BL. W. B. Yeats

6. ‘The Abbey Theatre’. Program note. Abbey Theatre, Dublin. 4 September 1908.

	Reprinted in Uncollected Prose, vol. 2.

Indicates that Yeats was aware of Japanese writing about his work as early as 1908. He closes this brief retrospective account of the Abbey, the Dublin theatre established in 1904 by Yeats and Lady Gregory to promote Irish poetic drama, by noting that ‘in Japan there are some who believe very erroneously that we are a great success . . . and one of their distinguished critics uses our example to urge upon his countrymen the support of their native drama’. Reprinted in 55, where an editorial note suggests, almost certainly correctly, that the critic in question was Shimamura Hôgetsu (1871-1918), whose evaluation of Yeats’s influence on the Irish revival had appeared in The Tokyo Daily News in March 1906.