The Plays of W.B. Yeats

The Plays of W. B. Yeats: Yeats and the Dancer investigates Yeats's experiments with the media of language and dance. He was at one with other artists of the 1890s in his fascination with the biblical dancer Salome, an obsession which lasted until the end of his life, as his final plays reveal. His discovery of things Japanese, particularly 'Noh' theatre with its central dance, also influenced his own dramatic writing.

Yeats's preoccupation with the solo dancer, principally female, is set in the context of the work of dancers who were his contemporaries - Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan - and he was greatly impressed by the arrival of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in London. Yeats was not alone in believing that language on occasion should give way to movement for the subtler expression of emotion, so the book concludes with a discussion of the dance-as-meaning debate still current today.