Where There is Nothing: Being Plays for an Irish Theatre - Volume I.

By William Butler Yeats

The first volume of "Plays for an Irish Theatre" contains W. B. Yeats' play in five acts "Where There is Nothing". This marvellous play will appeal to all lovers of the English language, and especially those with an interest in the work of Yeats' and Irish literature in general. William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the most prolific literary figures of the 20th-century. At the forefront of both the British and Irish literary movements, he co-founded the Abbey Theatre and was, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others, a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In his later life, Yeats also served as a Senator in Ireland. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Williamson Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473349261

William Butler Yeats

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet. Born in Sandymount, Yeats was raised between Sligo, England, and Dublin by John Butler Yeats, a prominent painter, and Susan Mary Pollexfen, the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. He began writing poetry around the age of seventeen, influenced by the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but soon turned to Irish folklore and the mystical writings of William Blake for inspiration. As a young man he joined and founded several occult societies, including the Dublin Hermetic Order and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, participating in séances and rituals as well as acting as a recruiter. While these interests continued throughout Yeats’ life, the poet dedicated much of his middle years to the struggle for Irish independence. In 1904, alongside John Millington Synge, Florence Farr, the Fay brothers, and Annie Horniman, Yeats founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which opened with his play Cathleen ni Houlihan and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News and remains Ireland’s premier venue for the dramatic arts to this day. Although he was an Irish Nationalist, and despite his work toward establishing a distinctly Irish movement in the arts, Yeats—as is evident in his poem “Easter, 1916”—struggled to identify his idealism with the sectarian violence that emerged with the Easter Rising in 1916. Following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, however, Yeats was appointed to the role of Senator and served two terms in the position. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, and continued to write and publish poetry, philosophical and occult writings, and plays until his death in 1939.

Book preview

1.png

PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE

VOLUME I.

WHERE THERE IS NOTHING

BEING VOLUME ONE OF

PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE:

BY

W. B. YEATS

Copyright © 2017 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library

Contents

W. B. Yeats

DEDICATION OF VOLUMES ONE AND TWO OF PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE.

ACT I.

ACT II.

ACT III.

ACT IV.

ACT V.

W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland in 1865. He spent his childhood in Country Sligo, and was educated in London, but returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen with the intention of pursuing painting. However, he quickly discovered he preferred poetry, and became involved with the Celtic Revival, an Irish movement resisting the cultural influence of English rule during the Victorian period. Throughout his life, much of Yeats’ work was included by Irish mythology and folklore, as well as various types of mysticism and occultism.

Yeats’ first verse play, Mosada, was published in 1886. Over the next few years, he continued to write, and mingled with many literary luminaries of the day, such as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. His The Wanderings of Usheen and other Poems was published in 1889, and brought him some attention from critics. In the late 1890s, he became involved with The Abbey Theatre – the institution which propelled him to fame and success. As its chief playwright, Yeats staged a number of his best-remembered productions during the years up to 1911, including The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and The King’s Threshold (1904).

From 1910 onwards, Yeats focussed more on poetry. The collections of lyrical poetry he penned during his last decades - such as The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940) – made him one of the most acclaimed and influential poets in Europe. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1939, aged 73, and is now regarded as one of the twentieth century's key English language poets, and a master of the traditional forms.

DEDICATION OF VOLUMES ONE AND TWO OF PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE.

My dear Lady Gregory, I dedicate to you two volumes of plays that are in part your own.

When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little chapters of the first edition of The Celtic Twilight, and that is how I began to write in the Irish way.

Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life. The old tales were still alive for me indeed, but with a new, strange, half unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass, until at last, when I had finished The Secret Rose, and was half-way through The Wind Among the Reeds, a wise woman in her trance told me that my inspiration was from the moon, and that I should always live close to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I had no need to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true countenance of country life.

One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Hoolihan for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play I could make others see my dream as I had seen it, but I could not get down out of that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all you had done for me I had not the country speech. One has to live among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing, She has been a serving-maid among us, before one can think the thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my dream into the little play, Cathleen ni Hoolihan, and when we gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the working people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic fables into speech. Some of these have already been acted, but some may not be acted for a long time, but all seem to me, though they were but a part of a summer's work, to have more of that countenance of country life than anything I