In July 1920, in his preface to Four Plays for Dancers, W.B. Yeats explained that The Only Jealousy of Emer “was written to find what dramatic effect one could get out of a mask, changed while the player remains upon the stage to suggest a change of personality” (Variorum 1305).  When I first read those words thirty some years ago, The Great God Brown came immediately to mind because, swept up in the great revival of the late 50s and early 60s, I knew more about Eugene O'Neill than I did about Yeats.  Somewhere in there, I thought, lurks an “influence” paper.  Chalk it up to youth!

 

Even if I wanted to, today, I doubt that I could convince anyone that such experiments in stagecraft sprang from Yeats, especially since O'Neill's first-hand knowledge of Irish theatre seems to come more from early Abbey tours, which seldom featured any but the safest of Yeats's plays.  Louis Sheaffer mentions The Hour-Glass, the first play for which Yeats had a mask designed, as one of the works performed on American tour by Dudley Digges and his Irish Players, but his point seems to be that these performances were available to O'Neill.  Sheaffer never comes right out and says O'Neill attended any of them (Son and Playwright 139); and even if he had been there, he wouldn't have seen any masks.  They were developed (but not used) for the 1911 Dublin production of Hour-Glass.

 

O'Neill did attend the Abbey Players' first official American performances in 1911.  “Eugene,” wrote Sheaffer, “saw every one of their productions—Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, T.C. Murray—during their six weeks at the Maxine Elliott Theater” (205).  But he still didn't see any masks.  Shortly after the troupe arrived in Boston, Yeats bailed out and left Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson to dodge eggs at the Playboy riots, while he took over the 1911-1912 Dublin season where he collaborated with director Nugent Monck and designer Gordon Craig in mounting, among other things, a highly innovative production of Hour-Glass.

 

What O'Neill came away with may more interestingly be illustrated by accounts from the other side of the Atlantic.  Hugh Hunt, for example, in his study The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre, 1904-1979, wrote: “But this first American tour gave something also to the American theatre; Eugene O'Neill was to tell an interviewer many years later ... ” (96), and then he quotes from Arthur and Barbara Gelb quoting O'Neill:

It was seeing the Irish Players ... that gave me a glimpse of my opportunity.  I went to see everything they did.  I thought then [in 1911] and I still think [in 1923] that they demonstrate the possibilities of naturalistic acting better than any other company. (Gelb 172)

Yeats, of course, hated naturalistic acting.  It would, among other frustrations, drive him away from the Abbey for about a decade until he could reconcile his vision of modern stagecraft with the “People's Theatre” he had helped Synge and Lady Gregory create.

 

So, if it wasn't from direct contact, how do we account for the parallels between Yeats's and O'Neill's theories and stage use of masks?

 

How close were they?  To begin with, in Yeats we must be careful not to confuse the stage mask with the philosophical doctrine of the mask which is central to Richard Ellmann's classic study, Yeats, The Man and the Masks.  “The doctrine of the mask,” Ellmann wrote, “is so complex and so central in Yeats that we can hardly attend to it too closely” (172).  And certainly it stands as the basic thought behind all of Yeats's use of antithetical elements in everything he wrote.  But on stage, Yeats does not always intend the mask to signal an opposite as he does, say, in A Vision when he sets up his geometrical diagram

to describe Will and Mask as the will and its object, or the Is and the Ought (or that which shall be), Creative Mind and Body of Fate as thought and its object, or the Knower and the Known, and to say that the first two are lunar or antithetical or natural, the second two solar or primary or reasonable. (Vision 124).

Although Yeats associates the philosophical concept of the mask with tragedy, comedy and farce in his journal entries for 26 and 28 January 1909, his point there relates not so much to the masks worn in a specific play as to the concept of these forms of drama, as when he writes: “Comedy is joyous, because all assumption of part, of a personal mask, whether the individualized face of comedy or the grotesque face of farce, is a display of energy, and all is joyous,” and a few sentences later: “The masks of tragedy contain neither character nor personal energy.  They are allied to decoration and to the abstract figures of Egyptian temples” (Memoirs 152).

 

The masks I'm talking about here are part of Yeats's stagecraft.  They're the ones he first attempted to use in the 1911 Hour-Glass, the ones he wrote so enthusiastically to Lady Gregory about in 1910:

If the masks work right I would put the fool and the blind man in Baile's Strand into masks.  It would give a wildness and extravagance that would be fine.  I should also like the Abbey to be the first modern theatre to use the mask.  (Wade 554).

 

These are also the masks he spoke of in his introduction to Pound and Fenollosa's Certain Noble Plays of Japan in 1916:

A mask will enable me to substitute for the face of some commonplace player, or for that face repainted to suit his own vulgar fancy, the fine invention of a sculptor, and to bring the audience close enough to the play to hear every inflection of the voice.  A mask never seems but a dirty face, and no matter how close you go is yet a work of art; nor shall we lose by stilling the movement of the features, for deep feeling is expressed by a movement of the whole body.  (Essays 226).

Or again, in his 1920 preface to Four Plays for Dancers, where he notes:

if I write plays and organize performances on any scale and with any system, I shall hope for a small number of typical masks, each capable of use in several plays.  The face of the speaker should be as much a work of art as the lines he speaks or the costume that he wears, that all may be as artificial as possible.  Perhaps in the end one would write plays for certain masks.  (Variorum 1305).

And it was in this same preface that he made the remark I began with:

The mask, apart from its beauty, may suggest new situations at a moment when the old ones seem exhausted; “The Only Jealousy of Emer” was written to find what dramatic effect one could get out of a mask, changed while the player remains upon the stage to suggest a change of personality. (1305)

Yeats wrote about masks elsewhere, but those few selections reflect his thinking on the subject, just as O'Neill's are found most succinctly in the American Spectator articles of 1932-1933, “Memoranda on Masks,” “Second Thoughts,” and “A Dramatist's Notebook.”  Yeats begins by pointing out that masks do not work for realistic plays, but that they provide the dramatist's answer “as to how—with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means—he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us” (Cargill 116).  This probing of the inner psychological conflicts forms the basis for Edward L. Shaghnessy's 1984 article, “Masks in the Dramaturgy of Yeats and O'Neill”; and, except for Shaughnessy's misreading of Yeats's intentions as a dramatist, his thesis that O'Neill and Yeats among modern dramatists “made perhaps the most serious recent attempts to discover the possibilities of the mask” (205) hits the mark.  But that exception leads to a major misreading of Yeats's dramaturgical intentions.  It rests wholly on those few years when Yeats, in a bit of a snit, left the Abbey stage and proclaimed he had invented a new form of Western drama, loosely based on the Japanese Noh, to be played in a drawing room for a few lovers of poetry.  By the 1920s he was back on the stage, and enjoying some of his greatest theatrical triumphs including the George Antheil-scored Fighting the Waves, a rewrite of Emer which featured the dancing of Ninette de Valois and the masks of sculptor Hildo van Krop; and while Yeats may have considered this “a mere occasion for sculptor and dancer” and for “the exciting dramatic music of George Anthiel” (Variorum 567), it showed him how he could construct non-realistic plays for a more general audience.  It also led to the publication of Wheels and Butterflies, a carefully crafted volume containing four of Yeats's plays and four connected philosophical essays.  A short introductory poem makes it clear that the “wheels” or essays were intended for those who must understand the philosophy under the words, but that the “butterflies,” the plays themselves, were for his friends.

 

Such distinctions have never seemed as clear in O'Neill, and accordingly, Shaughnessy's point, that O'Neill's masks work as a Prufrockian social cover-up, fits more readily into both the works and theory.  “What is valid, what is unquestionable,” O'Neill wrote, “is that this insight has uncovered the mask, has impressed the idea of mask as a symbol of inner reality upon all intelligent people of today” (Cargill 117).  This both is and isn't the mask Yeats put on the Fool and the Wiseman or, later, on Cuchulain and his ghost.  In the sense that the antithetical mask lurks behind everything Yeats did, it is, but as a dramatic device, O'Neill hits closer to Yeats's purpose with this observation:

Looked at from even the most practical standpoint of the practicing playwright, the mask is dramatic in itself, has always been dramatic in itself, is a proven weapon of attack.  At its best, it is more subtly, imaginatively, suggestively dramatic than any actor's face can ever be.

And a little further along, when O'Neill suggests that all future classical revivals should be done with masks and gives Hamlet as an example, the lines could have been written by Yeats himself:

Masks would liberate this play from its present confining status as exclusively a “star vehicle.” We would be able to see the great drama we are now only privileged to read, to identify ourselves with the figure of Hamlet as a symbolic projection of a fate that is in each of us, instead of merely watching a star giving us his version of a great acting role.  We would even be able to hear the sublime poetry as the innate expression of the spirit of the drama itself, instead of listening to it as realistic recitation—or ranting—by familiar actors. (118)

The phrasing may be a little different, but that's pure Yeats.  So, too, the observation in “Second Thoughts” where O'Neill emphatically declares that if he were to make any changes in the past production of his plays it would be “to call for more masks in some of these productions and to use them in other productions where they were not used before” (119).  That's exactly what Yeats did.  An inveterate reviser, he changed everything.

 

So we've seen some parallels, and though I agree with Shaughnessy that the dramatic persona type mask was there textually for both men through Eliot, Pound or Joyce, to name a few, there's another, more direct link for them when we talk of the mask as a piece of stagecraft.  That's Gordon Craig.

 

Although familiar with the designer's work as early as 1901, as James W. Flannery points out in W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, Yeats became actively involved with Gordon Craig in 1909-1910: “Craig's ideas on the übermarionette and the mask also came to Yeats's attention at an opportune time” (266).  This led to the Monck/Craig/Yeats collaboration on The Hour-Glass, but it was also in 1909 that Craig wrote “A Note on Masks,” where he outlined some of the very points we've seen in common between the two playwrights.  He refers to the mask as “that paramount means of dramatic expression, without which acting was bound to degenerate” (Craig 118).  He addresses the point of realism in drama and claims: “Drama which is not trivial, takes us beyond reality and yet asks a human face, the most realist of things, to express all that.  It is unfair” (120).

 

“Masks,” Craig explains, “carry conviction when he who creates them is an artist, for the artist limits the statements which he places upon these masks.  The face of the actor carries no such conviction; it is over-full of fleeting expression—frail, restless, disturbed and disturbing” (121).  And finally, in his “On Masks: By a Bishop and Me,” written in 1910, Craig pokes fun at a bishop who attacked the theatre from his cathedral, and warned against “men and women _who paint their faces and appear on the stage'” (128).  Craig agrees that they do not need “bad paint” and advises actors to “Get to your masks quickly.  When you learn their use and their invincible power you will be better fitted to ascend” (130).

 

So, clearly, Yeats drew many of his theories of the mask from Craig.  But what about O'Neill?  How did he come by them?  Craig always seemed the obvious answer.  Louis Sheaffer nailed it down for me in O'Neill, Son and Artist.  He explains the importance of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to The Emperor Jones, then mentions another book which O'Neill read that same year: Gordon Craig's The Theatre Advancing, which Sheaffer describes as a “compilation of Craig's radical views, that champions a freer, more imaginative stagecraft” (28).  It also contains Craig's essays on the mask from which I quoted above.

 

Certainly there were other influences on O'Neill's experiments with masks, just as there were on Yeats's.  A play in production, for example, opens new possibilities with every performance, and both men were active participants in that aspect of their craft.  Yeats was more likely to make major revisions after a play was on the boards, but then his works were almost all one-acts, and as such, they were more easily reshaped than O'Neill's dramatic megaliths.

 

Obviously there's more to be said on the subject of masks in the work of Yeats and O'Neill.  I've barely touched the Yeats/Craig/Monck collaboration on the 1911 Hour-Glass and the on-stage personality changes through masks in Emer and The Great God Brown.  At the very least, a study of masks in The Hairy Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings, The Emperor Jones, Lazarus Laughed and O'Neill's staging of Coleridge's “The Ancient Mariner” would be rewarding.  Yeats's on-stage personality shifts without masks, as in The Player Queen and Words upon the Window-pane, and O'Neill's efforts in the same direction, as in Strange Interlude, also offer fertile ground for further study.  So does the possibility of using puppets as masks with actors moving in and out of the parts, a technique used by Roman Paska for Yeats's The Shadowy Waters, which I plan to apply to a production of Marco Millions.

 

In short, there's much more to say on this subject.  I've drawn parallels, touched on common sources of inspiration, and trust you'll weave whatever cloth the woof and warp of your imagination finds possible from these common strings.

 

WORKS CITED

 

Cargill, Oscar, N. Bryllion Fagin and William J. Fisher, eds.  O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism.  New York: New York UP, 1961.

 

Craig, E. Gordon.  The Theatre Advancing.  New York: Benjamin Blom, 1947.

 

Ellman, Richard.  Yeats: The Man and the Masks.  New York: Dutton, 1958.

 

Flannery, James W.  W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

 

Gelb, Arthur and Barbara.  O'Neill.  New York: Harper & Row, 1960.

 

Hunt, Hugh.  The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre, 1904-1979.  New York:      Columbia UP, 1979.

 

Shaughnessy, Edward L.,  “Masks in the Dramaturgy of Yeats and O'Neill.” Irish University Review  14.2 (1984): 205-220.

 

Sheaffer, Louis.  O'Neill, Son and Artist.  Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

 

_____.  O'Neill, Son and Playwright.  Boston:  Little, Brown, 1968.

 

Yeats, William Butler.  Essays and Introductions.  New York: Macmillan, 1961.

 

_____.  Memoirs, ed. Denis Donaghue. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

 

_____.  The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

 

_____.  The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, ed. Russel K. Alspach.  New York: Macmillan, 1966.

 

_____.  A Vision and Related Writings, ed. A. Norman Jeffares. London: Arena, 1990.

 

_____.  Wheels and Butterflies.  New York: Macmillan, 1935.