Yeats began by writing "play after play" in his teens and finished his last play, The Death of Cuchulain, shortly before his death at the age of seventy-three. He was a man of the theatre as much as a lyric poet, managing Dublin’s Abbey Theatre for many years and constantly striving to create a national dramatic tradition for Ireland.

          Professor Jeffares has selected and annotated twelve plays which show the enormous range of Yeats’s dramatic talent: from the romantic dramas of his youth, through the explosively patriotic Cathleen ni Hoolihan, the explorations of Gaelic legends in his middle age, the mixture of farce and symbolism in The Player Queen, to the stylised plays for dancers, the superbly realistic The Words upon the Window-pane and the wild fantasy of The Herne’s Egg.

CONTENTS:
Introduction
Note on the Text
PLAYS
1. Cathleen Ni Hoolihan
2. On Baile’s Strand
3. Deirdre
4. The Player Queen
5. The Dreaming of the Bones
6. The Only Jealousy of Emer
7. The Resurrection
8. The Words upon the Window-pane
9. A Full Moon in March
10. The Herne’s Egg
11. Purgatory
12. The Death of Cuchulain
Notes
Select Bilbiography