Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism by Hennessey Oliver;

Author:Hennessey, Oliver;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

A Diet of Shakespearean History

Though he was probably unaware of it, Yeats had a connection with a figure he would probably have placed at a highly objective phase in A Vision: John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the man responsible for advancing English power in Europe through a series of military victories against the French in the early eighteenth century. Both men claimed that their entire knowledge of English history came from Shakespeare’s history plays.[116] In fact, Yeats later proposed a similar form of schooling for his own son, Michael. In “Pages from a Diary in 1930,” published in Explorations, he remarks how “[w]hen my [occult] instructors began their exposition of the Great Year all the history I knew was what I remembered of English and Classical history from school days, or had learned since from the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of Dumas.”[117] Rather than seeing this as a flaw, he recommends a similar pedagogy to Michael’s tutor: “Do not teach him a word of history. I shall take him to Shakespeare’s history plays, if a commercialised theatre permit, and give him all the historical novels of Dumas, and if he cannot pick up the rest he is a fool.”[118] Like father, like son—Yeats’s prescription of Shakespearean history points up his own distaste for normative approaches to the teleological understanding of historical process. By 1925, Yeats had constructed a metaphysical account of civilizational change that not only claimed a transcendent signified, a sort of occult primum mobile, but also posited a set of cyclical processes as the determining power in temporal change. Earlier, in fact, in his 1901 essay, “Magic,” Yeats predicted his own later systematizing, as he called for a new approach to the study of historical change that saw history as a reaction to discrete occult events occurring through the minds of the sensitive: “If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men, must be for ever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions; and all men, especially tranquil men who have no powerful egotistic life, must be continually passing under their power.”[119] Again: “May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch upon such things?”[120] and “[o]ur history speaks of opinions and discoveries, but in ancient times when, as I think, men had their eyes ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and revelations.”[121] Yeats here is not only pushing for an assimilation of an occultist “secret” history into the historiographical mainstream, he is also commenting on the use of history.

“History” was not a litany of dates and battles to be digested by the young. Yeats’s comments on Shakespeare’s history plays reveal what he regards as the purpose of representing history on the stage or in the classroom: to venerate the heroic ideals central to his occultism, his art, and his conception of the nation. The fact that Shakespeare manipulated historical sources to produce his drama was not only irrelevant; it was precisely the point.

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