BL. W. B. Yeats

240. Prasad, B. N. ‘Yeats and the Noh Plays of Japan’. In Modern Studies and Other Essays in Honour of Dr. R. K. Sinha, edited by R. C. Prasad and A. K. Sharma. New Delhi: Vikas, 1987.

Summarises Yeats’s early interest in drama and, in general terms, the conventions of the nô, and finds that the form ‘represented a culmination of [Yeats’s] quest for a satisfying dramatic form’. Prasad is aware of some earlier writing about the subject—though unaccountably does not mention Ishibashi (131), Qamber (167), or Taylor (180)—and argues that critics such as Pronko (A39) and Sharp (101) represent ‘a radical misunderstanding of Yeats’s intentions’, for he was not ‘aiming’ at a recreation of the nô, but rather a ‘creative assimilation and transmission’ of its traditions.