Two plays for dancers — Reading Notes

Masks, Music, and the Dancer's Body

Both plays require performers to wear 'heroic masks'—the Stranger and Girl in 'The Dreaming of the Bones' and the Figure of Cuchulain, Emer, and the Woman of the Sidhe in 'The Only Jealousy of Emer.' Yeats's stage directions for the Woman of the Sidhe specify that 'her mask and clothes must suggest gold or bronze or brass or silver so that she seems more an idol than a human being,' and her movements should 'keep the metallic suggestion.' This is not mere decoration: the mask and stylized movement transform the actor into an archetypal figure, while the dance itself becomes a dramatic language. In 'The Only Jealousy of Emer,' the Woman of the Sidhe 'moves round the crouching Ghost of Cuchulain at front of stage in a dance that grows gradually quicker, as he slowly awakes,' accompanied by 'string and flute and drum.' The dance is not an interlude but the core of the action, conveying seduction and supernatural power without words.

The Landscape as Symbolic Space

Yeats anchors his plays in specific Irish locations—County Clare and the Abbey of Corcomroe in 'The Dreaming of the Bones,' and the 'Country-Under-Wave' in 'The Only Jealousy of Emer'—but these are not realistic settings. The hills are 'like a circle of Agate or of Jade,' and the stage itself is a bare space where 'the pattern must only symbolize or suggest.' The natural world is charged with supernatural meaning: birds cry 'loneliness,' and the moon is 'covered up' or 'reeling.' In 'The Only Jealousy of Emer,' the Sidhe are 'fishers also and they fish for men with dreams upon the hook,' and the Woman of the Sidhe has 'hurried from the Country-Under-Wave and dreamed herself into that shape.' The landscape is not a backdrop but a threshold between the mortal and the immortal, where dreams and memories take physical form.

The Weight of the Past: Historical and Mythical Allusions

Yeats's note to 'The Dreaming of the Bones' acknowledges that Mr. W. A. Henderson 'wrote out for me all historical allusions to Dervorgilla,' the woman whose elopement with Diarmuid Mac Murchada traditionally brought the Normans to Ireland. The play thus weaves historical guilt into its supernatural plot: the Stranger and Girl are likely the ghosts of Dervorgilla and Diarmuid, doomed to wander until forgiven. In 'The Only Jealousy of Emer,' the ghost of Cuchulain is tormented by 'old memories' of 'a dying boy, with handsome face upturned upon a beaten place' and 'a woman that held in steady hand... a burning wisp to light the door.' These are not generic regrets but specific references to Cuchulain's mythological biography—his killing of his son, his betrayal of Emer. Yeats does not explain these allusions; he expects the reader to know the stories, or to accept them as fragments of a larger, half-glimpsed narrative.

Readers coming to these plays without knowledge of Irish myth or Yeats's earlier work will find the allusions dense and the action elliptical. The preface and stage directions are essential: they explain the theatrical principles behind the masks, the dance, and the bare stage. Treat the plays as scripts for performance, not as naturalistic dramas—the words are only part of the experience, and the dance, music, and visual symbolism carry as much meaning as the dialogue.

That grey afternoon, Yeats’s stage directions for Two Plays for Dancers felt like rain against the window—each gesture weighed, deliberate, stripped of accident. His masks and ritual left me thinking about history’s performed traitors, so I later picked up The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold: A Play for a Greek Theatre — Edition Insights. The leap surprised me, but both share that strange, formal distance.