Abbey Theatre Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Cara B. McClintock

Critical Essay by Cara B. McClintock

SOURCE: McClintock, Cara B. “‘It Will Be Very Difficult to Find a Definition’: Yeats, Language, and the Early Abbey Theatre.” In W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism, edited by Deborah Fleming, pp. 205-19. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 2001.

In the following essay, McClintock explores Yeats's changing attitudes toward the Irish language as a nationalist who insisted on “art over politics.” The author argues that Yeats's written dialogue attempts to capture the rhythm and sound of the Irish language in English, which both resolved and created certain difficulties for performers and their audiences.

In her introduction to the correspondence of W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge, Ann Saddlemyer writes that the Abbey Theatre represented “a turning-away from sterile compromise towards a re-examination and re-rooting of culture; in Yeats's words, ‘Repelled by what had seemed the sole reality, we had turned to … the nobility of tradition’”...
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