Now as to Magic. . . . I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make (magic) next to my poetry the most important pursuit in my life. . . .
If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book nor would “The Countess Kathleen” have ever come to exist.
The mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write.
--W. B. Yeats. Letter to John O’Leary. July 1892.
If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book nor would “The Countess Kathleen” have ever come to exist.
The mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write.
--W. B. Yeats. Letter to John O’Leary. July 1892.
The Outcast Poet: W.B. Yeats and Red Hanrahan
When W. B. Yeats first collected his Stories of Red Hanrahan in The Secret Rose with its stunning gilt cover by Althea Gyles, he stated in the dedication that the stories have but “one subject, the war between the spiritual and the natural order” (vii). To dramatize that war, Yeats created prose stories, including those of Red Hanrahan, set in Ireland that span from the ancient world to the nineteenth-century and “simply created a situation within each story and inhabited it, as gleeman, hero, votary, strolling poet or magus” (Warwick xxxvii). Hanrahan thus may be read not only as a fictionalization of the eighteenth-century Irish poet Owen Roe O’Sullivan, but as Yeats himself, the outcast poet touched by magic. Fascinated with life beyond the natural world, Yeats’s life-long study of magic, Irish folklore, mysticism, and the occult permeates his work. His personal faith defies easy description, at one moment seeming to value elements of Christianity, particularly Rosicrucianism, while the next espousing Irish fairy lore. Yeats views the beckoning transcendent world as simultaneously attractive and terrifying.
Hanrahan, the traveling Irish bard, is caught between the worlds. Indeed, “Hanrahan’s mind is a major battlefield for that conflict” between the supernatural and the natural, the transcendent sublime and the quotidian (O’Donnell 39). He is a worldly mortal who has experienced the supernatural power of the Sidhe (the fairies), and therefore trapped between experience and understanding, unable to choose between an identity rooted in humanity, or one enlightened in the Sidhe. Like Yeats's perspective of the occult, Hanrahan regards the Sidhe with a blend of both desire and fear. Restless after his supernatural experience but bound by the physical world, Hanrahan wanders, no longer confined to mortal understandings, but also restricted from union with the fairy world; he is caught in the middle, not fully alive but not fully dead, belonging to neither the natural world nor the spirit world, he is a liminal figure par excellence.
The scenic design of this new stage adaptation of the Stories of Red Hanrahan was developed through the creative collaboration of the two co-directors and the set designer; it is heavily influenced by Noh drama, a Japanese theatre practice with fourteenth-century beginnings, which was highly inspiring for Yeats later in his career. Yeats as a dramatist “had a radical vision of theatrical possibility and the Noh was his inspiration” (Martin xiv). The aspects of Noh that appealed so forcefully for Yeats were those elements that evoked the transcendent world, including “the sense of religion and ritual, the sacredness of place, the omnipresence of the supernatural, custom and ceremony . . .” (Martin xiv). Meditative Noh drama focuses on the central character's transformation from human to spirit, or spirit to human. Hanrahan is caught in the middle of this transformation, wandering along a human-to-spirit continuum. Though he experiences moments of greater humanness and others of greater spirituality, the bard never truly identifies with either until he is released from humanity and united with spirit. These dead, living, and spirit elements are ever-present on the Noh stage, represented by three pine trees which mark every Noh set. Knowing Yeats’s later fascination with Noh drama, adapter and co-director John Gentile asked scenic designer Ming Chen to create a design that blended the Japanese Noh with Irish traditions, suggesting that the Noh pines be modified into an Irish sacred tree – the fairy thorn, the white hawthorn or May thorn. “The people say that you must not hurt these bushes or trees,” wrote Yeats of the fairy thorns, “ because ‘the others’ have houses near them . . .” (“Tribes” 142). Chen’s design achieves that fusion, effectively blending the Noh style with Irish fairy lore and Celtic knot work. Co-director Henry Scott then suggested that we continue the Asian theatre aesthetic by using simple geometric blocks to serve as transformational objects throughout the performance, becoming in one moment a cottage table and in the next the mythic mountain Ben Bulben. Scott also fused Japanese and Irish motifs in composing the haunting original music for the production.
Magic and Irish mythology are omnipresent in Yeats's work, and symbols of this mysticism – such as the Tarot, the four treasures of Ireland, and the fairy folk – are significant in John Gentile's adaptation of Red Hanrahan for the stage. Yeats practiced Tarot in his own life using his own heavily marked deck, which Gentile studied at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin this past summer, and the cards and all their connotations align with his characters (see chart). Most notably, Hanrahan, as Kathleen Raine explains, correlates with the role of The Fool, whose weakness and failure to choose block him from success. “Indeed the figure of Hanrahan himself,” writes Raine, “seems related to the Tarot card Le Mat, the fool, the zero of the pack . . .” (18). The Old Man correlates with The Magician and Echtge as The High Priestess with the four women the four queens in the minor arcana: the Queens of Cups, Swords, Wands, and Pentacles. Hanrahan’s defining moment is his meeting with Echtge, a typically complex Yeatsian symbol, which be read variously as the Rose of Eternal Beauty, the Divine Feminine, Ireland, and the Anima Mundi, the World Soul. Cast out after his failure with Echtge, Hanrahan must earn his way back. Thereafter, every “story, except the last, ends in a frustrated desire for union with the anima, the representative soul” (Kruger 62).
In accordance with the Noh human-to-spirit transformation, the four treasures of Ireland are displayed as common objects when representing the human (the big pot, the flat stone, the long rusty knife, and the blackthorn stick), and as sacred treasures when representing the spirit (the cauldron, the stone, the sword, and the spear). In Gentile's adaptation, the most recognizable spirit elements are the Sidhe, the fairies, who are perhaps the most fascinating and terrifying denizens of Irish folklore. The Irish fairies (who are known colloquially by many names, including the “good people,” “the gentry,” and “the others,” and more) are not the dainty pixies of the Victorian English writers but rather “a mysterious and magical race of people who inhabit the same world as common men but inhabit it, somehow, on different terms” (Smith 13). The Irish fairies are morally ambiguous; they may be beneficent one moment and, then, turn malevolent in the next—especially to those foolish humans who deny their existence or disturb their revels. However, they are always powerful and capricious, and always to be respected and feared.
As his perceptions of the natural world and its mystical influences evolved, so did Yeats's stories. Each publication of the Stories of Red Hanrahan reveals dramatic changes to both language and content. Collaborating heavily with Lady Gregory in later versions, Yeats reduced the “elaborate English” that was inspired by Walter Pater in the 1897 publication to the “simple English” of Irish village life based on Lady Gregory’s Kiltartanese for the versions published in 1905 (Mythologies 1). With the language alteration came thematic changes: the Red Hanrahan stories of 1897 emphasize “the theme of nationalism versus art”; they present Hanrahan’s life as endlessly tragic (Smith 205). Later, Yeats modified the tales to alternate tragic events with seemingly happy or comedic moments in Hanrahan's life, sentencing the bard to a life of in-between-ness, neither tragic nor satisfying, but rather always swinging between the two. Critics of the stories disagree as to which versions, early or late, are superior. In preparation for this production, Gentile interviewed Yeats and Lady Gregory scholar James Pethica, who commented on the different values of the early and late versions of the Hanrahan stories:
For me, the earlier, sometimes rather ‘raw’ versions are far more revealing of Yeats’s hopes and anxieties as a writer and as an Irish Nationalist in the 1890s, and often as interesting for their limitations as for what is accomplished in them. The later versions are more powerful as an achieved artwork. I’m glad we have the multiple versions to compare, as they reveal much about Yeats’s evolving capacities as a writer.
Gentile’s adaptation, featuring selections from both the early Walter Pater-inspired and late Lady Gregory-influenced versions of the stories, also includes a generous sampling of Yeats’s poetry not originally featured in the stories, thus making Owen Hanrahan the Red perhaps even more like Yeats himself.
--John Gentile, Co-Dramaturg, Adapter, and Co-Director, and Tracey Cordle, Assistant Dramaturg
Works Cited
Gould, Warwick, and Deirdre Toomey, eds. Editors’ Introduction. Mythologies. By W. B. Yeats. New York: Palgrave, 2005. xxiii-lxxxxv.
Print.
Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan. “The Tarot in Yeats' Stories of Red Hanrahan.” E'ire Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies. 26.2 (1991): 62-77. Print.
Martin, Augustine. “Yeats’s Noh: The Dancer and the Dance.” Introduction. Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study. By Masaru Sekine and
Christopher Murray. Savage, MD: Barnes, 1990. xiii – xviii. Print.
O’Donnell, William H. A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983. Print.
Pethica, James. Interview by John Gentile. 28 Nov. 2012.
Raine, Kathleen. Yeats, The Tarot and The Golden Dawn. Dublin: Dolmen, 1972. Print.
Smith, Peter Alderson. W.B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu. Gerrards Cross, Bucks: C. Smythe, 1987. Print.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Vol. 1: 1865 – 1895. Ed. John Kelly. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Print.
---. Mythologies. Ed. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Print.
---. The Secret Rose. London: Bullen, 1897. Print.
---. “The Tribes of Danu.” Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth. London: Penguin, 1993. 138-154. Print.
Hanrahan, the traveling Irish bard, is caught between the worlds. Indeed, “Hanrahan’s mind is a major battlefield for that conflict” between the supernatural and the natural, the transcendent sublime and the quotidian (O’Donnell 39). He is a worldly mortal who has experienced the supernatural power of the Sidhe (the fairies), and therefore trapped between experience and understanding, unable to choose between an identity rooted in humanity, or one enlightened in the Sidhe. Like Yeats's perspective of the occult, Hanrahan regards the Sidhe with a blend of both desire and fear. Restless after his supernatural experience but bound by the physical world, Hanrahan wanders, no longer confined to mortal understandings, but also restricted from union with the fairy world; he is caught in the middle, not fully alive but not fully dead, belonging to neither the natural world nor the spirit world, he is a liminal figure par excellence.
The scenic design of this new stage adaptation of the Stories of Red Hanrahan was developed through the creative collaboration of the two co-directors and the set designer; it is heavily influenced by Noh drama, a Japanese theatre practice with fourteenth-century beginnings, which was highly inspiring for Yeats later in his career. Yeats as a dramatist “had a radical vision of theatrical possibility and the Noh was his inspiration” (Martin xiv). The aspects of Noh that appealed so forcefully for Yeats were those elements that evoked the transcendent world, including “the sense of religion and ritual, the sacredness of place, the omnipresence of the supernatural, custom and ceremony . . .” (Martin xiv). Meditative Noh drama focuses on the central character's transformation from human to spirit, or spirit to human. Hanrahan is caught in the middle of this transformation, wandering along a human-to-spirit continuum. Though he experiences moments of greater humanness and others of greater spirituality, the bard never truly identifies with either until he is released from humanity and united with spirit. These dead, living, and spirit elements are ever-present on the Noh stage, represented by three pine trees which mark every Noh set. Knowing Yeats’s later fascination with Noh drama, adapter and co-director John Gentile asked scenic designer Ming Chen to create a design that blended the Japanese Noh with Irish traditions, suggesting that the Noh pines be modified into an Irish sacred tree – the fairy thorn, the white hawthorn or May thorn. “The people say that you must not hurt these bushes or trees,” wrote Yeats of the fairy thorns, “ because ‘the others’ have houses near them . . .” (“Tribes” 142). Chen’s design achieves that fusion, effectively blending the Noh style with Irish fairy lore and Celtic knot work. Co-director Henry Scott then suggested that we continue the Asian theatre aesthetic by using simple geometric blocks to serve as transformational objects throughout the performance, becoming in one moment a cottage table and in the next the mythic mountain Ben Bulben. Scott also fused Japanese and Irish motifs in composing the haunting original music for the production.
Magic and Irish mythology are omnipresent in Yeats's work, and symbols of this mysticism – such as the Tarot, the four treasures of Ireland, and the fairy folk – are significant in John Gentile's adaptation of Red Hanrahan for the stage. Yeats practiced Tarot in his own life using his own heavily marked deck, which Gentile studied at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin this past summer, and the cards and all their connotations align with his characters (see chart). Most notably, Hanrahan, as Kathleen Raine explains, correlates with the role of The Fool, whose weakness and failure to choose block him from success. “Indeed the figure of Hanrahan himself,” writes Raine, “seems related to the Tarot card Le Mat, the fool, the zero of the pack . . .” (18). The Old Man correlates with The Magician and Echtge as The High Priestess with the four women the four queens in the minor arcana: the Queens of Cups, Swords, Wands, and Pentacles. Hanrahan’s defining moment is his meeting with Echtge, a typically complex Yeatsian symbol, which be read variously as the Rose of Eternal Beauty, the Divine Feminine, Ireland, and the Anima Mundi, the World Soul. Cast out after his failure with Echtge, Hanrahan must earn his way back. Thereafter, every “story, except the last, ends in a frustrated desire for union with the anima, the representative soul” (Kruger 62).
In accordance with the Noh human-to-spirit transformation, the four treasures of Ireland are displayed as common objects when representing the human (the big pot, the flat stone, the long rusty knife, and the blackthorn stick), and as sacred treasures when representing the spirit (the cauldron, the stone, the sword, and the spear). In Gentile's adaptation, the most recognizable spirit elements are the Sidhe, the fairies, who are perhaps the most fascinating and terrifying denizens of Irish folklore. The Irish fairies (who are known colloquially by many names, including the “good people,” “the gentry,” and “the others,” and more) are not the dainty pixies of the Victorian English writers but rather “a mysterious and magical race of people who inhabit the same world as common men but inhabit it, somehow, on different terms” (Smith 13). The Irish fairies are morally ambiguous; they may be beneficent one moment and, then, turn malevolent in the next—especially to those foolish humans who deny their existence or disturb their revels. However, they are always powerful and capricious, and always to be respected and feared.
As his perceptions of the natural world and its mystical influences evolved, so did Yeats's stories. Each publication of the Stories of Red Hanrahan reveals dramatic changes to both language and content. Collaborating heavily with Lady Gregory in later versions, Yeats reduced the “elaborate English” that was inspired by Walter Pater in the 1897 publication to the “simple English” of Irish village life based on Lady Gregory’s Kiltartanese for the versions published in 1905 (Mythologies 1). With the language alteration came thematic changes: the Red Hanrahan stories of 1897 emphasize “the theme of nationalism versus art”; they present Hanrahan’s life as endlessly tragic (Smith 205). Later, Yeats modified the tales to alternate tragic events with seemingly happy or comedic moments in Hanrahan's life, sentencing the bard to a life of in-between-ness, neither tragic nor satisfying, but rather always swinging between the two. Critics of the stories disagree as to which versions, early or late, are superior. In preparation for this production, Gentile interviewed Yeats and Lady Gregory scholar James Pethica, who commented on the different values of the early and late versions of the Hanrahan stories:
For me, the earlier, sometimes rather ‘raw’ versions are far more revealing of Yeats’s hopes and anxieties as a writer and as an Irish Nationalist in the 1890s, and often as interesting for their limitations as for what is accomplished in them. The later versions are more powerful as an achieved artwork. I’m glad we have the multiple versions to compare, as they reveal much about Yeats’s evolving capacities as a writer.
Gentile’s adaptation, featuring selections from both the early Walter Pater-inspired and late Lady Gregory-influenced versions of the stories, also includes a generous sampling of Yeats’s poetry not originally featured in the stories, thus making Owen Hanrahan the Red perhaps even more like Yeats himself.
--John Gentile, Co-Dramaturg, Adapter, and Co-Director, and Tracey Cordle, Assistant Dramaturg
Works Cited
Gould, Warwick, and Deirdre Toomey, eds. Editors’ Introduction. Mythologies. By W. B. Yeats. New York: Palgrave, 2005. xxiii-lxxxxv.
Print.
Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan. “The Tarot in Yeats' Stories of Red Hanrahan.” E'ire Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies. 26.2 (1991): 62-77. Print.
Martin, Augustine. “Yeats’s Noh: The Dancer and the Dance.” Introduction. Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study. By Masaru Sekine and
Christopher Murray. Savage, MD: Barnes, 1990. xiii – xviii. Print.
O’Donnell, William H. A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983. Print.
Pethica, James. Interview by John Gentile. 28 Nov. 2012.
Raine, Kathleen. Yeats, The Tarot and The Golden Dawn. Dublin: Dolmen, 1972. Print.
Smith, Peter Alderson. W.B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu. Gerrards Cross, Bucks: C. Smythe, 1987. Print.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Vol. 1: 1865 – 1895. Ed. John Kelly. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Print.
---. Mythologies. Ed. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Print.
---. The Secret Rose. London: Bullen, 1897. Print.
---. “The Tribes of Danu.” Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth. London: Penguin, 1993. 138-154. Print.