BL. W. B. Yeats

216. Bradbrook, Muriel C. ‘Yeats and the Noh Drama of Japan’. In Aspects of Dramatic Form in the English and the Irish Renaissance. Vol. 3 of Collected Papers of Muriel C. Bradbrook. Brighton: Harvester, 1983.

Finds that ‘the contradiction between the stillness surrounding . . . “vivid words” and the dance is resolved in the most fully integrated form of total theatre, the Japanese Noh’, and that Yeats discovered in it ‘a form which he afterwards adapted and modified, but which led him to his later and more mature style’. Discusses At the Hawk’s Well (12), The Dreaming of the Bones (14a), The Words upon the Window Pane (34), and Purgatory (44b). Revised version of a lecture given at the Yeats Centenary Summer School, Sligo, 20 August 1965.