B. Yeats and Certain Noble Plays of Japan

The influence of Noh on W. B. Yeats's oeuvre has been extensively studied in Western and Japanese scholarship, especially in relation to his four Noh-inspired ‘plays for dancers’, published between 1917 and 1921.²¹ This section will not be yet another comparative analysis of Yeats's dance-dramas with Noh: rather, it will try to explore his relationship with Noh, with specific reference to the ethics of his approach expressed in the introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916).²² Yeats’s involvement in the edition of the Fenollosa papers was radically different from Pound’s: though deeply fascinated by Noh, his interest remained instrumental to his own artistic production.

Noh seemed to fit into Yeats’s poetics on many levels: the intertextual quality of the Noh narratives, interweaving classic poetry with local folk-lore; the aesthetics of performance as ‘total theatre’, combining declamation, dance and music; the symbolic use of words, movement, masks and stage design; the spiritual element, which he could relate to his own interest in occultism; finally, the private, anti-commercial dimension of Noh, allowing emotive exchange between actors and a selected audience.

From 1904 Yeats wrote and produced plays for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where he wished to legitimate Irish tradition through the arts. As Richard Allen Cave observed, since the Act of Union of 1800 drama in Ireland reflected the English taste, and was used as ‘vehicle for colonial domination […] There was no such thing as an

21 The plays are At the Hawk's Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, Dreaming of the Bones, Calvary, with the addition of the Kyogen-inspired comic piece The Cat and the Moon. See, among many others, Stucki (1966), Ishibashi (1966), Qamber (1974), and Sekine & Murray (1990).

22 In 1916 Ezra Pound composed four Noh-inspired pieces The Protagonist, A Supper at the House of Mademoiselle Rachel (a reconstruction of Alfred De Musset’s play), Tristan, and the comic play The Consolation of Matrimony, later published as ‘Plays Modelled on the Noh’ by Donald Gallup (1987).

These plays were probably meant to be performed as interludes between Yeats’s dance-dramas at Lady Cunard’s, though they remained unperformed (1987, i).

Irish theatre’ (Cave in Yeats 1997, xiii).²³ Yeats’s engagement in the renaissance of the Irish tradition pervaded his work with Noh: the introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan opened with a declaration of intent: ‘In the series of books I edit for my sister’, wrote Yeats, ‘I confine myself to those that have I believe some special value to Ireland, now or in the future. I have asked Mr. Pound for these beautiful plays because I think they will help me to explain a certain possibility of the Irish dramatic movement’

(Fenollosa, Pound, and Yeats 1916, i).²⁴ Similarly to the connection that Pound drew between Noh, the classical Greek theatre and medieval drama, Yeats wanted to revive and legitimise Ireland’s own local tradition by establishing an association with the continuing tradition of Japan.

Certain Noble Plays of Japan greatly differed from Pound’s ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment: it included only four plays selected by Pound (Nishikigi, Hagoromo, Kumasaka and Kagekiyo) and featured a new introduction by Yeats. The titles of Pound’s and Yeats’s editions are sufficiently explicit in reflecting not only different receptions of Noh, but also different agendas. Pound’s choice – ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment – was rather unconventional: instead of using words such as ‘drama’,

‘play’ or ‘theatre’, he focused on explaining the meaning (or at least one of the meanings) of the word ‘Noh’, translated as ‘accomplishment’. This editorial decision is not of little importance: for the first time Pound broadened the spotlight on Noh, until then only fixed on texts, to include performance, and, most importantly, to transmit the notion of Noh training as form of spiritual cultivation. Yeats’s choice, Certain Noble Plays of Japan, cannot but reflect his interest in creating a form of aristocratic theatre, here vaguely reminiscent of Orientalism. It is important to note that Yeats did not intend to create a double of Pound’s book (unlike Pound he had not been entrusted to transmit Fenollosa’s notes), hence his decision to cut the introductory notes and replace them with his own impressions. Yeats looked for the accomplishment ‘of a few cultured people who understand the literary and mythological allusions and the ancient lyrics quoted in speech or chorus, their discipline, a part of their breeding’ (1916, xi): it is this kind of audience that he welcomed in the intimacy of Lady Cunard’s drawing-room, where in the Spring of 1916 his At the Hawk’s Well premiered in front of a select audience.

The encounter with Japanese modern dancer Michio Ito (1892-1961) was decisive in motivating Yeats toward the possibility of realising his dream of intimate

23 Also see F. Sakauchi (2006) W. B. Yeats's At the Hawk's Well and the Easter Rising.

24 Certain Noble Plays of Japan was published by Yeats's sister Elizabeth for Cuala Press in 1916.

drama. Ito, who studied Dalcroze eurhythmics in Germany, only saw Noh in his childhood, and was surprised to find out about Pound’s and Yeats’s interest in what he thought to be most boring (Ito 1976, 39).²⁵ Yeats and Ito had two important characteristics in common: they did not know Noh theatre, and they were little interested in knowing it beyond the extent to which it would be useful to pursue their own artistic agenda. Yeats planned to experiment with his Noh-inspired plays only to

‘turn to something else’ once he had ‘given enough performances’ (1916, ii). Ito, whose finances had become a matter of worry at the time of their collaboration, may have been less concerned with authenticity than with promoting his professional success in the Western world by selling his ‘Japaneseness’. After moving to the U.S. Ito founded his dance school where he taught Dalcroze eurhythmics as well as Japanese theatre, using

‘Noh’, or, Accomplishment as his main reference.²⁶

Although the association of Noh with spiritual elevation can be attributed to Fenollosa’s description of the Noh actor, the emphasis that Yeats put on intimacy and nobility does not seem to belong to Pound’s edition. Was Yeats possibly influenced by sources different from Pound’s? Edward Marx (2007) has recently unearthed important material shedding light on other Japanese sources that influenced Yeats’s reception of Noh. As early as 1907, well before Pound became interested Noh, Japanese modernist writer Noguchi Yonejirō (Yone) (1875-1947) published articles in the Japan Times suggesting that Yeats take on the study of Noh, in which he would find many points in common with the Irish folk-lore he wished to revive.²⁷ Noguchi introduced Noh as an anti-realist art, in which it is possible to encounter the ‘character of a lady whose appearance and voice are not different at all from a man’s; but you have no right to quarrel about it, you have only to believe that it is a lady. And if you cannot you are utterly outside the No realm. Spirit is the main thing’ (1907b). Naturally this form of theatre could not be appreciated by the mass that would rather enjoy more popular entertainment such as Kabuki, and it follows that what Noguchi called the ‘dignity’ of Noh was only shared among a restricted audience of connoisseurs who would be able to appreciate it.

25 Caldwell, who is not a Japanese theatre specialist, undermines the aesthetic and philosophical gap that separates Noh from Kabuki when she argues that Ito was not completely unfamiliar with the former, as he had been studying the latter. While sharing a number of common features, as any other traditional

Japanese art, Noh and Kabuki were and still are the products of completely distinct cultural environments.

26 At the end of January 1921 his American group was planning to perform a programme comprising the Noh Shōjō, Kagekiyo, Hagoromo as well as the Kyogen Busu (Caldwell 1977, 39-41; Kodama 1987, 17-19).

27 Edward Marx has collected relevant material on Noguchi, theatre and modernism in his web project:

http://www.h.ehime-u.ac.jp/~marx/YN/index.htm

Noguchi's book The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, published in London in 1914 includes a chapter on Noh, ‘The Japanese Play of Silence’, clearly written with the Western reader in mind. The section opens with the description of the spectators of Noh, ‘all of them No actors themselves’ (1914, 54), as ‘appreciative audience’, following the performance in composed silence. Describing a day at the Hōshō theatre, Noguchi recalled how the sight of so many ‘honourable names’ written on the theatre chairs impressed him, and how his ‘plebeian mind’ was particularly struck by the

‘general quietude that overflowed from the hearts of artistic sensibility’ (1914, 56-57).

Noh was described as an esoteric rite in which actors are ‘silent worshippers of the Imperfect [...] congregate[d] for the holy exercise of ritual of their imagination’ (1914, 60). Noguchi spelled out his fascination with the sacred dimension of Noh, and insisted on how this atmosphere was created by the collaboration of actors and educated audiences who possessed a form of nobility of spirit. It is not difficult to discern in Noguchi’s text a rather elitist tone. In his article addressing Yeats, Noguchi agreed with him that ‘a drama has not to wait on its audience and it would be a poor thing which has not the dignity of independence’ (1907b). Marx pointed out how Noguchi misread the preface of his Dramatical Poems (1907) in which Yeats wrote that ‘a writer of drama […] must always deny that […] a play has no need to await its audience’ (Yeats 1907, 2:v), probably confused by the double negation. In 1906, when Yeats wrote the preface, his adventure at the Abbey Theatre had only started and he was probably full of enthusiasm for the possibility of helping Irish drama and engaging the audience in narratives that would belong to their tradition. It appears that Noguchi, who experienced Western playhouses in New York and London, wanted to throw fuel on the fire of dissatisfaction that Yeats and other modernist playwrights were nurturing with the commercial stage. ‘We are tired’ Noguchi wrote in another article, ‘disgusted in the popular theatrical house where you have to sit with uncongenial people quite often with undesirable people of doubtful character, but here the age and audience are perfectly in unison the audience itself are the actors without action or voice. I thought how Yeats would be delighted here (1907a).²⁸ Noguchi hoped to educate the Western audience to a new, spiritual dimension of theatre going, one which would imply active participation in the creation of performance itself: an ideal that would certainly have interested Yeats and other modernist practitioners. However, the kind of participation he had in mind was not the roughness of the Kabuki stage, where audiences would cheer actors by

28 This and the other articles by Noguchi were reprinted as a longer essay, ‘The Japanese Mask Play’

(1910). For editorial details see Marx (2007).

shouting or throwing gifts on the hanamichi bridgeway, but the decent composure of Noh theatre, where spectators behave with the same degree of solemnity of the actors.

Noguchi offered a parallel for the aesthetic experience of watching theatre in an off-stage ethical attitude that reflects, and is in turn inspired by the art observed on-off-stage:

‘when the performance was finished, we left the house as quietly as we had entered;

here we are too the No actors. Pray, think what you do at your common theatrical house when you enter and leave it. To see the No is an art as much as to act as a No actor. It is poetry and ethics; it is philosophy, above all, the highest form of art in its own way’

(1910c).²⁹ If Yeats understood Noh as aristocratic art it was because this was by and large the image of Noh that Western Orientalists, with the exception of Marie Stopes, had created so far: Chamberlain, Edwards and Fenollosa attended events organised for aristocrats and dignitaries, and ignored the existence of different kinds of spectatorships, while Noguchi, in turn influenced by Western modernism, seduced Yeats with a vision of Noh he knew would impact upon his sensibility.³⁰ However, it should be clarified that Yeats’s ‘aristocracy’ was purely intellectual and followed the shared view of Noh actors and audiences as endowed with what Noguchi called ‘nobility of spirit’.

The notion of aristocratic, yet spiritually simple and pure drama reflected a crucial as much as problematic feature of Modernism: on one hand, the desire to return to popular, folk arts, far from the decadence brought by industrialism and urbanisation;

on the other hand, the elitist distaste for the flattened taste of the mass. The paradox is well exemplified in Yeats’s essay ‘A people's theatre’ (1919) in which he stated: ‘I want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society whose admission is by favour and never to many. […] I desire a mysterious art, always reminding and half reminding those who understand it of dearly loved things, doing its work by suggestion, not by direct statement (Yeats in Bradbrook 1983, 160). Similarly, in the introduction to the Noh plays, Yeats claimed to have ‘invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way – an aristocratic form’ (Fenollosa, Pound, and Yeats 1916, ii). However, elsewhere in the same text he claimed to ‘love all the arts that still can remind [him] of their origin among the common people’ (1916, iii). The ‘people’ Yeats had in mind were not the mainstream bourgeois theatregoers, but a restricted circle of connoisseurs, refined

29 Noguchi visited Stone Cottage in 1914 (Ellis 1995, 108), on which occasion he might have given direct advice on Noh to Pound and Yeats.

30 Chapter Five will show how, with the exception of Stopes, the tendency to view Noh as an aristocratic art will be argued against by scholars only after Second World War.

enough to appreciate mysterious and symbolic performance.

Reception of Yeats’s view of Noh

A number of Japanese critics, among them Yasuo Stucki, Ishibashi Hiro, and Sekine Masaru have criticised Yeats for having misunderstood Noh and having exploited its aesthetics in a superficial way. Stucki pointed out that Yeats’s sense of secrecy ‘is clearly foreign to the significance of secret tradition in the Nō’ (1966, 108), alluding to an effete use of cryptic symbolism. In fact, the poetics of Noh is largely based on ambiguity and not on fixed correspondences: both the gestural and the literary systems possess a gap (ma), or a degree of vagueness that leaves the interpretation open to the audience. In reception theory, this is what Wolfgang Iser called ‘structures of indeterminacy’, or the negative instances ‘which relate less to the text itself than to the conditions established between text and reader during the reading process. This kind of indeterminacy functions as propellant – it conditions the reader’s ‘formulation’ of the text’ (1978, 183). In a way, a certain degree of esotericism is an essential part of Noh training performance, yet Noh symbolism is not simply a code to be deciphered. Stucki maintained that Yeats’s plays ‘stand on two levels of presentation, one sensual and the other intellectual. However, a Nō play has only one level of presentation in which our passions and material world are presented in unity’ (1966, 106-7).³¹

Ishibashi observed how Yeats’s ‘discovery of a new form was the starting point of all his later plays. A creation, we thus see, can be born of a misunderstanding. And a creative worker is free to turn misunderstanding into creation, if only his works have in themselves the power to exist as high art’ (1966, 151). More recently, Sekine Masaru has maintained that ‘though Yeats imitated the Noh form with a great degree of sincerity, finding in its form, themes and conventions, correspondences with his own notions of dramatic art, he necessarily failed to make authentic Noh plays’ (1990, 1).

Especially Ishibashi and Sekine have compared and contrasted Yeats’s plays for dancers with Noh, yet this approach runs the risk of remaining confined within formal analysis.

What is interesting within the framework of the history of reception is Yeats’s own

31 Pound realised how his vision of poetry and Yeats’s were growing apart and expressed his

dissatisfaction with Yeats’s symbolism, to which he preferred imagism. He argued that ‘symbolists dealt in “association”, that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory […] The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2 and 7. The imagiste’s images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra’ (Pound 1914, 463).

appreciation of Noh and how his work contributed to further disseminate notions of Noh in the West.

How would ethical criticism consider Yeats’s ‘appropriation’ of Noh? If unconditioned and selfless attitudes are accepted as necessary propositions for the aesthetic experience, it is possible to argue that, to a certain extent, Yeats’s declared plan of utilising Noh theatre for his individual interest flawed his aesthetic experience.

It might be argued that Yeats’s intention, expressed in the introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan to ‘record all discoveries of method and turn to something else’ because

‘it is an advantage of this noble form that it need absorb no one’s life, that its few properties can be packed up in a box, or hung upon the walls where they will be fine ornaments’ (1916, ii) does not really correspond to the ethical ideal of dedication to the art of Noh that Fenollosa described in his notes. However, it should be considered that, unlike Japan, modern European theatre did not conceive of genres, and its practitioners would not demonstrate dedication by sticking to one company or director. In his study of Yeats’s collaboration with Ninette de Valois in the production of the Noh-inspired Dreaming of the Bones and At the Hawk’s Well at Abbey theatre in the early 1930s, Richard Allen Cave has pointed out how Yeats, though not involved in the study of Noh as Orientalist scholars were, was particularly fascinated by the discipline of Noh actors, and in his collaboration with de Valois he constantly demonstrated humility and selfless dedication to the discipline of the art (Cave 2011, xv-xvii). Yeats obviously never wanted to become a Noh practitioner, and yet his approach to his art was equally dedicated and ethically laudable.

Moreover, in his discussion of ethical criticism David Cooper claims that

‘someone who exercises virtues – selflessness, respect for the integrity of things, and so on – in appreciating the beauty of things will presumably manifest this in various ways:

through demeanour, comportment, style of speech and the like’ (2010, 78). Cooper’s argument aims at showing how human attitudes, not only art, express ethical virtues and are, in Berys Gaut’s terms, aesthetically relevant ethical properties. It appears that Yeats’s ideal of intimate drama, possibly inspired by Noguchi’s account of the Noh audience as endowed with ‘nobility of spirit’ describes an audience that is at once aesthetically and ethically sensitive. Participating in the play in an emotive exchange with the actors, the small audience Yeats envisaged would have added aesthetic value to the performance itself, and it would do so through decorum and composure.

Yeats’s reform of theatre originated in a revolt against the vulgarity of