BL. W. B. Yeats

199. Brown, Richard P. ‘Some Notes on Yeats and the Noh’. Southern Theatre 23/3 (1980): 15-21.

Argues that ‘the Noh is not really a dramatic structure at all’, but rather ‘an elaborate lyric structure, theatrical in approach and conception, which provides a . . . setting for a representation of a lyric activity that is formally central to the work’, and that in his Four Plays for Dancers (17) Yeats ‘borrowed both the conception of staged lyricism and the devices which instrument that conception’. The argument is brief, but might nonetheless serve as a starting point for a response to critics such as Tsukimura (138), who focus resolutely on the antithetical and ‘Western’ working out of a conflict in Yeats’s dance plays.