BL. W. B. Yeats

19. Plays in Prose and Verse. Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 2. London: Macmillan, 1922.

Reprints Deirdre (5).

a. The Player Queen. Yeats was at work on this play in 1914, and though Pound’s letter to Harriet Monroe of 31 January of that year (BK59b) contends that Yeats was already interested in the nô, the work shows no practical influence from the form. Arnott (A44) suggests that the confrontation between the Queen in life and the Queen in art ‘is an interesting variation on the meeting of the Mountain Hag and the Dancer in [the nô] Yamamba’, though that work was not among Fenollosa’s manuscripts or early-century English translations, and no evidence exists that Yeats would have known of it.