BL. W. B. Yeats

75. Bentley, Eric. ‘Yeats as a Playwright’. Kenyon Review 10 (1948): 196-208.

Argues that while the nô provided Yeats a ‘dramatic equivalent for his new verse style’, a model ‘terse, refined, solid, cryptic, [and] beautiful’, and taught him ways to simplify staging, and to combine music and dance with words ‘without letting the words get swamped’, post-1916 Yeatsian drama is so unlike its ‘Japanese prototypes’ that the nô should be seen above all as Yeats’s ‘excuse’ for ‘departing from even the most deeply entrenched Western [dramatic] pattern’. Reprinted in The Permanence of Yeats, edited by Joseph Hall and Martin Steinmann (New York: Macmillan, 1950).