Benjamin Wilson

Contexts Essay Proposal

For my Contexts essay I intend to write a comparative piece on certain plays (and, to a lesser extent,
poems) of W.B. Yeats and Japanese Noh theatre. I studied Noh last year as part of a Tragedy paper
and briefly looked at Yeatss plays which were directly influenced by the form, namely: At the Hawks
Well, The Dreaming of the Bones, The Only Jealousy of Emer, and Calvary. Though much has been
written on how Yeats mapped particular stylistic features of Noh on to his Plays for Dancers, more
needs to be said on why he chose to do it.
I do not want to write on why Noh theatre was embraced by modernism so much as why Noh
theatre was embraced by Yeats, asking specifically: where does Noh fit in with Yeatss philosophy and
poetic theory, and what are the aspects of Noh that help Yeats to greater understand himself, his
thought and his craft? It is largely a philosophical inquiry which must look broadly at the
development of Yeatss philosophy, which we may generally characterise throughout his life as
striving towards a reconciliation of antinomies and perceived opposites (the double, the anti-self, the
man and the mask) and the achievement of transmutation to a state where his iterated philosophical
questions what is reality, what is reality, and what is man? - are satisfied. A Vision will, of course, be
central to this study, as will his theories of Mask and Unity of Being. I will look at A Vision in
relation to the Buddhist framework of Noh, which is crucial to understanding both the plots and lexis
of Noh (especially those of Shura mono, warrior plays, in which the protagonist is a wandering ghost
looking for salvation) as well as its poetic aesthetics. The harder, more concrete poetry we first find in
At the Hawks Well is, in Noh, a reflection in poetry of Zen and Amidist teachings: simple, meditative,
imagistic. Not enough has been written on the religious traditions which influenced the poetry of Noh
and those Western writers influenced in turn. I will therefore discuss how Yeatss theories of poetry at
this time react to the Buddhism of Noh.
The core of my essay will be an exploration of how elements of the philosophy of Yeats
overlap with particular Buddhist and poetic precepts of Noh, and how the results of the fusion
manifest themselves in the poetry and dramaturgy of subsequent plays. I will therefore first identify
the points of overlap which, generally, are: the mask, reincarnation and escape (Yeatss vision of
heaven and beatitude against Buddhist nirvana), self (or soul) and anti-self (which links to his theory
of the mask), and, above all, concerns with non-dualism. In Zen Buddhism, the object of meditation is
to see the nonduality of subject and object; an enlightened mind means reconciliation and
transmutation. This is an important part of what Yeats was looking for in his theory of Unity of
Being. I suppose one could say that what links Yeats and Noh in this respect is a Hegelian sense of
Becoming (it may be helpful to bring Hegel in here) it is the process that is Becoming that both Noh
(and indeed the actual practice of Zen Buddhism) and Yeats depict. In both, there is a search for
release; how this is manifested in the poetry of Yeats and Noh is at the centre of my study. The
thirteenth cycle in A Vision perhaps comes closest to securing this release, to have Become, but try as
he might, Yeats is never completely able to dispel the world he has built up around him of symbols
and dreams.
For this essay, my primary texts will be: a selection of Yeatss plays (ed. Richard Allen Cave,
Penguin, 1997) and poems (ed. Edward Larrissy, Oxford Worlds Classics, 2008), A Vision, Letters,
Yeatss essays on Noh, and compilations of Noh plays by Arthur Waley and Royall Tyler. Richard
Ellmanns Yeats: The Man and the Masks has been exceptionally helpful. On Buddhism, I will use
Richard Bowrings The Religious Traditions of Japan: 500-1600, D.T. Suzuki (with whom Yeats was
familiar) on Zen, Royall Tylers essay on Religions of Noh, and Martin Collcutt, Bernard Faure, and
Carl Bielefeldt. Perhaps the best comparative work on Yeats and Noh is the collection of essays Yeats
and the Noh: A Comparative Study, eds. Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray. Other critics I intend
to use include: Hiro Ishibashi (Yeats and the Noh, 1965), Richard Taylor (The Drama of W.B. Yeats:
Irish Myth and the Japanese No), Nicholas Grene (W. B. Yeats and Rituals of Performance), and
Carrie J. Preston (Learning to Kneel).