A. S. Knowland’s scientific contributions

Purgatory was first produced on 10 August 1938 at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. The cast was: Old Man, Michael J. Dolan; Boy, Liam Redmond. There exists a scenario of eight pages, two manuscripts, from typescripts corrected by Yeats, and a set of corrected proofs, now all in the National Library, Dublin. For a transcript of some of this material see Curtis Bradford (YW 297–300) who has written of the scenarios: When working on a play he began with what he called a ‘Scenario’. These are always in prose and are usually very roughly written. Yeats had a visionary mind, and his scenarios record visions of a dramatic action, sometimes intense visions. Yeats sees in his mind’s eye, as it were, a dramatic action unfolding before him in a theatre. Some of the scenarios are short … Others, for example, the scenarios of ‘The Words upon the Window-Pane’ and ‘Purgatory’, are longer and fully develop the plays that grew out of them. (YW 171)

The play, which abandons the austere concentration of the Noh-type drama and requires quite elaborate theatrical resources, was first printed in 1938. The Abbey Theatre intended to produce it but changed their minds, to Yeats’s relief, evidently because he feared that its irreverent and Rabelaisian qualities would provoke riots. He himself described it as ‘the strangest wildest thing I have written’ (L 845), as amusing as The Player Queen but ‘more tragedy and philosophic depth’ (L 843). When it was taking shape in his mind in December 1935, he told Dorothy Wellesley that Shri Purohit Swami was with him and that the play was ‘his philosophy in a fable, or mine confirmed by him’ (L 844). Although he warned Ethel Mannin not to ask him what it meant, the play has not lacked interpreters.

Yeats made a prose draft of this play at the Chantry House, Steyning, Sussex in September 1938 (Hone, WBY 474–5). He was working on it in October, as he told Ethel Mannin in a letter of 20 October 1938: I am writing a play on the death of Cuchulain, an episode or two from the old epic. My ‘private philosophy’ is there but there must be no sign of it; all must be like an old faery tale. It guides me to certain conclusions and gives me precision but I do not write it. To me all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness, beings or persons which die each other’s life, live each other’s death. That is true of life and death themselves. Two cones (or whirls), the apex of each in the other’s base. (L 917–18)

The play first took shape in Yeats’s mind in 1902, and continued to nag at it off and on until 1922, when the two final versions, one in prose and the other in prose and verse, were published. It is based on a story, ‘The Priest’s Soul’, recorded by Lady Wilde in AL I, in which a priest, the cleverest in Ireland, denies the existence of the soul, of Heaven, of Purgatory and Hell. He is visited by an angel who tells him that he may either live on earth for a hundred years enjoying every pleasure and then be cast into Hell for ever, or die in twenty-four hours in the most horrible torments, and pass through Purgatory, there to remain till the Day of Judgement, unless he can find someone who believes, through whose mercy his soul can be saved. Finally he is saved by a child ‘from a far country’ who convinces him of the existence of the soul. The priest then retracts his blasphemy and bids the child kill him and call his pupils to watch his soul escaping, which becomes ‘the first butterfly that was ever seen in Ireland’.

The first performance of this ‘trivial, unambitious retelling of an old folk-tale [which] showed William Fay for the first time as a most loveable comedian’ (A 452), was given in Dublin, 30 October 1902, in the Antient Concert Rooms. It was written with Lady Gregory’s help, but ‘neither Lady Gregory nor I could yet distinguish between the swift-moving town dialect — the dialect of the Irish novelists no matter what part of Ireland they wrote of — and the slow-moving country dialect’ (A 451). It proved hardly less popular than Cathleen ni Haulihan.

Yeats began to write his version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex about 1904. Ulick O’Connor remarks: It is generally thought that Yeats didn’t begin his first attempt at Sophocles’ Oedipus until 1908, owing to Gilbert Murray’s refusal to make a literal translation for him in 1904. But a note from Gogarty to an Oxford acquaintance shows that the poet turned to his young friend instead and asked him to give him a version which he could turn into English verse. To G. K. A. Bell Gogarty wrote in February 1904, ‘I am preparing a trans. (verse) of Oedipus Rex for Yeats.’ Oedipus in fact was to be Yeats’s finest dramatic work. Later, as he completed the play in the ‘twenties, he made Gogarty chant passages to him in Greek so that he could capture in English some of the assonances of the original. (Oliver St John Gogarty: A Poet and his Times, 1965, p. 45)

In the Introduction to Four Plays for Dancers Yeats wrote that: The conception of the play is derived from the world-wide belief that the dead dream back, for a certain time, through the more personal thoughts and deeds of life. The wicked, according to Cornelius Agrippa, dream themselves to be consumed by flames and persecuted by demons; and there is precisely the same thought in a Japanese ‘Noh’ play, where a spirit, advised by a Buddhist priest she has met upon the road, seeks to escape from the flames by ceasing to believe in the dream. The lovers in my play have lost themselves in a different but still self-created winding of the labyrinth of conscience. The Judwalis [a fictitious Arab tribe invented by Yeats] distinguish between the Shade which dreams back through events in the order of their intensity, becoming happier as the more painful and, therefore, more intense wear themselves away, and the Spiritual Being, which lives back through events in the order of their occurrence, this living back being an exploration of their moral and intellectual origin. All solar natures, to use the Arabian terms, during life move towards a more objective form of experience, the lunar towards a more subjective. After death a lunar man, reversing the intellectual order, grows always closer to objective experience, which in the spiritual world is wisdom, while a solar man mounts gradually towards the most extreme subjective experience possible to him. In the spiritual world subjectivity is innocence, and innocence, in life an accident of nature, is now the highest achievement of the intellect. I have already put the thought in verse.

This is a version, in verse, of the play originally written in prose and called The Golden Helmet. It is founded, Yeats tells us, ‘upon an old Irish story, The Feast of Bricriu, given in Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and is meant as an introduction to On Baile’s Strand’ (CW, IV). Saul (PYPl 50) points to an allied tale in the same volume, ‘The Championship of Ulster’, and also draws attention to the Middle English analogue, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, though there is no evidence to suggest that Yeats knew this poem.