The Land of Heart's Desire, staged at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894, marks W. B. Yeats's first use of Irish folklore in a play produced in the commercial theater, with important consequences for his career as a dramatist. This book includes transcriptions and photographs of the surviving holograph manuscripts of the play, reproductions of Yeats's own notes and revisions, and other materials related to stage productions and the resulting changes he made to the text.

After Maud Gonne refused his offer of marriage in the summer of 1893, Yeats coped with his...

Between 1829 and 1831, Jared Curtis, the newly appointed prison chaplain at the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown, interviewed every one of the over 300 inmates at the prison and recorded their biographies in two leatherbound notebooks. Those notebooks, fully transcribed and well annotated after their discovery in 1998, form the basis for Philip F. Gura's Buried from the World.

Curtis's notebooks provide the sole memorial of the hundreds of inarticulate prisoners who lived in the vast silence of Charlestown prison. The one or two paragraphs he devoted to each man capture...

Yeats first expressed interest in producing translations of Greek classical plays in March of 1903, in the early days of establishing the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. But not until two decades later did he turn his hand to creating his own versions of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Working from Victorian translations into English and French by classicists R. C. Jebb and Paul Masqueray, he completed Oedipus the King in the fall of 1926 and Oedipus at Colonus a year later.

The second play, like the first, he gave directly to the...

Each of the 21 volumes of "The Cornell Wordsworth," one of the great scholarly editions of our time, is complete in itself, but few volumes supplied tools useful to anyone studying two or more volumes. In this supplementary volume the reader will find a unified index to titles and first lines for the entire series, a guide to the hundreds of manuscripts treated in the twenty-one volumes, and a comprehensive list of the contents of Wordsworth's many lifetime editions. The chance to provide such tools in a volume supplementary to the series made it possible as well to include information...

The Resurrection was first performed at the Abbey Theatre on 30 July 1934. Yeats had sketched the play's first scenarios in 1925, and worked on it intermittently for the next nine years. For the author, the work was a kind of study piece for communicating to a general audience his investigations into patterns of historical recurrence. In The Resurrection, Yeats asks how the avatar of a new era can be dramatized as a true anomaly, capable of revitalizing a declining civilization through the power of magic or miracle. The play takes the form of a series of questions and...