Yeats's Plays and the Noh Drama

Abstract

The Noh theatre, as Yeats understood it, does not imitate human beings; it imitates signs. The dramatis personae are not rounded, credible characters and their sensibilities do not deepen. They are masks, ideograms carved in wood and outfitted with arms and legs. The Noh is a sort of treatise on religion carried out by ambulatory pictograms, pointing to truths beyond our world. In the Noh, there is rarely anything that could be called a story; the action, which is minimal, is usually accomplished during, and by means of, the climactic dance. The dramatic action, then, is only a movement towards enlightenment. The action of a Noh play takes no time at all: it is a moment of recognition, an instant of transfiguration, artificially prolonged. Yeats’s Noh plays are discussed as exemplified in The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), At the Hawk’s Well (1917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), Fighting the Waves (1929), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939).