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| Rewriting The Hour-Glass: A Play Written in Prose and Verse Versions
ISBN: 9781942954170
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Liverpool University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Language & Literature;
Rewriting "The Hour-Glass" presents the complete prose text of Yeats's one-act morality play of 1903, the complete "mixed" poetry and prose text of 1913, and all variants between and after these as both states were maintained in his lifetime. As a breakthrough play for Yeats, The Hour-Glass was commended in his manifesto "The Reform of the Theatre" (1903) and became, with significant rewriting, his first play to employ masks, by analogy to the Renaissance-era court masque, prior to his own adaptation of Japanese form and Irish content in his "plays for dancers." Like any critical edition, this book engages with and acknowledges all of the relevant texts, including Yeats's own corrected copies of the play. Consequently, the book unpacks and unwinds convolutions of the notoriously dual presentations of prose and verse versions in the Variorum Edition, reversing the procedure of the latter and permitting a more linear presentation of first and last states of the play, much to the benefit of students.Rewriting "The Hour-Glass" also traces the steps by which Yeats solved a problem. No sooner had he finished writing the play and prepared for its first performance and publication than he began to plan its revision. But he did not hit upon the solution until the play's most substantial rewriting in 1912. When finished, he had taken "the offence out of the old by a change of action so slight that a reader would hardly have noticed it" yet decided to keep the older version for playing in provincial towns and the newer one for himself and friends. Contemporary reviewers failed to notice.
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland on June 13, 1865. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. Yeats' plays included The Countess Cathleen, The Land of Heart's Desire, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The King's Threshold, and Deirdre. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He is one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize. His poetry collections include The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower, The Winding Stair and Other Poems, and Last Poems and Plays. He died on January 28, 1939 at the age of 73. (Bowker Author Biography) |
