The Complete Works - William Butler Yeats

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it were bedtime, and had so quiet minds

      They hardly winked their eyes when the sword flashed.

      FERGUS.

      She never could have played so, being a woman,

      If she had not the cold sea’s blood in her.

      DEIRDRE.

      I have heard the ever-living warn mankind

      By changing clouds and casual accidents

      Or what seem so.

      NAISI.

      Stood th’ ever-living there,

      Old Lir and Aengus from his glassy tower,

      And that hill-haunting Bodb to warn us hence—

      Our honour is so knitted up with staying,

      King Conchubar’s word and Fergus’ word being pledged,

      I’d brave them out and stay.

      DEIRDRE.

      No welcomer,

      And a bare house upon the journey’s end!

      Is that the way a king that means no wrong

      Honours a guest?

      FERGUS.

      He is but making ready

      A welcome in his house, arranging where

      The moorhen and the mallard go, and where

      The speckled heath-cock in a golden dish.

      DEIRDRE.

      Has he no messenger—

      [Etc., etc.]

      The play then goes on unchanged, except that on page 151, instead of the short speech of Deirdre, beginning ‘Safety and peace,’ one should read

      ‘Safety and peace!

      I had them when a child, but from that hour

      I have found life obscure and violent,

      And think that I shall find it so for ever.’

       The Legendary and Mythological Foundation of the Plays.

       Table of Contents

      The greater number of the stories I have used, and persons I have spoken of, are in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne. If my small Dublin audience for poetical drama grows to any size, whether now or at some future time, I shall owe it to these two books, masterpieces of prose, which can but make the old stories as familiar to Irishmen at any rate as are the stories of Arthur and his Knights to all readers of books. I cannot believe that it is from friendship that I weigh these books with Malory, and feel no discontent at the tally, or that it is the wish to make the substantial origin of my own art familiar, that would make me give them before all other books to young men and girls in Ireland. I wrote for the most part before they were written, but all, or all but all, is there. I took the Aengus and Edain of The Shadowy Waters from poor translations of the various Aengus stories, which, new translated by Lady Gregory, make up so much of what is most beautiful in both her books. They had, however, so completely become a part of my own thought that in 1897, when I was still working on an early version of The Shadowy Waters, I saw one night with my bodily eyes, as it seemed, two beautiful persons, who would, I believe, have answered to their names. The plot of the play itself has, however, no definite old story for its foundation, but was woven to a very great extent out of certain visionary experiences.

      The foundations of Deirdre and of On Baile’s Strand are stories called respectively the ‘Fate of the Sons of Usnach’ and ‘The Son of Aoife’ in Cuchulain of Muirthemne.

      The King’s Threshold is, however, founded upon a middle-Irish story of the demands of the poets at the Court of King Guaire of Gort, but I have twisted it about and revised its moral that the poet might have the best of it. It owes something to a play on the same subject by my old friend Edwin Ellis, who heard the story from me and wrote of it long ago.

       The Dates and Places of Performance of Plays.

       Table of Contents

      The King’s Threshold was first played October 7th, 1903, in the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theatre Society, and with the following cast:

Seanchan Frank Fay
King Guaire P. Kelly
Lord High Chamberlain Seumus O’Sullivan
Soldier William Conroy
Monk S. Sheridan-Neill
Mayor William Fay
A Cripple Patrick Colum
A Court Lady Honor Lavelle
Another Court Lady Dora Melville
A Princess Sara Algood
Another Princess Dora Gunning
Fedelm Maire ni Shiubhlaigh
A Servant P. MacShiubhlaigh
Another Servant P. Josephs
A Pupil G. Roberts
Another Pupil Cartia MacCormac

      It has been revised a good many times since then, and although the play has not been changed in the radical structure, the parts of the Mayor, Servant, and Cripple are altogether new, and the rest is altered here and there. It was written when our Society was beginning its fight for the recognition of pure art in a community of which one half is buried in the practical affairs of life, and the other half in politics and a propagandist patriotism.

      On Baile’s Strand was first played, in a version considerably different from the present, on December 27th, 1904, at the opening of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and with the following cast:

Cuchulain Frank Fay
Conchubar George Roberts
Daire (an old King not now in the play)

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