First Yeats play to be brought to life
Scenes from a never before staged play by WB Yeats will be performed for the first time next month.
'Love and Death' - the writer's first play - was revealed to the public for the first time this year by Boston College after academics digitised the 127-year-old hand-written manuscript.
The work is written across five notebooks and loose scraps of paper and is peppered with notes.
Betsy McKelvey, Boston College's digital collections librarian, said the manuscript was in good condition despite its age.
"Of course one of the things that's so charming about it is you can tell it was a household item, there's calculations and miscellaneous notes written on the back pages, but in terms of its physical stability it's great," Ms McKelvey said.
Yeats wrote 'Love and Death' in 1884 when he was just shy of 20, the same year that he began writing 'Mosada' and 'The Island of Statues', his earliest published plays.
It will be of interest to Yeats scholars, academics and general fans of the writer perhaps better known for his world-renowned poetry, including Easter 1916, which highlights his torn emotions at the failed rising against British rule.
The US university acquired the manuscript in 1993 through the late Michael Yeats, the poet's son and former Fianna Fáail senator.
But because of copyright restrictions lifted only in January, it could not be widely disseminated among the public until April, when it was digitised.
The plot focuses on a murderous princess who falls in love with an immortal being, which Yeats himself described in the manuscript as a tragedy.
Whether the work rates among the poet's other literary gems remains to be seen, but one reader is not overly taken with it.
"The play is somewhat mediocre," said Ms McKelvey.
"But one of our librarians said it is no worse than some of Yeats' earlier plays that were published."
Boston College's Yeats expert, professor Marjorie Howes, will travel to the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo with a graduate student of the university, where scenes from the play will be performed for the first time on August 1.
Professor James Pethica, summer school director, said it was a coup for the school and follows on from another never before staged production last year.
"This is the second year running where we're kind of doing a premier of an unpublished text," Professor Pethica said.
"But this is probably the last one, the last complete text. The chance of there being anything else out there that scholars have missed ... I think this is the end of the line."
