Cornell Yeats – serie

Based on a folktale called "The Priest's Soul," which Yeats first encountered in 1888, The Hour-Glass was written as both a play in prose and a drama in verse over the course of more than thirty years. This volume brings together all extant manuscripts of The Hour-Glass, from a handwritten three-page fragment of the 1902 prose version to Yeats's typescripts of the 1922 verse rendition.

Words upon the Window Pane, first staged in 1930, is W. B. Yeats's most powerful and brilliant dramatic exploration of the occult, in which he had a lifelong interest, and an affirmation of Anglo-Irish Protestant cultural ascendancy. Written at Lady Gregory's Coole Park estate, it features a séance in which Jonathan Swift's voice is projected through a medium. Like Yeats, Swift was both politician and poet, and taking Swift as his subject allowed Yeats to cloak a political message under personal character.Quite probably based on an obscure one-act play called Swift and Stella by Charles Edward Lawrence, Lady Gregory's editor, the play is centered on a romantic triangle involving Jonathan Swift and two women, Vanessa and Stella. Yeats's use of a séance as a frame permits him to compare the present with the past by putting twentieth-century Dubliners side by side with Swift's contemporaries. This volume of the Cornell Yeats contains transcriptions and photographic reproductions of the drafts of Words upon the Window Pane, with variant readings from proofs, typescripts, and notebook entries, as well as other materials pertaining to its writing, publication, and performance.

"He has chosen death: Refusing to eat or drink, that he may bring Disgrace upon me; for there is a custom, An old and foolish custom, that if a man Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve Upon another's threshold till he die, The common people, for all time to come, Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold, Even though it be the King's."—from The King's Threshold The King's Threshold was first performed in Dublin by the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903 and first published in New York in 1904. The Cornell Yeats edition of this play about a bard's hunger strike includes the preliminary notes and first prose drafts dictated by Yeats to his patron and collaborator, Lady Gregory, in March and April 1903. As well as providing an outline of the play, these preliminary notes identify contemporary persons on whom some of the characters were based.Other features of this edition of The King's Threshold include Yeats's first blank verse drafts, heavily revised and corrected typescripts and galley proofs, and notes for the changes made between 1904 and 1906. A major revision added a tragic ending to the version published in 1922, and this ending has remained in place ever since. Uniquely, this edition presents all four versions of the play, spanning thirty years of Yeats's efforts to perfect it. Declan Kiely presents the biographical and historical context of the play's genesis and Yeats's revisions, and gives accounts of several productions and revivals of the play. The Introduction also explores the relationship between theatrical production and textual revision.

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series:"For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artist."—Irish Literary Supplement"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."—A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally.... The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press.... The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet.... Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."—Yeats Annual (1983)The four short works collected in this book were among the earliest plays to be authored collaboratively by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. Written in the pivotal years during which the "Irish Literary Theatre" experiment of 1899–1901 began to evolve into what would become the Abbey Theatre, they show both writers engaging with questions central to the early Irish dramatic movement: How should "Irishness" be represented on the stage? To what extent should artists engage directly with Nationalist politics? And what role might literature play in the creation of a new Ireland? The manuscripts presented here chart the evolution of two plays published over Yeats's name: "Cathleen ni Houlihan"—the pair's most successful collaboration, and the work that confirmed Yeats's credentials as a Nationalist writer—and the "peasant" farce "The Pot of Broth." This book also includes manuscript material for "The Country of the Young" and "Heads or Harps," which the writers left unpublished and unproduced during their lifetimes.

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series:"For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artist."—Irish Literary Supplement"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."—A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally.... The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press.... The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet.... Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."—Yeats Annual (1983)The manuscripts transcribed and reproduced in this volume of the Cornell Yeats were written from spring 1933 through December 1934. "Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems" is the third section of W. B. Yeats's book A Full Moon in March (1935), following the two plays "A Full Moon in March" and "The King of the Great Clock Tower." David R. Clark's introduction relates biographical events to what the manuscripts show about the chronological order in which the poems were written. The poems, which illuminate such facets of Yeats's life as the poet's flirtations with fascism and Hinduism and his concern, at age sixty-eight, that his poetic powers were waning, are presented in the order in which they appeared in A Full Moon in March.Of the twenty-one poems here, eighteen are called songs. Only "Parnell's Funeral" itself is un-songlike, a somber and powerful declaration made by a Parnellite. Each poem is accompanied by comments on its content and its manuscripts. Ninety-nine illustrations show Yeats's handwritten drafts, typescripts, and revisions. Because of the poems' exotic references, a long section of the introduction provides relevant material from Yeats's letters and commentary and an independent analysis of each poem. Early in his career Yeats, with his fellow poets in the Rymers' Club, had "taken delight in poetry that was, before all else, speech or song, and could hold the attention of a fitting audience like a good play or a good conversation." Throughout "Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems," Yeats's desire for a direct lyrical urge is evident.