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The Role of Shakespeare in W. B. Yeats’s Irish Theatre: Diarmuid and Grania (1901) and Beyond

After the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890, W. B. Yeats was engaged in a series of cultural projects and sought to construct a new Irish identity not through parliamentary politics but by revitalizing indigenous art and literature. The Irish Literary Theatre (1899–1901), which the poet cofounded with Augusta Gregory, Edward Martyn, and George Moore, was one of them. Curiously enough, Shakespeare played a small but significant part in the theatrical discourse that would help transform the Literary Theatre into the Abbey Theatre (1904-).
My essay will first examine Yeats’s reaction to Shakespeare’s English history plays as they were performed by actor-manager F. R. Benson and his company in Stratford- upon- Avon in April 1901. The English actors were set to stage Yeats and Moore’s Diarmuid and Grania for the Literary Theatre in October the same year. I will go on to explore the direct bearings that the Stratford festival would have on the Dublin show, in an attempt to illuminate the ways in which memories of Shakespeare’s histories were both inscribed in, and erased from, Yeats’s Irish theatre. Particular attention will be paid to Irish actor and theatre critic Frank Fay, whose reviews of Diarmuid and Grania would influence Yeats’s vision for Ireland’s national theatre.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37307/j.1866-5381.2022.02.06
Lizenz: ESV-Lizenz
ISSN: 1866-5381
Ausgabe / Jahr: 2 / 2022
Veröffentlicht: 2022-11-24
Dokument The Role of Shakespeare in W. B. Yeats’s Irish Theatre:  Diarmuid and Grania  (1901) and Beyond