BL. W. B. Yeats

252. Putzel, Steven. ‘Poetic Ritual and Audience Response: Yeats and the Nô’. In Yeats and Postmodernism, edited by Leonard Orr. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse UP, 1991.

Brings new methods to the study of the relation between Yeats’s dance plays and the nô by focusing on how Yeats’s ‘fragmentary knowledge’ of the form allowed him to posit a new relation between his plays and an ideal audience. Makes intelligent use both of recent ‘reception theories’ and of Zeami’s (Ap) critical understanding of the nature of the interaction between performance and audience.