Staging The King’s Threshold

Abstract

THE DISCOVERY BY COLIN SMYTHE of a stage design (Plate 4) by Yeats himself for the first production of The King’s Threshold prompts a reconsideration of this early and much revised play.¹ It is a play that has excited little commentary over the years: critics of Yeats’s drama tend to give it honourable mention in passing; Peter Ure and S. B. Bushrui are virtually alone in devoting to it entire chapters in their published criticism.² The problem perhaps lies in the extent and complexity of the revisions Yeats felt it necessary to make to it: it certainly is the play where Yeats seems least confident of what he is doing both thematically and theatrically, and many years passed before it reached its final form as recorded in the Collected Plays. There is some truth in Ure’s judgement that ‘The King’s Threshold is, in the best sense, an amateur play and almost the last play by Yeats of which this could properly be said’.³ ‘Amateur’ was, interestingly, the word used by Max Beerbohm of the whole company of Irish players when he commented in his column in the Saturday Review on the visit to London by the Irish National Theatre Society on the occasion in 1904 when they first played The King’s Threshold in the metropolis.