Abstract
This chapter differs from others in the book as it is concerned with two plays that seek to contain, rather than exalt, the radical potential of the form of the Passion play. Yeats’s Calvary and Gregory’s The Story Brought by Brigit were written in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, in the midst of the historical upheavals that led to the creation of the Free State. Focusing on the plays’ dramaturgical handling of the martyred body of Christ, I show that they strive to contain the political impact of the Rising by rewriting the Passion on their own terms. The instant coalescing of a disparate audience into a unified community which the Easter Rising’s sacrificial performativity achieved threatened to make redundant the role which the cultural nationalists had bestowed on themselves: that of defining the emerging nation’s myths and values, of inventing a future Ireland which might accommodate a pluralistic conception of Irishness. Both plays, I argue, indirectly touch on the history of the Rising and seek to reassert the importance of marginalised individual artists in the historiographic process that enables the construction of the future nation.
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Notes
- 1.
Deane, Celtic Revivals, 63.
- 2.
Moran, Staging the Easter Rising, 1.
- 3.
Morgan, James Connolly, 200–1. Quoted in Boyce, “Interpreting the Rising,” 174.
- 4.
Boyce, “Interpreting the Rising,” 173.
- 5.
Quoted in Jeffares and Knowland, Commentary, 226.
- 6.
Letter to Lady Gregory of 14 January 1918, quoted in Sekine and Murray, Yeats and the Noh, 15.
- 7.
W. B. Yeats, Calvary, in The Plays, 329. All further references to Calvary are to this edition and will be indicated parenthetically.
- 8.
Flannery, “Action and Reaction,” 77.
- 9.
“I have used my bird-symbolism in these songs to increase the objective loneliness of Christ by contrasting it with a loneliness, opposite in kind, that unlike His can be, whether joyous or sorrowful, sufficient to itself. I have surrounded Him with the images of those He cannot save, not only with the birds, who have served neither God nor Caesar, and await for none or for a different saviour, but with Lazarus and Judas and the Roman soldiers for whom He has died in vain.” (696–97)
- 10.
Yeats’s introductory note to Calvary, in The Plays, 697.
- 11.
Sekine and Murray, Yeats and the Noh, 15.
- 12.
See for instance James Shapiro’s fascinating account of the staging process of the Oberammergau Passion play, in Oberammergau, esp. 44–100.
- 13.
Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 24.
- 14.
See Yeats’s note to The Dreaming of the Bones: “The conception of the play is derived from the world-wide belief that the dead dream back, for a certain time, through the more personal thoughts and deeds of life. The wicked, according to Cornelius Agrippa, dream themselves to be consumed by flames and persecuted by demons, and there is precisely the same thought in a Japanese ‘Noh’ play, where a spirit, advised by a Buddhist priest she has met upon the road, seeks to escape from the flames by ceasing to believe in the dream. The lovers in my play have lost themselves in a different but still self-created winding of the labyrinth of conscience.” The Plays, 692. He elaborates on the theme in A Vision: “In the Dreaming Back, the Spirit is compelled to live over and over again the events that had most moved it; there can be nothing new, but the old events stand forth in a light that is dim or bright according to the intensity of the passion that accompanied them.” A Vision, 164.
- 15.
For a recent, illuminating example see Armstrong, “Ghost Memories.”
- 16.
Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 24.
- 17.
Sieffert, Introduction to La tradition secrète du Nô, 20.
- 18.
Flannery, “Action and Reaction,” 74.
- 19.
Flannery, “Action and Reaction,” 75.
- 20.
James W. Flannery, “Staging the Phantasmagorical,” 99.
- 21.
Private email to David Lloyd, 11 February 2013.
- 22.
Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 12.
- 23.
Email message to David Lloyd, 11 February 2013.
- 24.
In the Christmas dinner episode of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the bigoted Dante vilifies Parnell, who is defended by Casey and Simon Dedalus. Both sides paradoxically construct him as a Christ figure: for Dante he is a fallen Christ who betrayed his fate and his nation when he became involved in an adulterous affair, while for the two men he was, like Christ, first worshipped, then betrayed by his own people and rejected by the Pharisees of his day. See Joyce, Portrait, 22–33.
- 25.
Conrad, “Keening the Nation,” 53.
- 26.
Ibid., 53.
- 27.
Gregory, Wonder and Supernatural Plays, 303. All further references to The Story Brought by Brigit are to this edition and will be indicated parenthetically.
- 28.
In his history of the Abbey Theatre, Fr. Dawson Byrne reports that “an unknown Trinity College student, Mr Lyle Donnahy, a golden-haired, clean-shaven, splendid-looking boy played the symbol of Our Lord very effectively.” The Story of Ireland’s National Theatre, 120.
- 29.
See Duncan, “Lady Gregory and the Feminine Journey.”
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Poulain, A. (2016). Framing the Rising: W. B. Yeats’s Calvary and Lady Gregory’s The Story Brought by Brigit . In: Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94963-2_4
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