An Irish Catalysis: W. B. Yeats and the Uses of Shakespeare

Summary

In April 1901, W. B. Yeats was in Stratford-upon-Avon, staying at the Shakespeare Hotel, watching the Benson company perform the history plays in sequence, and reading criticism of the plays at the library of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. ‘I do not’, he wrote to Augusta Gregory, ‘even stop for Afternoon tea.’ This period of Shakespearian immersion resulted in two magazine articles, published in the Speaker, then subsequently reprinted as a single piece, under the title ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, in the collection Ideas of Good and Evil (1903). In his letter to Gregory, Yeats observed that ‘The more I read the worse does the Shakespeare criticism become. And Dowden is about the climax of it.’ The ‘Dowden’ referred to here was, of course, fellow Irishman Edward Dowden, Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin from 1867 until his death in 1913, author of the highly successful Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, and inaugural general editor of the Arden Shakespeare.

Yeats and Dowden had a complex relationship. The professor had been an undergraduate at Trinity with Yeats's father, the painter John Butler Yeats, and they remained lifelong friends. Dowden offered much encouragement to the younger Yeats in the early days of his writing career, helping to convince the Dublin publishing firm of Sealy, Bryers and Walker to produce a pamphlet version of the poet's Mosada in 1886, and helping also to solicit subscriptions for the publication. When The Wanderings of Oisin was published in 1889, Dowden wrote to Yeats:

It gave me great pleasure to get your volume of poems, & to get it from yourself, & see it a fact accomplished, & last to read it from cover to cover. I do not think there is a page in it which has not its own beauty, & there is also a kind of unity in the whole book…A great many were already familiar to me, & I think it is a good sign of your quality that I remembered them so well.