“A player, a playwright, and the most famous poet in the world”: Highs and Lows in The Player Queen

Abstract

Yeats published The Player Queen, a play he had struggled with for more than a decade, in 1922, just a year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. This article argues despite its appearance of complete wackiness, The Player Queen constitutes a significant landmark in Yeats’s elaboration of his own theatrical aesthetics, as well as a meditation on artistic responsibility—or failure thereof. Why does the poet Septimus fail to communicate his beautiful vision of the Unicorn to anyone, and why does no-one in the play listen to him? On the one hand, the citizens in the play are figures of the incompetent spectators, reminiscent of the audience who rejected Synge at the Abbey. On the other hand, Septimus himself is an incompetent spectator, who is so engrossed in his poetic vision that he fails to pay attention to the momentous change that is really going on before his eyes, although this concerns his own wife Decima, the eponymous Player Queen who comes to replace the real queen. Septimus fails to make himself heard because he is not paying attention to what really matters, he is not fulfilling his duty, as a playwright and a poet, of translating the shapeless chaos of reality into intelligible forms.