"Deirdre" is an important transitional play in Yeats's career as a playwright. The manuscripts included here show him extending the limits of the conventionally staged play and initiating the development of some of the features of the dance plays (the use of chorus and song, the unity of metaphor, the compression of language). Most intriguing, however, is the view they offer of the play as it was first performed at the Abbey Theatre. "The Cornell Yeats" edition of "Deirdre" features a series of sketches for staging the play, one of a very few pieces of evidence for Yeats's production plans for any of his early plays.
