The drama of W. B. Yeats : a rhetorical approach

By using five Yeats plays, representing a cross-section of his dramatic career, this study illustrates how Yeats was involved in a collaborative effort with his audience in order to adjust his ethos, or how his audience perceived him. By adjusting his plays, and by extension the audience's perception of him, Yeats could adapt to a changing rhetorical situation. Tracing the changes that Yeats made to his plays during his career shows that he became much more adept at manipulating audience response as he became a more mature artist. For example. The Countess Cathleen, the first Yeats play to be staged in Ireland, did not result in an ideal perception of Yeats as playwright. The artistic merit of the play was overshadowed by the political controversy regarding its portrayal of the Irish peasant. Yeats continued to revise this play during the remainder of his life. Cathleen ni Houlihan, with its overtly nationalist plot, provided a much more favorable response from the public and less reason for Yeats to revise in order to adjust his ethos. Much later in his career, as he began his experiment with the Noh form, Yeats wrote two different versions of one basic play. This work, The Only Jealousy of Emer in verse, and Fighting the Waves in its prose, demonstrated Yeats's heightened awareness of differing audiences and the difference in tactics necessary to communicate with these various publics. The Words Upon the Window-Pane showed a further progression of Yeats's ability to manipulate his audience's perception of him. By using a the realistic form that he had formerly rejected, Yeats discovered a means for conveying themes that were important to him without overwhelming his audience with a high degree of otherness. Finally, with Purgatory Yeats had come full circle; he used the play as the epilogue to On the Boiler, a work containing his elitist ideas. In this final play Yeats gained the ethos of a credible author, although the tone of the essay indicates that he did not care how his public perceived him, provided they engaged with his ideas.