When we speak of the Irish Renaissance, we can also be referring to a Celtic Renaissance. We call it the Irish Renaissance because it was championed principally by Irish writers, one of which, at least, used the Celtic tradition to invigorate the Renaissance. Ireland at the turn of the 20th century was mired in passions. Rebellion was always on the horizon, economic collapse was always imminent, the catastrophe of the Potato Famine was still a racial memory, and the rule of the English was still unbearable. From this potentially destructive social structure came some of the finest writing of the 20th century. Writers like Synge and Yeats were instrumental in creating a belief in the Irish and hence the Celtic culture. W. B. Yeats accomplished this, not with words, not with actions, but with symbols that the Irish held dear, Celtic symbols from the earliest traditions of Ireland.
The Irish are a people with a long memory. They remember the seas from whence they came; they remember the sky under which they explored their new land; they remember the stone bones of the land they call home. It is these symbols that became important to them, to their lives, to their collective culture. It is these symbols that Yeats offered to them, his Irish audience, in celebration of their eons of toil and suffering. Yeats learned his craft from such writers as Ibsen and M. Maeterlinck (Weygandt 21). From them, he learned the techniques of playwriting. The subjects he used were pure Irish. Yeats was not the first to realize that “It is in character, in ideals, in atmosphere, in color, that drama must be native” (Weygandt 22), while in technique the words and their usages could be imported from other cultures and other Renaissances.
The least potent of the symbols used by Yeats was the sea, indeed of water in any form. Still, being the least potent does not relegate the use of sea and stream to the dustbins of the mind. His verse acted like the sea, “upon the words rode the ship of his plays, coursing through the sea of humanity with sails of verse set against a rising current” (Downing 8). Yeats Irish audience knew the power of his lyricism and appreciated the flow as any Irishman acknowledges the sea. Though actors moved from scene to scene, the words, the verse, the pace remained the same. The sea was in the verse, and the verse was of the sea. Yeats words served as the conveyance for his remaining symbols.
Yeats second most powerful symbol was the air. To utilize that symbol in full strength, he used the visualization of birds in flight. The dodging, the drifting, and the stooping became displays of men at war. Conflict rode upon the wings of falcons. Yeats used birds repeatedly. They were used in battle, they were utilized in the hunt, and they were eaten, even if the bird happened to be the mystical reincarnation of the son of the eater.
The most powerful of all of Yeats symbols was the stone. The stone was Yeats favorite symbol. He used it often in all forms of writing. Yeats poems are filled with the permanence of stone, as are his short stories and his plays. In his poetry, stone stood for constancy in the face of danger:
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
Minute by minute they change. . . .
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Yeats, "Easter 1916”
The stone in the poem reveals the poetic, and mythological, as well as the deep cultural bonds traceable to the foundations of Irish cultural identity. Though the metaphorical contexts are evident to any scholar, the symbol is a driving force within the Irish community as it reaches back into the Irish psyche and reveals the fundamental identity of the Irish faithful. Indeed, the Stone of Destiny is one of the principle pieces by which the Irish identified the land on which they lived. “All the kings of Ireland, both pagan and Christian, were crowned upon this inauguration stone and their destiny was tied in with the magical powers of the stone” (Jordan 37). The stone is embraced by the Irish as the fundamental symbol of their fidelity.
Yeats uses the image of stone in his plays, in particular, the Cuchulain cycle plays where he uses the epic ventures of Cuchulain as a vehicle of constancy. Somewhere in the past, when the Irish were attacking other Irish behind stony forts, Irish bards created the mythical image of Cuchulain, a stone of a man, irresistible, powerful, brightly armored, and undefeatable in battle. These three chronologically linked one-acts were written for Lady Gregory's Abbey Theatre. They were to play an important role in the Irish Renaissance by reawakening interest in Ireland's pagan past. The play opened in 1904 to a less than appreciating audience.
“The first presentations of the play used English actors. Many of them were booed when they appeared in Irish costume” (MacKenzie, Masucci 64). Such was the hubbub that it became almost impossible to produce the play. Yeats demanded a change to Irish actors, actors that could identify with the symbols of the play, actors that spoke in the same lyrical fashion as his characters on a daily basis, actors that did not mash the Irish accent in an attempt to sound Irish. The play closed and opened again two weeks later with Irish players, much to the acclaim of the audience (Downing 12).
It was not so much the use of English actors to play Irish symbols that were the problem; it was the use of anything English at all. Not far in the future was to be the rebellion of 1916 for which Yeats’ Easter 1916 poem would be an epitaph. After that, the plays of Cuchulain would take a new and more vigorous path. Along the whole scope of Yeats' plays that deal with Cuchulain, Yeats uses the stone symbol to represent the bounty, the beauty, and the hero that is the Irish. All through the Cuchulain play cycle, and particularly in Women of the Sidhe, appear all the "enchanted" and "fatal" (17) versions of Innisfail (Ireland), who wear a seductive masks and say nothing. These women are bound to the stone metaphorically. In At the Hawk's Well, the Sidhe do not appear on stage but are described as beings who "dance among the stones (18)" The guardian of the well, a being who is possessed by a woman of the Sidhe, is visualized with eyes that “know nothing, or but look upon stone" (137) a haunting reminder of the "hearts . . . enchanted to a stone" in Easter 1916. At the end of At the Hawk’s Well, Cuchulain's death is dependent on a driving desire for a goddess, "rock-nurtured Aoife" (103), the fierce queen with the "stone-pale cheek" (169), who arouses Cuchulain and wiles him to his death. To Yeats’ Irish audience “Aoife” represented England, the notorious bringer of death.
Finally, in the last play of the cycle, The Death of Cuchulain, the image of the stone binds the plays into one masterful piece. Yeats' wields the stone in such a way as to suggest that the Sidhe and other women warriors are all made of "stone-like" beauty and reflect the beauty of Ireland herself.
At the beginning of the play, Cuchulain has been resurrected to battle for Ireland once again. By the end of the play, a wounded Cuchulain binds himself to a "pillar-stone" to meet death on his feet as a warrior of Ireland should: "I have put my belt /About this stone and want to fasten it / And die upon my feet . . . ." (442). Aoife, who represents the authority of England, watches over his death. She winds her veil around the pillar-stone, binding him even closer to make escape impossible: "And that your strength may not start up when the time comes / I wind my veil about this ancient stone" (442). For Cuchulain, the pillar-stone is his "Stone of Destiny." Tied to his personal destiny, he dies a heroes’ death.
Yeats, through masterful use of metaphor, symbols, language, and imagery “affirms the power of the Irish traditions” (Norman and Knowland 76). Yeats is affirming more than the Irish; he is affirming himself. His life hits many of the same patterns as Cuchulain. When “Cuchulain learns, as Yeats did, that love unmixed with hate is not possible for him, the man of heroic stubbornness who defies all injunctions against looking at the dangerous hawk” (Engleberg 172).
Yeats did not quibble about his love of Ireland, nor did he relent in his criticism of British colonial power. His plays reflected his attitude and his audience in Ireland appreciated his work, wept over it, and proclaimed it as a national phenomenon.
Though Yeats’ plays do not transfer well to stages outside Ireland, it is not the fault of the author. His language is the language of Ireland; his verse is the verse of the sea that brought the people of Ireland; his vision is the accumulated experience of a people that have been beaten, trodden, ignored, and defeated through every means possible only to return to the fray as strong and as determined as before.
The Irish Renaissance was not just a blip in the history of nations. The Irish Renaissance was a movement that ignited a people, which justified a culture’s sacrifice, which created a movement that would play upon the stage of the world as a worthwhile endeavor worthy of Cuchulain himself.
Works Cited
Downing, Francis. The Plays of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge. Diss. Boston College, 1927. Boston: Boston College, 1927. JStore. Web. Mar 31 2016.
Engelberg, Edward. “Yeats on Stage”. The Sewanee Review 84.1 (1976): 167–174. Web. March 1 2016.
Jeffares, A. Norman, and A. S. Knowland. A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1975. Print.
Jordan, Carmel. “The Stone Symbol in "Easter 1916" and the Cuchulain Plays”. College Literature 13.1 (1986): 36–43. Web. 31 March 2016.
MacKenzie, Gina Masucci. The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. Print.
Weygandt, Cornelius. Irish Play and Playwrites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913. Gutenberg Press. Web. 31 Apr. 2016.
