What Stood in the Post Office?

Abstract

The old man ‘looking like something out of mythology’ who introduces The Death of Cuchulain speaks directly for W. B. Yeats in the last year of his life. His speech takes its place as the last of a long series of ‘curtain speeches’ which Yeats began in the early days of the Irish dramatic movement and continued throughout his career as a playwright. In the Old Man’s introduction to this final play, Yeats returns to those ideas about theatre which his addresses to the early audiences of the Irish dramatic movement had introduced. In the person of the Old Man Yeats looks back over a lifetime devoted to the attempt to re-establish ritual verse drama in the modern theatre, in the face of public preference for melodrama, realism and satire. At seventy-three Yeats has lost none of his belligerence and none of the delight in mob-baiting which was always an essential part of his platform style. The Old Man wears with pride the charge that he is out of fashion and out of date.