BL. W. B. Yeats

4. ‘The Play, the Player and the Scene’. Samhain: An Occasional Review Edited by W. B. Yeats. Dublin: Bryers and Walker, 1904.

As in the previous year when Yeats anticipated his response to the nô in the call for an Irish theatre ‘remote, spiritual, and ideal’ (see 3), here he does so in noting that in the theatre ‘the hour of convention and decoration and ceremony is coming again’. Miller suggests of this line that when it was written Yeats ‘was not aware that, on the other side of the world, a theatre form which embodied these qualities had existed for centuries and that he would come, a decade later, to discover and adapt the form to his own purpose’ (185, p. 198).