W.B. Yeats complained in his 1939 poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” that “Players and painted stage took all my love,/And not those things that they were emblems of ” ([1939] 1991:I, 347). Similarly, in his late prose piece On the Boiler (1938), Yeats reflected on his theatre work: “often looking back I have wondered if I did right in giving so much of my life to the expression of other men’s genius” (1938:14). An influential strand of Yeats criticism has subsequently articulated the idea that Yeats’s theatre work constituted a misstep in his career. As Louis MacNeice commented in 1941, “Yeats was the cause of drama in other men but he does not seem to me to have been properly a dramatist himself […]. On the whole the poetry of the plays is less interesting, less powerful, and less original than that of the lyrics” ([1941] 1979:163). Likewise, Alexandra Poulain observed in 2015, “the amount of work devoted to his plays is still negligible compared to the impressive scholarship which addresses other aspects of his work” (2015:381).

In Yeats on Theatre, Christopher Morash brilliantly argues that we should revisit and revise our conventional thinking about the place of drama in Yeats’s oeuvre. Morash suggests that from about 1903 onwards, “Yeats’s writing in all genres is consciously moving towards a condition of speech,” and that therefore “theatre in performance is his paradigmatic form; that he is, in other words, a playwright who wrote poetry” (167).

The title that Morash has selected for this study is intended to correspond with the titles of those volumes, often published by Methuen, that have revolutionized our thinking about the theatre. John Willett’s Brecht on Theatre first appeared in 1964 and was followed by volumes including Sartre on Theatre (1976), Craig on Theatre (1983), and Artaud on Theatre (1989), as well as a thoroughly revised Brecht on Theatre in 2015. But there is a significant problem if we are to consider Yeats in this kind of company. Those familiar “on Theatre” volumes are all anthologies that make a range of theatrical writings available to readers. But Yeats’s theatre writings have almost all been anthologized in earlier scholarly editions, including, in the most recent collection of works, a 2003 volume called The Irish Dramatic Movement. Morash is frustrated that such readings potentially have the effect of making Yeats appear a parochially Irish figure. After all, Brecht on Theatre did not appear as part of Bertolt Brecht’s collected works with the title “The German Dramatic Movement.”

Morash acknowledges that Yeats was an antisystematic thinker, and that the performance history of Yeats’s plays has been uneven. But Morash points out that the same could easily be said of Antonin Artaud, and adds that, when Yeats’s writings for the theatre are gathered together, they do reveal a coherent philosophical framework, as well as convey a great deal of practical advice from a figure who was intimately involved in establishing and running a mid-size theatre venue.

Morash constructs his book by drawing together Yeats’s disparate theatrical ideas under coherent thematic headings, and the great advantage of this approach is that Morash is able to draw upon his own detailed knowledge of Yeats’s dramatic scripts and Yeats’s broader writings about the theatre in order to discuss the kinds of ideas that could not easily be included in an anthology. As Morash points out, Yeats rewrote some of his plays numerous times; “Revision, for Yeats,” asserts Morash, “was thinking” (26). And so Morash asks readers to consider how an “Imaginary Hypertext Variorum” edition of Yeats’s plays might look; the answer is, far more collaborative than one might think, and considerably shaped by workshopping processes. Morash also asks us to consider Yeats’s “Fugitive Organum,” a comprehensive Vision of the Theatre, which Yeats never penned. Through a detailed examination of the theatre writings that Yeats did set down and by drawing surprisingly heavily on the philosophical text A Vision (published in different versions in 1925 and 1937, and not usually considered particularly central to Yeats’s ideas of theatre), Morash imagines what such a “lost” organum for the theatre might say. As the book unfolds, Morash continues to focus on extra-textual aspects of the theatre such as “bodies,” “audiences,” “space,” and “voices,” the discussion of which could only be incorporated into a traditional anthology of Yeats’s theatre writings with considerable awkwardness. For example, when thinking abou4t bodies, Morash establishes the precision of Yeats’s stage directions, and highlights the way in which Yeats drew upon a nuanced theatrical language of movement and proxemics, helping the reader to reappraise Yeats’s drama, which is sometimes considered only for the light it may cast on the textual accomplishments of the poetry.

Morash is perhaps at his most sophisticated when he delineates Yeats’s ideas of tragedy. With characteristic deftness, Morash shows how Yeats’s thoughts on tragedy showed little evidence of any Aristotelian interest, but that instead Yeats held in tension the Neoplatonic ideas of Plotinus and the anti-Platonic thinking of Nietzsche. This section of Yeats on Theatre is extremely rich and will reward rereading, in a volume that itself offers many insights for both Yeats scholars and for a far wider group of those who are concerned with the development of theatre in the modernist and late modernist era.

The suggestive connections that Morash repeatedly draws between Yeats’s ideas and those of figures such as Brecht, Artaud, Edward Gordon Craig, and Konstantin Stanislavski (in a well-indexed volume) allow us to see Yeats from an array of fresh perspectives, and, overall, Morash makes a convincing case for the relevance of Yeats’s thinking about theatre to the wider creative realm of Europe during the 20th century. This is a bold and bracing volume and deserves a wide readership.