BL. W. B. Yeats

176. Taylor, Richard. ‘Assimilation and Accomplishment: Nô Drama and an Unpublished Source for At the Hawk’s Well’ (12). In Yeats and the Theatre, edited by Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds. Niagara Falls, N.Y.: Maclean-Hunter, 1975.

Includes the text of Yôrô (see BK75), transcribed by Dorothy Pound in 1960 from Fenollosa’s notebooks (see BK132), and asserts that the play is ‘obviously the model from which Yeats constructed At the Hawk’s Well’. Taylor’s argumentation, as always, is careful, yet a direct link between Yôrô and Yeats’s play is not as obvious as he believes. Proceeds to analysis of ‘the exact measure of . . . influence’ in Yeats’s ‘assimilation’ of the nô form, finding that Yeats gained from the nô ‘a substitute for worn-out and meaningless stage conventions, [and] a valid means of objectifying the life of the spirit and restoring ritual drama to the theatre’. Incorporated into 180.