft 16, p. 241.
80.
N.L.I. Folder 1. Act 1, sc. 2, p. 28. Bradford: Draft 16, p. 204.
81.
W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well, p. 119.
82.
Ibid., p. 120.
83.
Ibid.
84.
N.L.I. Ms. 8773 (3). Ts. Second version. W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well, p. 3.
In The Only Jealousy of Emer The Woman of the Sidhe refers back to Cuchulain’s desire for her in At the Hawk’s Well: “Hold out your arms and hands again;/ You were not so dumbfounded when/ I was that bird of prey, and yet/ I am all woman now”. To which Cuchulain replies: “I am not/ The young and passionate man I was”. W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 325.
85.
Ibid., p. 303. Ninette de Valois “interpreted the text as requiring her to move through three distinct phases: from an evocation of brooding power, through suggestive seduction to the violent ecstasy of a wild bird”. Richard Allen Cave, “Commentaries and Notes” in Selected Plays, p. 321.
86.
N.L.I. “Ms. 8773 (4). [1] + 16 ff., with manuscript corrections”. W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well, p. 13.
87.
W.B. Yeats, The Only Jealousy of Emer. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 325.
88.
Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and the Antithetical Tradition (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 75.
89.
Petra Dierkes-Thrun suggests an alternative position—that Salomé “develops a notion of secular sublimity that replaced existing metaphysical and moral discourses … and puts forward a powerful and shocking vision of secular sublimity that replaces the search for the uplifted soul with the quest for the ecstatically fulfilled body”. Wilde’s theory of reciprocity between bodily and spiritual appetites has no place in Dierkes-Thrun’s theory. Petra Dierkes-Thrun, “Salome’s Modernity” in Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression, p. 198.
90.
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, p. 73.
91.
W.B. Yeats, “The Wind Among the Reeds”, p. 94.
92.
George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script, Volume 2, p. 116.
93.
T.R. Henn refers to Yeats’s practice of “allowing images to beget fresh images, to multiply in clusters round a single nucleus”. Henn continues “the more clearly the basic image is established and accepted in his mind, the greater is the vitality that coheres about the subsidiary image”. T.R. Henn, The Lonely Tower, p. 250.
94.
W.B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, pp. 300, 303.
95.
Ibid., p. 304.
96.
Ibid., pp. 304, 306.
97.
W.B. Yeats, The Dreaming of the Bones. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Volume II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 315.
98.
Ibid., p. 313.
99.
Ibid.
100.
W.B. Yeats, The Only Jealousy of Emer. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 325.
101.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume V, ed. Joseph Donohue, p. 715.
102.
W.B. Yeats, The Only Jealousy of Emer. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 327.
103.
W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. XIV, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, p. 60.
104.
W.B. Yeats, The Only Jealousy of Emer. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 326.
105.
W.B. Yeats, “Phases of the Moon”. The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 163.
106.
Ibid.
107.
W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. XIV, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, p. 101.
108.
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Mask (rpt., 1948; New York: Norton & Co., 2000), p. 228.
109.
W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children”, The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 215.
110.
W.B. Yeats, B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”. The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 187.
111.
Ibid., p. 172.
112.
Amy Koritz acknowledges the importance of body and soul to Salomé’s dance, and speaks of the transcending of “the dichotomy of the physical and the spiritual” in her dance. Koritz goes on to say that although Salomé is perceived by the reader as body, “Wilde could imagine her equally as soul.” Maria Marcsek-Fuchs, Dance and British Literature: An Intermedial Encounter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015), p. 241.
113.
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, p. 102.
114.
Szüts, Melinda, “The Space-Minded Dramaturgy of W.B. Yeats in Theory and Practice: At the Hawk’s Well and the Dance Plays” in International Yeats Studies: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 11, p. 87. Available at: http://tigerprints.clemson.edu/iys/vol1/iss1/11
115.
Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art (1960; rpt., London: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 7.
116.
W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. XIV, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, p. 29.
117.
W.B. Yeats, “Demon and Beast”. The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 185.
118.
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”. The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 187.
119.
Neil Mann, “The Phases of the Moon” http://www.yeatsvision.com/phases.html
120.
W.B. Yeats, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”. The Poems (Second Edition). The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. I, ed. Richard J. Finneran, p. 206.
121.
N.L.I. Ms. 8774 (4). W.B. Yeats, Fighting the Waves, “2 ff. typescript of cancelled note on the play”.
122.
W.B. Yeats, The Only Jealousy of Emer. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 325.
123.
W.B. Yeats, The Dreaming of the Bones. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, pp. 311, 314, 315.
124.
W.B. Yeats, The Only Jealousy of Emer. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 325.
125.
W.B. Yeats, The Dreaming of the Bones. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 316.
126.
W.B. Yeats, Calvary. The Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Vol. II, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, p. 335.

References

Manuscripts

Yeats, W.B. Four Plays for Dancers in At the Hawk’s Well. N.L.I. Ms. 8773.
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———. At the Hawk’s Well. (Fragment Ts. Second Version). N.L.I., Ms. 8773(3).
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———. “Note on the Symbolism in Calvary.” (Ts. 5pp.) N.L.I. Microfiche 30,789.
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Bennett, Chad. “Oscar Wilde’s Salome: Décor, Des Corps, Desire.” ELH, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Summer, 2010) Project Muse.
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Szüts, Melinda. “The Space-Minded Dramaturgy of W.B. Yeats in Theory and Practice: At the Hawk’s Well and the Dance Plays.” International Yeats Studies. Vol. 1, No. 1, Article 11. Available at: http://tigerprints.clemson.edu/iys/vol1/iss1/11

Books

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Noreen Doody

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Doody, N. (2018). “Drama as Personal as a Lyric”: The Centrality of Wilde’s Concepts of Dance, Desire and Image to Yeats’s Developing Aesthetic (1916–1921). In: The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89548-2_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89548-2_8
Published: 08 August 2018
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