The Countess Cathleen

Did You Know?

• The play is set ahistorically in Ireland during a famine.
• The Countess sells her soul to the devil to save her tenants from starvation and damnation.
• After her death, she is redeemed because her motives were altruistic and she ascends to Heaven.

Editions and revisions

The play first appeared in 1892 in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, with the spelling changed to "Cathleen" in all later editions. The text underwent extensive changes until the final version, performed in 1911 and published in 1912, which Yeats described as "a complete revision to make it suitable for performance at the Abbey Theatre" and "all but a new play." The variorum editor Russell K. Alspach noted that the revision for the 1895 Poems was so drastic that intelligible collation was virtually impossible. Yeats's changes moved decidedly away from an almost farcical realism and tentatively toward the austere, suggestive mode of the dance plays.

Performances

The first performance was on 8 May 1899 as the Irish Literary Theatre's inaugural production, at the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin. Yeats attended an amateurish performance by the Dramatic Society of the Norwich High School Old Girls' Association on 21 February 1911. The first Abbey Theatre performance, using the much-changed final version, took place on 14 December 1911. A German translation staged by Friedrich Bethge and featuring Paul Verhoeven was performed in Frankfurt in 1934, for which the city awarded Yeats its Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt.

Reception

In the 1899 production of Yeats's play, a seventeen-year-old James Joyce was struck by Oona's Act II song, "Who will go drive with Fergus now?"—later cut from the 1911 version. Richard Ellmann notes that Joyce set the poem to music and called it the finest lyric ever written. Stanislaus Joyce recalled that James sang his own composition of the song at the bedside of his dying brother George in 1902. In Ulysses, Buck Mulligan chants the same lines, and Stephen Dedalus plays with them in a way that is parodic but not merely so. Stephen also echoes Cathleen's final words, "Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel...," in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Frederick Sefton Delmer argued in 1911 that the play was anti-English, with the merchant-demons standing in for English landlords. Werner Egk later adapted Yeats's work into the libretto for his 1955 opera Irische Legende.