The King of the Great Clock Tower, and, A Full Moon in March: Manuscript Materials

by W.B. Yeats, Richard Allen Cave (Editor)

"It takes years to get my plays right." So Yeats informed Margot Ruddock on October 11, 1934, from Rome, where he had begun to redraft The King of the Great Clock Tower to give her a role to act. In June of that year Yeats had begun to rewrite his first prose version of the play before it had even been staged (it was performed most successfully at the Abbey Theatre from July 30 that summer). Two versions of The King of the Great Clock Tower (one in prose and one in verse) and a new play, A Full Moon in March, derived from the first, were to emerge from a period of gestation that had started early in November 1933.

The composition of each play was fueled by Yeats's intense feeling for a woman. Both were performers: Ninette de Valois elected only to dance on stage and not to speak; Margot Ruddock was an actress possessed of a rich contralto voice who preferred not to dance (despite Yeats's most enduring description of her as his "sweet dancer"). Yeats devised strategies for each of his dance plays to meet these prescriptions. While admiration for de Valois's artistry helped to shape the first play, the second for Ruddock was the product of a deepening personal infatuation. The structure and content of the two plays and the differences between them reflect the wholly different emotions that stimulated their creation.

This volume of the Cornell Yeats contains manuscript materials for both the prose and verse renditions of The King of the Great Clock Tower and all of the drafts that resulted in A Full Moon in March. It also includes drafts of Yeats's prefaces and program notes for the plays, as well as staging information and cast photographs of the production of The King of the Great Clock Tower at the Abbey.

448 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2007

About the author

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia