I first came to Yeats's plays after reading all of Shakespeare, four Ben Jonson plays, much of Restoration Comedy, a half dozen Moliere plays in French, and a couple Synge. I was not impressed. Now, having published a translation of Bruno's one comedy Candelaio (1582) and fostered its performance in London and here, and having written a few plays and one musical myself, I am more appreciative of Yeats's brief plays. After all, he co-founded and managed the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where nationalists rioted against Synge's Playboy of the Western World. (Something for US Trumpians to aspire to--even seeing and then protesting live theater.
This collection includes Cathleen ni Hoolihan, the first to be performed--and curiously, the last in this collection. And Yeats's three longer plays, including Deirdre. But I shall review only two, first "Resurrection," not in verse like Mosada (see my rev), but containing the best verse in his plays, Two Songs from a Play, "Everything that man esteems / Endures a moment or a day…." I shall compare Yeats to Dario Fo's passion or medieval "Mystery" plays about Maria at the Cross, card-playing at the foot of the Cross, etc.
Two men are guarding the entrance to the Last Supper, a Greek and a Hebrew, while a third (a Syrian) has been sent to ascertain if in fact Jesus's tomb was empty. Why need they guard those eleven gathered? The Dionysian celebrants have been in the fields, tearing a goat apart and drinking its blood. They're now rampaging through the streets, a mob with rattles; the Dionysians cry every year, "their lunatic cry, 'God has arisen'…They can make their god live and die at pleasure." The Hebrew is reluctant to tell Peter about the empty tomb, "Peter would remember that the women did not flinch; not one among them denied their master."(136)
Dario Fo, when you see his face, you feel that like Moliere, who as a young actor speaking serious verse, his audience laughed. (Moliere had no choice but to write comedy, fortunately.) Fo's mystery plays are mostly comedies, like gamblers at the foot of the cross, or satires, like Maria learning the fate of the Condemned, her son. A neighbor woman says they should not go where the witches are, one condemned for dancing with a goat, two for thievery. Maria says, before she knows one is Jesus, "Oh the Mother of such a son, doomed to hang on a cross…" The neighbor woman says, "Oh, that third guy always has a bunch of undesirables around him, people without work or skills to work, dying of hunger, the disreputable, the prostitutes…"(Mistero Buffo, 140). Fo writes in dialect, but the Einaudi edition I use, edited by Rame, translates into Italian.
Another of Yeats's short plays on medieval mystery subjects, like those Dario Fo parodies: "Purgatory." I have no idea what Yeats attempted here; but, if it was to write the first depressing modern play that people flock to in the second decade of the 21st C, then he succeeded (performed at Abbey Theatre Aug '38). Surely, it does not exhilarate, as Hugh Richmond asserts tragedy must. In his intro to "Shakespeare's Tragedies Reviewed, a Spectator's Role," Richmond questions the appeal of depressing plays so current. Well, maybe Yeats started it all. Only two characters, a Boy and his Grand-father. And what a grandpa he is. Perhaps a specter or two.
This may be the worst play I've ever read-- a kind of compliment since I have read widely in the drama of five languages, but especially English since the 16C. Yeats does write in verse of variable length, and of homely speech: "Where are the jokes and stories of a house, / Its threshold gone to patch a pig-sty?"(199) ( )