Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/80

 60 Mr. Yeats after "The Shadowy Waters" grow, play by play, less in poetic beauty, and that their gain in dramatic effectiveness does not compensate for such a loss.

"The King's Threshold" (1904) is as near a play with a purpose as Mr. Yeats has written. It vindicates the right of the poet in Ireland's Heroic Age to sit at the highest table of the King, and as it was written and played in 1903, when its author was being accused of caring more for his art than for his country, it looks very like a defense. Seanchan, the poet, removed from his high seat at the request of "Bishops, Soldiers, and Makers of the Law," takes his stand on the King's threshold, with the intention of starving himself to death there, as there is, as the King says,—


 * "a custom,

An old and foolish custom, that if a man Be wronged, or think that he is wronged and starve Upon another's threshold till he die, The common people, for all time to come, Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold, Even though it be the King's."

It was at this time that the clamor against "In the Shadow of the Glen" had stirred up a great deal of feeling against Mr. Yeats and the other managers of the Irish National Theatre Society. And Mr. Yeats, it may be, wrote the play not only to symbolize his contention that the poet is as important to society as is the man of action, but also to assert that poetry cultivated for its own sake, the sake of art, is as necessary to a nation, to Ireland, as what Ireland calls patriotism. By the way, he illustrated the fact that that kind of patriotism that assumes the