of flood and fire: a study of "the player queen"

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Of Flood and Fire: A Study of "The Player Queen"Author(s): Heather MartinSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Jun., 1981), pp. 49-60Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25512522 .

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Of Flood and Fire 49

Of Flood and Fire: A Study of The Player Queen

by Heather Martin

Michael Hinden has argued that the final version of W.B. Yeats's The Player Queen is merely a farce, a very amusing "self satirical treatment of ideas which earlier he [Yeats] had failed to render satisfactorily in abstract form.,,l Hinden*s article

highlights the comic moments in the play and is a timely warning against taking Yeats too seriously. Nevertheless, it continues to be difficult to follow Hinden's and, indeed, Yeats's own injunc tion to treat this play only as a farce. In the final version Yeats does "indeed find the means to escape from allegory by mocking his own thought,"

2 but he does not repudiate the thought so

painstakingly worked out in the numerous manuscript versions. The same beliefs make their appearance in the final version of The Player Queen through seemingly random symbols transmit ted by the sets and props, by the often unintelligible mutterings of various characters, and, though to a lesser extent than in later

plays, by the ritual and movement of the drama. Much of the detail of the sets and masks, the references to flood and fire, stars and planets, dawn and dark, drowning and drunkenness,

spirits and beasts, even the dance at the end of the play, all are as often as not irrelevant to the plot of the play. These symbols are present for no other reason than to transmit a philosophical undercurrent.



50 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

Yeats never abandoned the determination to disseminate his

philosophical beliefs through his drama. At the same time he

worked very hard at becoming a good playwright, and as he

perfected his craft he learned to subsume the philosophical con

tent to the dramatic structure of the play. He wrote to Margot

Ruddock,

I do not think a play where everyone speaks my

thought can be the greatest kind of play no matter

how written. Goethe said, 'a philosopher needs all

his philosophy but must keep it out of his work'

(which he could not do.) Take some plot which

seeks to express all in the action and where nothing is said about the action; do not speak through the

characters, let them speak through you, and you will find that at some moment of crisis they will

speak at once passionately and pro foundry .3

While Yeats struggled to devise a symbolic framework for

his drama that would incorporate the metaphysical base, but

would supersede it, he nevertheless hoped that the underlying beliefs would be grasped by the informed, discerning reader of

the plays, if not by the larger audience. Referring to the mem

bers of his audience in the notes to The Death of Cuchulain, Yeats wrote that "They can find my words in the book if they are curious, but we will not thrust our secret upon them"

(Variorum Plays 1010). He left many such words, in the co

pious allusions to the drama in his prose writings and even,

though heavily masked, in the plays themselves; they are also

found in the manuscript versions of the plays which are at long last being made public.

That Yeats laboured for some twenty years to deliver him

self of The Player Queen indicates the importance for him of its

philosophical roots. This play constitutes the most serious

dramatic treatment of his belief in a rapidly approaching apoca

lypse, the apocalypse described in the notes to "The Second

Coming," and of the role which he felt a playwright could and

should assume to help bring it about. Yeats states explicitly for the first time in the published 1922 version of The Player Queen that it announces a new antithetical dispensation, though one

that is slow in coming. With lines that can have no other interpre tation, Septimus cries,




Gather about me, for I announce the end of the

Christian Era, the coming of a New Dispensation, that of the New Adam, that of the Unicorn; but

alas, he is chaste, he hesitates, he hesitates.4

The last extant manuscript versions state this less explictly, and

place more emphasis on the frustrations of Septimus at the re

luctance of the Unicorn:

I will die railing upon the Unicorn because he will

Not trample mankind to death under his hooves and beget

Upon some woman a new race.

(MPQ 406-7)

The Unicorn itself only makes an appearance in Draft 19 and, writes Curtis B. Bradford, the editor of the manuscript versions, the "first apocalyptic hint in a play that was to become decid

edly apocalyptic" (MPQ 145) only occurs in Draft 11. It is my

contention, however, that the play is decidedly apocalyptic from its conception.

Yeats in several manuscript versions dovetails the coming an

tithetical revelation with one of two great catastrophes, the im

pending destruction of the world by fire which follows the great Biblical Deluge, the destruction and restoration of the world by water. These early versions focus on the growing dissatisfaction of the citizens with their Queen, who aspires to be a saint and not a ruler. Knowing Yeats's spiritual bent, it is evident fairly

quickly that both the role of the Queen and her approaching demise have spiritual connotations, especially when an old man

is introduced who is possessed by the ghost of the Queen's father and who announces the coming death of one monarch and the

elevation to the throne of another by braying with the voice of the donkey who carried Jesus into Jerusalem. The old man's role is to announce the coming change in the world from the old order to the new. This change is being hurried on by the

enraged citizens who, as their discontent mounts, band together to burn down the castle and replace the Queen with a more able ruler.

This plot is juxtaposed against a sub-plot in which a group of players, at the Queen's request, are attempting to stage a

play called "The Tragical History of Noah's Deluge" within the

besieged castle. F.A.C. Wilson first pointed to the real signifi



52 Canadian Journal of Irish S tudies

cance of this play, which he calls "an ingenious piece of symbol ism in which Yeats remembers Blake."

No one who has read the Quaritch edition could fail to remember, as one of Yeats's most successful

pieces of exegesis, those pages in which he relates

Blake's image of Noah's Ark to his author's cyclic theory of history, and explains that 'the destruction

of all things by the flood' is a symbol for the dis aster that overtakes humanity at the end of a cycle.5

Wilson's assessment of the importance of this theme has received

little attention, perhaps because in the published versions of The

Player Queen the Noah play has been reduced to a recurring,

seemingly unintegrated motif; it was chosen, we are told, for

the simple reason that the religious Queen will only tolerate

plays based on real and holy stories.

However, thanks to Bradford's scholarship we now know

that Yeats spent much of his time in the early versions elaborat

ing on the themes of this play-within-a-play. The Noah play is

in fact portentous and timely, though this fact is lost on all the

populace present at its performance (with the exception of the

fool) and is even lost on Bradford himself, who does not under stand why Yeats insisted on including it. He writes,

I cannot see that staging the Noah play advanced

Yeats's purpose in any way and can only conclude that since Hamlet, the play within the play had had a morbid fascination for playwrights.

(MPQ 11)

Elsewhere he concludes that "The Noah play is there to provide a dull part for Decima to dislike" (MPQ 235).

Mad Michael, the fool of drafts 11 and 12, understands the

significance of the destruction by water which the play is dra

matizing, though his babblings are ignored by the audience. He

states,

Before the flood men were spirits, nothing but spir its. But afterwards they had bodies. The flood of

space and the flood of time they call it. Those that were drowned did not die. No, no. They were the




people that became like the beasts, a multiple of

things. They change, they change, they change al

ways. But those in the Ark now, they do not

change, oh no.

(MPQU1)

The speech consistutes the most explicit articulation of the sig nificance of the motif of drowning and of the parade of beasts

that Yeats retained even in the last version. Michael is alluding to the mystical traditions which teach that generation occured

through water, and is thus equating the Deluge with Creation,

with, in Celtic terms, the streams that burst forth at creation from Connla's Well. Yeats elaborated on this theory in A Vision,

(1932) where he posits that the world is destroyed once by water and once by fire in the course of every Great Year.6 The

destruction by water is a creation of sorts, for it is by "a 'lunar' water that is Nature" (A V 247) and is equated with Discord and

separations (the fall from unity) while the destruction by fire is

equated with Concord and unity (the joining of the many into

the One at the end of time).7 At creation spirits enter the universe of "time and fate and

change," as Yeats calls the world in a number of plays, donning

bodies and becoming "wet" or incarnate souls, in contrast to

the dry souls of discarnate spirits such as the Hawk-woman in At the Hawk's Well of whom the Old Man says, "There falls a curse/

On all who have gazed on her unmoistened eyes" (Collected Plays 215). Spirits, Michael states, were thus drowned into material form, following Yeats's belief that spirits die into our

spiritual life.8 This is the significance of the mask of Noah's sis ter with the "beautiful, drowned, flighty mouth" (MPQ 423)

which Decima assumes at the end of the final version of the

play. Noah's sister, unlike his ugly wife, refused to follow his

command to enter the Ark and was thus drowned into material form (Collected Plays 420). Elsewhere in his version Septimus describes mortal life as a state "between two washings" (Collected Plays 348).

In draft 16 it is Yellow Martin (Septimus) himself who ex

plains the significance of the Noah play in his "Prologue," but now its significance is more clearly tied to the troubled present, and to the coming destruction of the world by fire. He de

claims,




Nobles and gentlemen, now let your troubles cease. The world is safe awhile. It has yet to be

consumed by fire ? that is the consuming of all forms and images

? but once it was near drowned

by water. From water generation comes, but that's

a mystery.

(MPQ 221)

Yellow Martin implies that the destruction by fire will have a

different effect than did that by water. Water gives life ("water is the mother of change,

" he says in another version) and thus

gives rise to form, while fire will destroy "all forms and images." But he does not continue, for he is interrupted by the attack on

the castle, and the actors scatter in the ensuing confusion. The

world is obviously not quite so safe as Yellow Martin would like to believe; "The times are desperate," (MPQ 208) says the Prime

Minister in the same version, while in another Peter, one of the

actors, cries that the people are about to set the castle on fire: "I heard them say 'burn down the Queen's house,/ Throw every

thing that belongs to her to the flames' "

(MPQ 138). That these times are as troubled as were the times before

the flood is implied everywhere in the drama. The parallels to Yeats's own time are also abundant. Perhaps the most obvious

are the allusions to the corrupt taste of the theatre-goers who, like the audiences in Yeats's own time, demand realistic drama instead of the romantic plays that Septimus wrote in his youth and that Decima longs to act in. These plays sound suspiciously like Yeats's dance plays, the "antiquated romantic stuff" which the Old Man speaks of in the prologue to The Death of

Cuchulain. Therefore, long before it is made explicit in the play that a new spiritual dispensation is at hand, long before the uni corn is introduced or before Septimus announces "the end of the Christian era," the parallels between the evil times drama tized in The Player Queen, the evil times preceding the flood, and Yeats's own troubled times make it clear that the play is de

cidedly apocalyptic in intent and execution, beginning with the earliest drafts.

The prophecy of a coming cataclysm through fire is present in a number of other plays, and several protagonists are given the opportunity to help bring it about, but only a few, notably

Martine Hearne in The Unicorn from the Stars, act on it. In this

play Martin is not the only one who has had visions of the im




pending apocalypse, but only he welcomes the chance to take an active role in it. Unlike his alter ego Yellow Martin in The

Player Queen who bemoans the fact that the new age is so long in coming but does little to hurry it on, Martin decides to take

matters into his own hands. When Father John pleads with him

to have patience, saying "the world was destroyed by water; it

has yet to be consumed by fire," (Collected Plays 350) Martin answers

Why should we be patient? To live seventy years, and others to come after us and live seventy years, it may be; and so from age to age, and all the while

the old splendour dying more and more.

Emulating the destroying unicorns in his vision, Martin decides

to,

rise out against the world and break it and unmake

it. . . . We will consume the world, we will burn it

away ? Father John said the world has yet to be

consumed by fire. Bring me fire.

Martin is thus akin to the citizens in the early versions of The Player Queen who, increasingly dissatisfied with their ruler,

replace the primary queen with her opposite, the lowly-born, antithetical Decima. By choosing to aid the coming cataclysm

Martin is in a sense becoming the Marxist idea of the historic

hero, the man who incorporates the forces of change within him self and through his actions acts as a catalyst for that change.

This is what Yeats was hoping to transmit to his audience ? the

possibility of hurrying on the coming spiritual liberation from

the decaying and life-destroying order of the primary Christian

age by incorporating this change within themselvs.

Nevertheless, it is not necessary, like Martin, to take the

prophecy of a coming cataclysm through fire literally. The fire, writes Yeats in A Vision, is "a fire that is not what we call fire

'but the fire of heaven'," and Yeats himself is not certain whether the consequence of this fire will be complete annihila

tion, or merely a transformation, of the the world (A V 247). In

any event, whether or not the world is physically destroyed is im material since, following Yeats's idealist philosophy, the world

is no more and no less than a thought held jointly by God and




the individual spirit. In order to effect a transformation what

must be destroyed is not the physical manifestation of the world

but its manifestation in the minds and hearts of men.

Martin chooses physical violence, but his goal is specifically to bring about spiritual regeneration:

We will destroy all that can perish! It is only the

soul that can suffer no injury. The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars.

(Collected Plays 365)

Yeats's identification with Martin Hearne is evident; equally evi

dent is his disgruntlement with Yellow Martin (Septimus) in

The Player Queen. Septimus is the the "dramatist and poet" ?

it is he who should be taking an active role in bringing about this regeneration, instead of waiting for the hesitant unicorn to

act. Martin comes to realize that he was mistaken to attempt to

burn down the physical world: in a later vision, he learns that

what should be set aflame is not the physical world but the im material self, the heart and soul. This, according to Yeats, is

really the business of the priest (Paul Ruttledge); it is also, at

the end of an age when religion is empty at the core, the busi ness of the poet. This responsibility is accepted by the poet Seanchan in The King's Threshold in marked contrast to

Septimus in The Player Queen, who long ago conceded defeat.

Seanchan argues that the world is an illusion held collectively by men as a result of looking at images created by poets from the beginning of the world:

poets hung Images of the life that was in Eden

About the child-bed of the world, that it,

Looking upon those images, might bear

Triumphant children.

(Variorum Plays 264)

It follows that if poets can take responsibility for the present image of the world, they can also take responsibility for trans

forming the world, by changing its image in the minds of men. In The Player Queen it is the actress Decima and not Septimus

who understands that artists can play an active role in ensuring the spiritual regeneration of an age.



Of Flood and Fire 5 7

Decima finds some plays written by a younger, more inspired

Septimus which he has discarded because they are so unpopular, so different from the mood of the present day. She insists that if he would put on the plays, and allow her to act in them, they

would transform the minds of the audience, and gradually the

age itself. She urges him in drafts 11-12 to,

Let me become your dreams. I will make them

walk about the world in solid bone and flesh.

People looking at them will become all fire them

selves. They will change, there will be a last judge ment in their souls, a burning and a dissolving.

Perhaps the whole age may learn. 9

(MPQ 132-3)

This is akin to Yeats's argument in his essay "Poetry and Tradi

tion" that by contemplating beauty men can be set free, and

"those who have been freed . . . have something terrible about

them, a light that is unendurable to eyesight" (Essays and

Introductions 252). It is for this reason, explains Decima in

draft 15, that she wants to portray the beautiful, inspiring

queens of his early plays instead of Noah's ugly wife.

I must be beautiful and have shining things to wear.

I must grow greater and make all those that look at me grow greater. Bad or

good, it does not matter.

But I must be a fire, a light.

(MPQ 170)

Septimus does not have the courage of her convictions. In

the final versions, the now quite inebriated poet transfers all the

responsibility onto the unicorn, and agonizes over its chastity because "His unborn children are but images; we merely play with images" (MPQ 421). He refuses to see that his own plays are just such unborn images; by staging them he would breathe life into these images and awaken similar ones in the minds of

those who would see them.

This was certainly Yeats's understanding of the power of drama. Nevertheless, it is easy to see why he was as uncomfor

table with the early version of The Player Queen as he was with the earlier Where There is Nothing', both "speak . . .

[his] thought" didactically and often undramatically. As a playwright,




he was too closely identified with Septimus's struggle. The

introduction of the unicorn in later versions gave Yeats some

distance from the subject matter. The new age is slow in coming

through no fault of the playwright: the unicorn refuses to beget. While Yeats thus achieved comic relief at the expense of both

characters, mocking at once the dubious chastity of the unicorn

and the attempts of the drunken poet to protect its reputation, he continued to pursue the same themes.

Septimus and the unicorn are in fact quite closely identified

through the imagery of the play. We are told that when the uni

corn,

bathes by the light of the Great Bear, and to the

sound of tabors, even the sweet river water makes

him drunk; but it is cold, it is cold, alas! it is cold.

(Collected Plays 419)

Septimus's inebriety is due to a more prosiac drink, but he also

bathes by the "light of the Great Bear"; he also is drenched

with cold water, and shivers "

in the pale light of dawn"

(Collected Plays 390). The drowned and the drunk are sharing a similar fate. We are reminded of Porphyry's "intoxicating cold drink of generation" of which Yeats speaks in "The

Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry":

Cold, he [Porphyry] says, causes life in the world, and heat causes life amongthe gods, and the constel

lation of the Cup is set in the heavens near the sign of Cancer, because it is there that the souls descend

ing from the Milky Way receive their draught of

the intoxicating cold drink of generation. 10

(Essays and Introductions 83)

Yeats wrote in a letter that the unicorn from the stars is

simply a name for the soul (Wade 286), and Martin Hearne con

firms this when he states that "The soul of man is of the imper ishable substance of the stars." In The Player Queen the unicorn is associated with mortality, with the condition of the drowned or drunken soul. In the 1922 version it is equated with Decima as much as with Septimus; like her, it "will be terrible when it

loves." It follows naturally that by the end of that version

Septimus is thrown aside by Decima like an old rug and the




unicorn itself is forgotten. It is now Decima who "seeks destruc

tion somewhere and with some man she knows nothing of"

(Collected Plays 430). Decima dons the beautiful mask of

Noah's drowned (drunk) sister and attempts to usher in the

new age herself by becoming the perfect antithetical queen, the

fiery embodiment of the new age. Unlike Septimus, Yeats persevered in writing "antiquated

romantic" plays. He truly believed in the power of symbols to

evoke a response in his audience, however unconscious, and once he perfected tfese symbols, he gradually relinquished the

logical content of the plays. In the final version of The Player Queen Yeats does much more than mock his own thought. He

manages, by a marriage of farce and symbolism, to resolve the

problem facing Septimus, to write a play which can announce

the coming spiritual changes, act as a catalyst for these changes, and at the same time work dramatically.

NOTES

1 Michael Hinden, "Yeats's Symbolic Farce: The Player Queen" MD, 14 (1971), p. 448.

2 /Wd.,448.

3 Ah Sweet Dancer: W.B, Yeats f Margot Ruddock -A Correspondence ed. Roger McHugh (New York: MacMillan, 1970), p. 80.

4 Curtis B. Bradford, ed., W.B. Yeats: The Writing of 'The Player Queen,' (DeKalb: North Illinois University Press, 1977), p. 421. This book will henceforth be referred to in the text as MPQ.

5 F.A.C. Wilson, W.B. Yeats and Tradition (London: Methuen and

Company Ltd., 1968: first published in 1958), p. 138.

6 Yeats's Great Yeat, somewhat different from Plato's, encompasses 26,000 years and therefore six antithetical and six primary ages. (A F254).

7 The Deluge as creation is further elaborated on in this chapter: "The

destroying flood rose in Capricorn but lasted through the two succeeding signs, only disappearing when the World-Restorer appeared; the creation it self had been but a restoration. To many Christians and Jews, though the




doctrine soon ceased to be orthodox, not the Messiah alone but the Spirit that moved upon the waters, and Noah on Mount Ararat, seemed such

world-restorers" (A F249).

8 Cf the Magician Dunn/Maclagan's elaboration of this belief in Yeats's

autobiographical novel The Speckled Bird, ed. William H. O'Donnell, Yeats Studies Series (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1976), p. 209.

9 Decima's speech is almost identical to one of Paul Ruttledge's; in

fact, there are many similarities between the two.

10 This symbol appears in a number of Yeats's plays, most explicitly in Where There is Nothing and The Unicorn from the Stars through the

psalm "

*Et calix meus inebrians praeclarus est!' How splendid is the cup of drunkenness!" which is one of the leitmotifs of the plays. It can be

understood on one level as the cup of generation, signifying birth; on an

other it simply refers to common drunkenness as a means of escaping the sorrow of life. Drunkenness, according to Paul Routledge and to Martin and Thomas Hearne, frees men from the mortal condition, however tem

porarily, and lifts their hearts "to the stars."



of flood and fire: a study of "the player queen"

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