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“That ceaseless revery about life which we call wisdom”: a comparison of Yeats’s and Maeterlinck’s dramaturgy Abstract ArianeMurphy William Butler Yeats read extensively the French Symbolists and the plays of the Belgian playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, before there were widely known in the English and Irish literary world. However, Yeats made a point to distance himself from his increasingly famous contemporary playwright. A word returns repeatedly in Yeats’s criticism about Maeterlinck’s drama: his early plays lack “revery”. This paper examines how the concept of reverie drives the dramaturgy of two plays with similar stories, Deirdre by Yeats and Pelléas and Mélisande by Maeterlinck. On the one hand, in Yeats’s review of one of Maeterlinck’s plays, “revery” acquires the original meaning of a type of poetics that demands at the same time philosophical reflection and poetry. In Deirdre, deep thought expressed directly by the characters goes along with high language: at a time when the Irish stage represents Irish realist peasant drama, Yeats uses the same legends but in a poetic theatre. Maeterlinck’s characters do not express that type of “revery”: no philosophy, but pure emotions, no verse, but a language simplified to its core, leaving space for silence. On the other hand, reverie in its original definition, as a romantic state that lies between the unconsciousness of the dream and the consciousness of an awoken mind, plays an important part in both Pelléas and Deirdre. Maeterlinck’s characters do not act; they experience a ceaseless reverie that the spectator is made to experience with them at the sight of their reverie. Unlike Maeterlinck, Yeats does not show the moments of the reverie, but he explains the consequent thoughts of the characters’ reverie, the same way he does not represent the whole legend but he begins the action of Deirdre when the story is almost over. Yeats refuses both action and emotion: Yeats’s dramaturgy of reflection thus responds to Maeterlinck’s dramaturgy of experience.
