Abstract
In 1901, Dowden saw into print his Introduction to Shakespeare and the twelfth edition of Mind and Art. Yeats wrote to Lady Augusta Gregory from the Shakespeare Hotel in Stratford on 25 April of that year:
This is a beautiful place. I am working very hard, reading all the chief criticisms of the plays and I think my essay will be one of the best things I have done. The more I read the worse does the Shakespeare criticism become and Dowden is about the climax of it. I[t] came out [of] the middle class movement and I feel it my legitimate enemy.1
The first half of his essay ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ would feature in The Speaker on 11 May. Yeats wrote to Gregory again just after the second half appeared a week later, remarking that ‘I think I really tell for the first time the truth about the school of Shakespeare critics of whom Dowden is much the best.’2 Despite this qualified praise, Dowden represented a ‘legitimate enemy’ to Yeats.
rosencrantz: Faith, there has been much to-do on both sides, and the nation holds it no sin to tar them to controversy. There was for a while no money bid for argument unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.
(Hamlet, 2.2.317–19)
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Notes
W.B. Yeats, The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. by Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 349.
A Bibliography of the Writings of W.B. Yeats, ed. by Allan Wade, 3rd edn, revised and ed. by Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), p. 90.
See W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 85–90.
For a lull discussion of J.B. Yeats’s Shakespeare, see William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats, 1839–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
J.B. Yeats, Letters of J.B. Yeats: Letters to his son W.B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922, ed. by Joseph Hone (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 199.
Compare Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 51–2.
Edward Dowden, Letters of Edward Dowden and his Correspondents, ed. by Elizabeth D. and Hilda M. Dowden (London: Dent, 1914), p. 48. See pp. 43–51 for their exchange. ‘The Brotherhood’, a name used as much in jest here as homage to the Pre-Raphaelites, consisted of the artists J.B. Yeats, Edwin Ellis, J.T. Nettleship, and George Wilson. Their ‘doctrine’ of emotional education was heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites.
Peter Ure, ‘W.B. Yeats and the Shakespearean Moment: On W.B. Yeats’s Attitude Towards Shakespeare as Revealed in his Criticism and in his Work for the Theatre’, lecture delivered at Queen’s University, Bellast, 27 April 1966, p. 6.
W.B. Yeats, ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, in Early Essays (2007), ed. by George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, ed. by George Mills Harper and George Bornstein, 14 vols (New York: Scribner, 1990–2008), IV, p. 79.
Kiberd, ‘Yeats and Criticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats, ed. by Marjorie Howes and John Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 115–28 (p. 124). This idea has its own history in Yeats criticism.
For example, Reg Skene in The Cuchulain Plays of W.B. Yeats: A Study (London: Macmillan, 1974)
and Philip Edwards in Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) give it a systematic treatment. Edwards largely reiterates this position in ‘Shakespeare and the Politics of the Irish Revival’, in The Internationalism of Irish Literature and Drama, ed. by Joseph McMinn, Irish Literary Studies Series 41 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), pp. 46–62.
Ruth Nevo has adopted a similar position to both Edwards and Skene in ‘Yeats, Shakespeare and Nationalism’, in Literature and Nationalism, ed. by Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp. 182–97.
See Yeats, Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1918), in Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959). He observes of the imagination in relation to the object therein ‘that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is not merely imagining’ (pp. 344–5). In the phases close to fifteen, this balance appears the most productive.
See Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 151–4, for phase twenty.
See Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Thomson, 2004), pp. 214–20.
William Morris, News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), p. 60.
Tom McAlindon, ‘Yeats and the English Renaissance’, PMLA, 82.2 (May 1967), 157–69 (p. 158).
Jefferson Holdridge, Those Mingled Seas: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, the Beautiful and the Sublime (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000), p. 3.
See Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 10–15, for the impact of this reading of the English Renaissance on the shaping of Yeats’s own personality and his early poetry.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), p. 55.
Walter Pater, Appreciations: With an Essay on ‘Style’ (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 103.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 238–9.
T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), p. 442.
W.B. Yeats, The Poems (1997), ed. by Richard J. Finneran, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, ed. by George Mills Harper and George Bornstein, 14 vols (New York: Scribner, 1990–2008), I, pp. 148–9 (p. 148).
For Yeats, the immediate sources of ‘imperialistic enthusiasm’ are Sidney Lee’s ‘Shakespeare, William’, in The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 63 vols (London: George Smith, 1885–1900),
and Lee’s A Life of William Shakespeare (1898).
R.E Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life. Volume I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 222–3.
R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 456.
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry S. King, 1875), p. 194.
See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediœval Political Theology, 7th edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Margaret Shewring, ‘In the Context of English History’, in Shakespeare’s Histories, ed. by Emma Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 254.
See Yeats’s commentary on ‘Three Songs to the Same Tune’, in King of the Great Clock Tower: Commentaries and Poems (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970), pp. 36–8.
Ibid., pp. 206–10 (p. 207). See Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 136. For Yeats’s references to some of his own poems as soliloquies, see Autobiographies, p. 359, p. 532, and ‘A General Introduction for my Work’, in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 509–26 (p. 521).
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 220–1.
Yeats, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, in Early Essays, pp. 128–38 (p. 130–1, p. 137). See also Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, in Lectures and Essays in Criticism, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. by R.H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), III, pp. 291–386 (p. 375, p. 379).
W.B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, ed. by J.B. Frayne, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1970–75), II, p. 241.
Reginald R. Buckley, The Shakespeare Revival and the Stratford-upon-Avon Movement (London: George Allen and Sons, 1911), pp. 45–6.
See John Elsom and Nicholas Tomalin, The History of the National Theatre (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978).
W.J. McCormack, Ascendency and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 342.
A similar debate had recently worked itself out in England. As Grady observes, a deep divide had taken shape by the late nineteenth century between lay readers of Shakespeare siding with either Arnoldian ‘men of letters’ or the ‘specialist’ founder of the New Shakespeare Society, F.J. Furnivall, a friend and frequent correspondent of Dowden. Grady cites Swinburne’s attack on Furnivall and the minutiae of the NSS as an example of this sort of scholarship run amuck. Swinburne resented scientific testing in humanist criticism, resenting even more the ‘disintegration’ of the ‘organic whole’ of the Shakespearean text as observed, in his mind, unchallenged since at least Coleridge’s time (The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 53–6). It would appear, then, that Yeats’s work fits directly within this debate, as he leverages his own Romantic literary inheritance to argue against the reification of a ‘racy Saxon’ (Pater, Appreciations, p. 16) in the work of calculating character critics like Dowden just as surely as he shows himself in ‘Poetry and Tradition’ to stand increasingly apart from nationalists seeking ‘Immediate victory, immediate utility’.
Christina Hunt Mahony, ‘Women’s Education, Edward Dowden and the University Curriculum in English Literature: An Unlikely Progression’, in Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres, ed. by Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), pp. 195–202 (p. 195).
John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), XVIII, p. 161.
Ibid., p. 113. See Francis O’Gorman, ‘“The Clue of Shakespearian Power Over Me”: Ruskin, Shakespeare, and Influence’, in The Victorian Shakespeare, ed. by Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, 2 vols (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), II, pp. 203–18, for a much more complete treatment of this theme in Ruskin’s lifelong engagement with Shakespeare. This discussion owes a great deal to O’Gorman’s own.
Quoted in ibid., p. lix. See also Ruskin, ‘Letter 91’, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, ed. by Dinah Birch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
Quoted in William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–49), IV, p. 463.
Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment, trans. by David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 12.
See Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Pimlico, 2005), pp. 132–3. Stoker served as the business manager of Irving’s company.
Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 114.
Gordon Craig, Henry Irving (London: Dent, 1930), p. 74.
G.B. Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, ed. by Edwin Wilson (New York: Applause, 1961), p. 252.
Jonathan Allison, ‘W.B. Yeats and Shakespearean Character’, in Shakespeare in Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 114–35 (p. 117).
See Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), pp. 86–7.
Yeats, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Volume II: 1896–1900, ed. by Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 416.
See Gregory’s Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (London: Colin Smythe, 1972) for the declaration of intentions drawn up in 1897 and the context of its creation.
Yeats, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Volume I: 1865–1895, ed. by John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp. 446–7.
Quoted in Kathryn R. Ludwigson, Edward Dowden (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 140.
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler et al. (London: The Bodley Head, 1986), pp. 177–8.
Yeats, Letters to the New Island, ed. by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 12.
As the editors of his Early Essays have noted, Yeats ‘invokes’ The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Timon of Athens much more frequently after 1901 as he increasingly focuses on the Renaissance as a tipping point in history towards ‘modern fragmentation and subjectivity’, the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that Eliot would identify in 1921 with his famous review essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’. See Yeats, Early Essays, p. 334, and TS. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in Selected Prose of TS. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 59–67.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 2000), § 7 (p. 60).
Neil Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 57.
J.M. Synge, The Playboy of Western World: A Comedy in Three Acts (Dublin: Maunsel, 1907), p. vii. Synge dated his ‘Preface to The Playboy of Western World’ as ‘January 21st 1907’.
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© 2013 Adam Putz
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Putz, A. (2013). W.B. Yeats. In: The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027665_4
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