BL. W. B. Yeats

185. Miller, Liam. The Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats. Dublin: Dolmen, 1977.

A work grown from an admitted quarter-century ‘obsession’ with Yeats’s plays. Chapters 6 to 8, especially, focus on information related to Yeats’s adaptation of the nô. Miller argues that Fenollosa’s notebooks provided Yeats a ‘manual’ that offered the ‘possibility of devising a form for his own theatrical work’. What Yeats found in the notebooks helped him ‘accommodate’ long-held beliefs about ‘the continuing presence of myth and its relevance to history in the world’, and in the last twenty-three years of his life he was able to ‘elaborate variations’ within this ‘framework’. Includes discussion of the nô itself and all of Yeats’s plays written after his introduction to it, along with lengthy and exacting notes about particular productions. Miller suggests but does not actually declare that the Peacock, a small stage Yeats commissioned in the twenties as part of the Abbey Theatre, was inspired by his understanding of the intimacy of the nô stage.