A. Critical and Comparative Studies

39. Pronko, Leonard Cabell. ‘Three Visions of Noh’. In Theater East and West: Perspectives toward a Total Theater. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. Reprint, 1974.

A reliable discussion of the nô that examines the relation between the form and Yeats’s adaptations (see especially BL12), Britten and Plomer’s Curlew River (BJ18), and Beckett’s drama (see also BL190, 235, and 250). Pronko emphasises that the nô is not only a literary genre but also a theatrical art, and that ‘in any work . . . faithful to the spirit of the Noh, meaning comes to us not through the words alone, or even primarily, but through other aural and visual means’. The discussion of Yeats’s adaptations draws from Sharp’s earlier analysis (BL101) and is more perceptive than most writing on the subject.