Yeats, Beckett and Noh

BECKETT, YEATS, AND NOH: "...but the clouds...
" as Theatre of Evocation

Author(s): Minako Okamuro
Source: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 21, Where Never Before: Beckett's
Poetics of Elsewhere / La potique de l'ailleurs. In Honor of Marius Buning (2009), pp. 165-
177
Published by: Brill
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BECKETT, YEATS, AND NOH:
...but the clouds... as Theatre of Evocation
Minako Okamuro
In ...but the clouds..., the ritualistic movements of Ml culminate in his conjuring

of a woman who quotes from "The Tower," the poem in which W. B. Yeats, who
was profoundly influenced by Japanese noh theatre, evokes a number of ghosts.
In this study, I demonstrate that Beckett was influenced in his writing of ...but the
clouds... both by the highly stylised mugen noh - the noh of dreams and phan
toms - and Yeats's experience of noh.
Introduction
Beckett's teleplay ...but the clouds..., written in 1976, presents a striking
ritual. A man, M, sits on an invisible stool, bowed over an invisible table.
As he sits, an image of the man, called Ml, walks deliberately from west
to east, illuminated in a circle of light surrounded by darkness. Newly re
turned from the roads in the west, Ml stops and stands listening for five
seconds, then enters a closet in the east, where he exchanges his hat and
greatcoat for a robe and skullcap. He then reappears in the circle of light,
advances five steps, and stops to face the shadowed west for five seconds.
Finally, he turns and vanishes into his "sanctum" in the north.
M's voice (V) is then heard telling of his begging a lost woman to
appear in his sanctum: "Then crouching there, in my little sanctum, in the
dark, where none could see me, I began to beg, of her, to appear, to me.
Such had long been my use and wont. No sound, a begging of the mind, to
her, to appear, to me. Deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied,
and ceased. Or of course until?." M's begging is almost always - "in the
proportion say of nine hundred and ninety-nine to one, or nine hundred
and ninety-eight to two" - in vain, but on several occasions, the face of
the woman, W, does appear. Sometimes, she quotes unintelligibly from
William Butler Yeats's poem "The Tower" (written in 1925), mouthing
the words, "...clouds... but the clouds... of the sky...." The audience
does not hear these inaudible lines uttered by W; only her lips are seen to
166 Minako Okamuro
move, as M's voice murmurs "...but the clouds...," which suggests that
W is but an image in M's mind.
As I argue in "...but the clouds... and A Yeatsian Phantasmagoria"
(included in SBT/A 19: Borderless Beckett/ Beckett sans frontieres, Tokyo
2006), ...but the clouds... may be viewed as a seance play in which M
conjures up the appearance of W in his sanctum. M's voice (V) narrates
his past actions in the past tense, and at the same time comments on the
pictures in the present in such lines as "No, that is not right," "Right," and
"Let us now distinguish three cases." M furthermore makes scenes repeat
in order to review their details: "Let us now run through it again." M is
thus highly conscious of television as a medium, and as he provides com
mentary on the unfolding scenes, M seems, in effect, to be directing the
action and camera work. If ...but the clouds... is a seance play, M may be
understood to be repeatedly reproducing the solitary seances of Ml, who
is M's past self. In adopting M's viewpoint, members of the television
audience become unwitting guests at the seance. The other participants in
the seance are the personages into which M is split: his dreamed, imag
ined, or remembered past self, namely Ml, the memory image recorded
by the camera, and M's narrating voice V. The various roles are given to
M, that is, the narrator of a seance and the author-director of the inner
drama being evoked. The appearance of W's image, then, represents a
dream image (W) within a dream image (Ml), or a memory image (W)
within a memory image (Ml).
What inspired Beckett to create the mysterious ritual that Ml per
forms? The woman's quoting from Yeats's "The Tower," a poem evoking
ghosts, offers a clue. As is well known, Yeats, who was devoted to the
study and practice of seances, was also profoundly influenced by Japanese
mugen (dream) noh, a ritualistic form of theatre featuring ghosts and
dreams that is performed on a bare stage to musical accompaniment and
dance. In presenting the seance-like evocation of a woman's ghost,
Beckett's teleplay too seems to share central concerns of mugen noh and
to echo a number of its characteristics. The ritualistic movement around a
lit circular area in ...but the clouds... is similar to the stylised movements
that transpire on the square stage of noh theatre. The circular lit area of
Beckett's teleplay has four directions which on the square stage of noh are
suggested by the four poles in the corners.1 Ml enters the lit area from the
west, or stage right, as noh actors enter stage right from the corridor
known as hashigakari that also indicates the west. Before starting their
ritualistic performances, noh actors don masks in a sacred room called
Beckett, Yeats, and Noh 167
kagami no ma (mirror room); Ml enters the closet to "assume" his robe

and skullcap before beginning his ritualistic evocation of W. Finally, as
Masaru Sekine points out, the movement and stage props in noh theatre
are minimal; the audience's imagination creates the backdrops and sets
(27). In ...but the clouds... as well, the set is invisible, as indicated in the
stage directions, which specify, "man sitting on invisible stool bowed over
invisible table."
Several studies, including remarkable works by Yasunari Takahashi
and Katharine Worth, have explored the relationship of Yeats, Beckett,
and noh. I propose to extend this line of investigation in examining how,
in writing his ritualistic ...but the clouds..., Beckett was influenced by
noh, and particularly Yeats's experience of mugen noh, the noh of dreams
and phantoms,2 whose similarity to a seance Yeats recognised. I will fur
thermore consider purgatorial aspects of noh in a number of Yeats's and
Beckett's plays.
Yeats and Noh: Dreaming Back and Seance

Although the origins of noh are uncertain, it is believed to have emerged
from the Chinese sangaku dance, which included juggling and mime.
Sangaku reached Japan in the seventh or eighth century as part of a cul
tural movement incorporating Buddhist ideas. As sangaku encountered
wazaogi, a traditional Japanese form of entertainment, it developed into
sarugaku, a popular form of theater consisting largely of outdoor per
formances of singing, dancing, and comic amusements. In the samurai
culture of the Kamakura period (1192-1334), sarugaku fused with den
gaku, a religious form of entertainment widely performed in the country
side. In the late fourteenth century, two actors, Kan'ami and his son
Zeami formalised the more solemn noh plays, consigning the more hu
morous elements to the kyogen interludes. In the Muromachi period
(1336-1573), supported by the life-long favour and patronage of Yoshimi
tsu, the third shogun, Zeami developed an increasingly sophisticated noh
theatre. Noh attained the status of official ceremonial entertainment under
the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who unified Japan following a period of
civil war (1477-1573). With the Meiji restoration of 1867, however, noh
lost the patronage of the shogunate, whereupon the noh troupes built
stages for public performance in Tokyo and Kyoto. Noh has maintained
its traditional style and high-cultural appeal as a theatrical form to the pre
sent day.3
168 Minako Okamuro
Yeats encountered noh in 1913 through Ezra Pound who was editing
Ernest Fenollosa's translations of noh plays. With its symbolism, highly
stylised action, masks, choruses, and musicians, noh proved to be over
whelming for Yeats. In 1916, he helped Pound publish a volume of four
plays translated by Fenollosa through the Cuala Press, even writing an
introduction for the book. In his own work, as R. F. Foster observes,
Yeats "consciously followed the main lines of the classical Noh play in At
the Hawk's Well, but only in so far as it fitted the format he had already
grasped" (2003, 35). According to Worth, "[Yeats's] dance plays drew
inspiration from what he knew of Noh but the inspiration did not send him
in a totally new direction. He had been experimenting with total theatre
techniques for a drama with a supernatural dimension since he used music
and a spell-binding dance in The Land of Heart's Desire in 1894 and
Where There Is Nothing in 1904" (1990, 147-48). These qualifications
notwithstanding, noh was of essential interest to Yeats because of its
characteristic dramatisation of the evocation of ghosts and spirits. As Ta
kahashi points out, "Noh revealed to him [Yeats] with a coup what had
been lacking: A GHOST! - certainly the foremost item in the list of the
invisible and intangible anathematised by the Wise Man [in The Hour
Glass}" (112).
As Sekine shows, Zeami established mugen noh, or dream noh, "to
bridge the time gap between two scenes of a play" (164). In mugen noh,
the leading role of the play is the shite, the spirit of an ordinary person
such as a rural woman or a fisherman, who appears to a waki, a living per
son - a travelling monk, for instance - who serves as the shite's foil. The
shite tells the waki about a historical event that occurred at the place of
their meeting. With the shamanistic power of Buddhist monks, shite char
acters reveal their real natures as ghosts who, in their former lives, were
the heroes or heroines of the events they recount.4 The shite, or ghostly
character, gradually disappears when the waki wakes up, and is therefore
often considered a dream of the waki. For Yeats, nevertheless, such noh
plays concerned "the meeting with ghost, god or goddess at some lonely
place or much-legended tomb" (qtd. in Worth 1990, 148). Worth therefore
connects noh, through Yeats, with Beckett's "theatre of evocation" (150),
detecting "the same profound sense of grief and a similar "mysterious
comfort" in Ohio Impromptu as in the noh play Sumidagawa, in which a
mother praying by her young son's grave is allowed a moment of com
munion with his spirit (150). Although Worth does not refer to ...but the
clouds... in this connection, what Ml begs for is the apparition of the

woman: a moment of communion with her spirit.
Why, then, does M direct and replay the moment? The Yeatsian idea
of "dreaming back" is relevant in considering this question, as Yeats may
be understood to have adapted the style of noh in order to represent it. In
book 3 of A Vision, itself a work of occult philosophy, Yeats explains
dreaming back as follows:
In the Dreaming back, the Spirit is compelled to live over and over
again the events that had most moved it; there can be nothing new,
but the old events stand forth in a light which is dim or bright ac
cording to the intensity of the passion that accompanied them. They
occur in the order of their intensity or luminosity, the more intense
first, and the painful are commonly the more intense, and repeat
themselves again and again.
(1992, 226; emphasis in the original)
The dreaming back of the crucial scenes of a lifetime elides the gap be
tween the dead and the living, the past and the present. Worth observes,
"The boundary between the two states is dissolved in Noh without awk
wardness" (1990, 150). In the plays in which Yeats attempted to dramatise
the idea of dreaming back through concrete images of the past and the
dead, the representation of ghosts on stage was a central concern. The
ghostly Japanese noh theatre, with its style of and approach to symbolic
scenery, masks, dance, and chorus, must have resonated strongly for
Yeats, who points out in the same part of book 3 of A Vision, "One thinks
of those apparitions haunting the places where they have lived that fill the
literature of all countries and are the theme of the Japanese N drama"
(227).
Yeats further develops the idea of apparitions haunting the places in
which they lived in his seance play The Words upon the Window-Pane. In
this play, Mrs. Henderson, the medium, is possessed by the spirits of her
control Lulu, Jonathan Swift, and Swift's lover Vanessa, who in the after
life continues to suffer the emotional pain of her triangular love affair
with Swift and Swift's other lover Stella in the house that "in the early
part of the eighteenth century belonged to friends of Jonathan Swift, or
rather of Stella" (1933, 599). The influence of noh upon the play is not
obvious, but Takahashi regards the play as demonstrating even more in
teresting assimilations of what Yeats had learned from noh than At the
170 Minako Okamuro
Hawk's Well and The Dreaming of the Bones, which Yeats wrote under
the direct influence of noh. Furthermore, Takahashi observes "some radi
cal divergences from the norms of Noh drama," which include "the physi
cal absence of the protagonists which sets off their vocal presence all the
more powerfully," "the fierce debate which takes place between the two
ghosts," and "the utter un-selfconsciousness of the medium in regard to
the ghosts" (173). Worth points out the similarity between the dramatic
effect of the medium in The Words upon the Window-Pane mouthing
words that are not her own, and W's lips moving inaudibly to Yeats's
words in ...but the clouds.... In Worth's view, Beckett - like Yeats -
achieves the effect of a medium channelling a spirit by the splitting up of
narrative voice, figures on the screen, and W's lips forming the words
(1999, 110).
Yeats indicates his recognition of the similarity of seances and noh in
his essay "Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places," written in
1914, in which he develops his idea of seance and refers directly to noh.
After explaining the story of a noh play about a ghost couple who marries
after death, he says, "It is not uncommon for a ghost, 'a control' as we
say, to come to a medium to discover some old link to fit into a new
chain" (71-72). The terms 'control' and 'medium' show that Yeats identi
fies the ghost play as a kind of seance. Pound, too, points out the connec
tion between the seance and noh theatre in his foreword to the noh play
Tsunemasa, stating that the tension of the play is "a psychological tension,
the tension of the seance. [...] The spirit is invoked and appears" (Pound
and Fenollosa, 54).
Pound observes further parallels between noh and Western spiritual
ist doctrines, as reflected in the following direction to the reader in his
foreword to Tsunemasa: "Note the spirit's uncertainty as to his own suc
cess in appearing. The priest wonders if he really saw anything. The spirit
affirms that 'The body was there if you saw it'" (Pound and Fenollosa,
54). Similarly, M in ...but the clouds... cannot rid himself of the suspicion
that the woman's appearances, when they do occur, are merely his own
reveries. Unable to distinguish his own imaginings from what he has
really seen, M rephrases "When I thought of her" as "When she ap
peared." M longs earnestly and sincerely for the image of the lost woman
to appear from without - or at least, M longs to 'see' her without.
In 1912, a year before he encountered noh, Yeats attended a series of
seances in London with an American medium, Etta Wriedt, who put Yeats
in touch with a 'control-spirit' called Leo-Africanus. At Leo's own re
quest, Yeats wrote the spirit a letter expressing skepticism regarding the
seances. Leo responded to Yeats with a twenty-six page manuscript in
which he declared himself to be Yeats's "opposite" or "antithesis." Arnold
Goldman, who regards the manuscript as a work of fiction by Yeats, of
fers the following explanation of Yeats's engagement with Leo:
Concerned for some years that his dramatis personae might only be
fragments of himself, that the conflicts he posited in drama and verse
were only intra-psychic shadow-boxing - "rhetoric" not "reality" in
another of his formulations - Yeats was perhaps hoping that spiritu
alism would put him in touch with something outside himself, reduce
the merely egocentric. If Leo, hereafter abandoned, was not to pro
vide that guarantee, he was a step in the invention of a larger sys
tematization of masks, opposites and antitheses, of the anti-self, and
of subjective and objective personalities, all meant in part to rescue
the poet from mere subjectivity and from the mere romantic explora
tion of self.
(120-21)
Goldman's argument concerning the meaning of the seance for Yeats is

compelling. As Robert Langbaum observes, "Yeats feels his imagination
to be the vehicle for another's memory" (173). In the Yeatsian conception,
our unconscious life is external, in that the dead work out their destinies
through us; our spontaneous thoughts are not really our own.5 This under
standing of an ambiguous border between self and non-self applies not
only to the shite of noh as a rural person who is the incarnation of a spirit,
but to a medium in a seance who speaks with someone else's voice, and to
M in ...but the clouds... who cannot distinguish within from without.
Beckett and Noh: Ghosts in Purgatory

In one of his descriptions of noh, Yeats refers to the suffering of ghosts in
purgatory: "At the climax instead of the disordered passion of nature there
is a dance, a series of positions and movements which may represent a
battle, or a marriage, or the pain of a ghost in the Buddhist purgatory"
(qtd. in Pound and Fenollosa, 158; emphasis added). What Yeats meant
by "the Buddhist purgatory" is not completely clear, but the notion may
relate to the Buddhist conception of chuu-u, the state of intermediate exis
tence between death (si-u) and rebirth (shou-u). Following death, the soul
in chuu-u passes through ten courts over a period of forty-nine days, un
172 Minako Okamuro
dergoing judgment, punishment, and cleansing. In Japan, Buddhist, monks

conduct ceremonies on the forty-ninth day after a death for the repose of
the soul of the deceased, praying for its absolution from sins committed
during life. Yeats may have recognized the resemblance between chuu-u
and the Christian or Dantesque purgatory. In any case, he found the
"Buddhist purgatory" an attractive concept in adapting the essence of noh
in his plays.
In Purgatory, another ghost play by Yeats, the protagonist, called
Old Man, sees his father's ghost in a window in the ruins of his mother's
house, where he once lived. Old Man's father had wasted his mother's
life, so Old Man had killed his father with a knife. Old Man then killed his
own son with the same knife in order to put an end to the transmission of
the family's evil genetic line. The ghost of his father that soon returns is
"[B]ut the impression upon [Old Man's] mother's mind; Being dead she is
alone in her remorse" (1952, 688). His mother is trapped in the dreaming
back of her husband in purgatory, a state from which neither can escape.
M, in ...but the clouds..., who tells repeatedly of imploring the
woman to appear, can be taken to be or to have been dreaming back in a
purgatorial state. According to A Vision, this state is "the period between
death and birth" (223), and it perhaps involves, in the words of Old Man
in Purgatory, the need to "Appease/The misery of the living and the re
morse of the dead" (1952, 689). M's description of the woman, "With
those unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at me" (emphasis
added), implies that the woman is dead, that M is dead, or that both are
dead. Beckett may be quoting from "The Tower," a poem that evokes the
dead, in order to signal the ghostliness that he is evoking. Alternatively, M
could be considered to be sleeping, or at least to be half asleep, and hence,
Ml is assumed to be a dreamed image. M's repeated attempts to repro
duce Mi's ritual may thus be understood, in view of Yeats, as a dreaming
back to the crucial moment of the ghostly woman's appearance.
As mentioned above, Worth describes the theatre of Beckett, Yeats,
and noh, as a "theatre of evocation" (1990, 150). She writes, "[t]he char
acteristic process is movement towards revelation of some truth, some
'shape' of things that has hitherto been concealed or cloudy" (150). In
considering Beckett's and Yeats's respective relationships to noh, Taka
hashi argues that "the dramatic conflict which was much in evidence in
Yeats is so completely discarded that Beckett's theatre comes to look even
closer to Noh than Yeats's did" (174). Takahashi explains that the
"stranger from another world whom we call a ghost becomes more 'inter
nalized' in these [Beckett's later] plays, recedes further into the protago
nist's own mind, until it becomes almost synonymous with memory or
consciousness itself (174). At the same time, Takahashi notes a major
difference between Zeami's and Beckett's dramaturgy. Whereas the main
protagonist in mugen noh is a ghost that reenacts its past in the presence
of a priest, seeking absolution and release, Beckett's protagonists are of
ten old men or women who are in need of release, affirmation, or consola
tion from ghostly voices that tell them the stories of their own lives.
Beckett effectively switches the focus from the dreamed ghost to the
dreamer.
In Krapp's Last Tape, for example, the protagonist and sole charac
ter Krapp listens to his own recorded voice from thirty years earlier. Ta
kahashi observes that in this play, "Yeats' 'dreaming back' is replaced by
Krapp's re-play of the tapes" (175). Here Krapp's past self emerging from
the tape recorder corresponds to the ghost; the past self alienates the pre
sent self by exposing the discrepancy between the two. Krapp is never
able to reconcile his present and past selves. Takahashi takes a similar
approach in analysing a number of Beckett plays, and concludes that
Beckett shared neither Zeami's faith in the afterlife nor Yeats's in the oc
cult: "All that Beckett has in common with Zeami and Yeats seems to be a
faith in the sheer indestructible persistence of consciousness" (175). I
agree that Beckett shared Zeami's and Yeats's faith in the "persistence of
consciousness," but Beckett seems also to have possessed at least a deep
interest in the occult. While it may be difficult to directly connect
Beckett's later plays with noh theatre, positing the seance as a dreaming
back, as Yeats did, makes clear the validity of Takahashi's argument that
"[in Embers] Henry does communicate, to a certain degree, with the voice
of his former wife, Ada, whom he has evoked with his own will-power"
(174). This approach also affords insight into Not 7, in which the protago
nist in Mouth's story is dead and the play has a special presence on-stage
as a 'listener' for the ghost, a listener who, as Takahashi argues, "looks
like a compassionate confessor somewhat resembling the priest in Noh"
(174).
Half Sleep and Evocation

Although the image of the woman in ...but the clouds... may be no more
than a hallucination in the mind of MTV, her face appears without M's
evocation at the end of the play. Why does she thus finally appear?
174 Minako Okamuro
M hopes that, through repetition that is reminiscent of dreaming

back, the moment may come when he feels the appearance of the woman
to be real, perhaps because the repetition will have made him so "wea
ried" - as he used to feel in his sanctum in "the dead of night" - that he
loses control of reason and consciousness and enters a dream-like state.
Ml presumably changes his daytime coat and hat to a night-time robe and
skullcap in order to dream back in his sanctum. The wardrobe change also
suggests an escape from daytime habit.6
This brings to mind a line of discussion in Beckett's Proust that re
flects the influence of Henri Bergson. As Lydia Rainford argues in her
Bergsonian reading of ...but the clouds..., "The deliberate, 'knowing'
memory persistently fails to recall what it seeks, and the image only
comes as an involuntary or spontaneous memory, full of affect but with
out comprehension or true presence" (185). Rainford points out the simi
larity of M's predicament to the one Beckett describes in Proust, observ
ing that in both, "habit" destroys the "miraculous relief and clarity" of
spontaneously remembered visions even as they are recalled, such that
"no effort of deliberate rememoration can impart or restore them" (185).
Graley Herren agrees with Rainford that the teleplay is influenced by
Bergson's view of memory, arguing, "M's unsuccessful conjurations of W
represent the habitual shortcomings of memory" (102). Herren regards M
as "a victim of his own good memory," because "[h]e has won his lost
Woman through hard-earned habit, only to lose everything he once loved
about her" (103). In Herren's understanding, "the dependability of the
retrieval routine comes at the expense of the image he retrieves, which is
deaf, dumb, and blind - a travesty of the memory he is trying to recover"
(103).
Such Bergsonian and Proustian readings of ... but the clouds ... are
persuasive, but Yeats's influence on the teleplay reveals a further dimen
sion. In "The Soul in Judgement," in book 3 of A Vision, Yeats identifies
the "separated spirit," or "phantom," with the "dream of the night" (221).
In Yeats's description, phantasmagoric materialisations are "those finely
articulated scenes and patterns that come out of the dark, seemingly com
pleted in the winking of an eye, as we are lying half asleep"; they are "all
those elaborate images that drift in moments of inspiration or evocation
before the mind's eye" (1959, 350). For Yeats, the state of being "half
asleep" is a momentous one, as it is the most favourable time for dream
ing. In At the Hawk's Well (1917), a play strongly influenced by noh, the
musicians sing, "I call to the eye of the mind," a line Winnie quotes in
Beckett's Happy Day. In Yeats's play, water miraculously flows from an

otherwise dry well only when the characters Old Man and Cuchulain are
lulled to sleep by the dance of the hawk, the guardian of the well. In re
sponse to Old Man's question to the Musicians, "Why don't you speak to
me?"(1952, 210), Cuchulain says to Old Man, "Then Speak to Me" (211).
M, in ...but the clouds..., who similarly calls W to the eye of his mind -
"No sound, a begging of the mind," he specifies at one point - also pleads,
"Speak to me," when the woman appears, her lips moving with her inau
dible quote from "The Tower."7 Yeats related the state of half sleep to
which he attached such importance to noh. In discussing a mugen noh
play in "Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places," Yeats writes,
"We neither wake nor sleep and passing our nights in sorrow, which is in
the end of vision [...]. This thinking in sleep for some one who has no
thought for you, is it more than a dream?" (70). To the extent that this un
derstanding informed ...but the clouds..., it is significant that the woman
only appears when M is in a dream-like state and when Ml must himself
be exhausted, and hence, free of the control of his own consciousness in
"the dead of night." Yet in this state he must convince himself that she
really appeared.
For Beckett as a writer, it must have been crucial to be free from rea
son and consciousness and, at the same time, to be awake enough to per
ceive with the mind's eye what comes from the profound regions of the
unconscious. Noh must have attracted him, as it did Yeats, because it is
the art of waiting in a dream-like state for someone to arrive.
Notes
1. See Toida, 23.
2. Noh dramas fall into two structurally distinct categories: mugen noh and
genzai noh. Genzai noh (present-time noh) is a more realistic form about living
human beings.
3. For much of this history of noh, I rely on Sekine and Murray.
4. See Sekine, 167-69, and http://www.the-noh.com/en/world/forms.html.
5. See Okamuro, 264.
176 Minako Okamuro
6. Ruby Cohn writes of Ml, "His invariant routine and costume changes seem
to me an unintentional Bergsonian comedy" (343).
7. As Brater points out, this also echoes the following dialogue in Yeats's se
ance play, The Words upon the Window-Pane in this regard: "Dr. Trench: I
thought she was speaking. / Mrs. Mallet: I saw her lips move" (Yeats 1952, 611
12, qtd. in Brater 1987, 102). Brater also mentions Horatio's "Speak to me" in
Hamlet 1.2, and "Speak to me" in T. S. Eliot's "A Game of Chess" in The Waste
Land (Brater 1987, 101; 2004, 38).
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London:
Calder, 1999).
-, The Grove Centenary Edition, vol. 3: Dramatic Works, ed. Paul Auster (New
York: Grove, 2006).
-, ...but the clouds..., in Beckett 2006, vol. 3: Dramatic Works, 443-49.
Brater, Enoch, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theatre (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1987).
-, "Intertextuality," in Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois
Oppenheim (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004), 30-44.
Cohn, Ruby, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005).
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Yeats, Beckett and Noh

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BECKETT, YEATS, AND NOH: "...but the clouds...

" as Theatre of Evocation

In ...but the clouds..., the ritualistic movements of Ml culminate in his conjuring

kagami no ma (mirror room); Ml enters the closet to "assume" his robe

Yeats and Noh: Dreaming Back and Seance

clouds... in this connection, what Ml begs for is the apparition of the

Goldman's argument concerning the meaning of the seance for Yeats is

Beckett and Noh: Ghosts in Purgatory

dergoing judgment, punishment, and cleansing. In Japan, Buddhist, monks

Half Sleep and Evocation

M hopes that, through repetition that is reminiscent of dreaming

Beckett's Happy Day. In Yeats's play, water miraculously flows from an

1. See Toida, 23.

3. For much of this history of noh, I rely on Sekine and Murray.

4. See Sekine, 167-69, and http://www.the-noh.com/en/world/forms.html.

5. See Okamuro, 264.

Sekine, Masaru, and Christopher Murray, eds., Yeats andNoh: A Comparative

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