Some
of Yeats’s plays have dramatized political
issues, especially those embracing Irish nationalism, Politics, Drama
and Poetry: The Political Vision of W.B. Yeats as Reflected in Select
Plays and PoemsSome of Yeats’s plays have dramatized political issues,
especially those embracing Irish nationalism, contemporary political
intrigues and the rising tide of the native Catholic middle class
protest against the traditional Protestant landed aristocracy. Both his
plays and his politics have been subjected to incisive scrutiny, but not
the political components in his plays. I will contrast the treatment of
political themes in them to that in select ‘political’ poems which
articulate similar concerns to highlight what is distinctive as also
more shadowy, oblique and peripheral about the depiction of these issues
in his drama. The plays to be analyzed are: The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan (written in collaboration with Lady Gregory), On Baile’s Strand, The Dreaming of the Bones and The Player Queen.
They will be compared with several poems, including “September 1913,”
“To a Shade,” “Easter 1916,” “On a Political Prisoner,” “Mediations in
Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Parnell’s
Funeral,” “Come gather round me, Parnellites,” “The Ghost of Roger
Casement,” “On a Political Prisoner,” and “Sixteen Dead Men”.
Thanks
to John O’Leary and Maud Gonne, Yeats got involved with Fenians, the
Irish Republican Brotherhood and numerous political controversies, even
as temperamentally he continued to abhor political activism. Although
later he played an active role in the Irish Senate, he never
wholeheartedly admired politicians and their profession. In his mind,
there was always a certain ambivalence towards militant nationalism,
especially armed rebellion against English colonial rule. Moreover, the
desire to escape from the sordid reality into a world of fantasy
struggled in his self with his political endeavours. Ironically, this
appears to be more evident in his plays than in his “political” poems.
It is also fascinating that his own works engage less with contemporary
politics than some of the plays by Shaw, Synge and O’Casey mounted at
the Abbey Theatre.
In
my analysis of Yeats’s political vision, I will ask how his Protestant
and somewhat genteel background shaped his “Tory” view of the Irish
groups he despised: merchants, clerks, Catholic clergymen, and agitators
and rabble rousers, especially the Whigs of all shades. Did the early
influences of Nietzsche and secret mystical societies at all contribute
to the formation of an elitist contempt for the masses? Further, Yeats’s
interest in the occult and the esoteric, pagan and magical spirituality
opened him to Indian religious thought, chiefly to its mysticism. Mme.
Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Mohini Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and
Purohit Swamy all made Indian philosophy, and to an extent Indian
politics, fascinating to him. But in spite of significant parallels
between the colonial Indian and Irish political situations, he did not
set any play in India. He was not alone in this as none of the major
Anglo-Irish playwrights, not even Shaw, chose Indian settings for their
plays. Was this a result of the state of the Dublin and London theatres
of his time? Perhaps the nature of Yeats’s dramatization of political
issues in his plays was rooted in a mode of thinking and feeling based
on duality, on counterpointing and balancing of opposites, on “a
dialectical process of synthesis.”
Prof.
Prashant K. Sinha is retired from the Department of English, University
of Pune, India. He may be contacted at prashantsinha_2000@yahoo.com.