war, politics, and disappearing poetry Thinking of characters rather than actors, we have to recognize that again
andagain in Shakespeare iambic pentameter lines are left incomplete as words
give way to weeping. Weeping is often explicitly discussed—for example, when
Lear, reconciled with his daughter, asks Cordelia ‘Be your tears wet?’^41 All the
Shakespearean examples Yeats cites weep. In picking his poetic quarrel with those
‘hysterical women’, Yeats perhaps had the example of Lear pre-eminently in mind:
O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below.^42But to keep Lear on side, Yeats had not merely to keep hysteria, ‘the Mother’, down,
as Lear himself attempts—less than successfully—to do here; Yeats also had to
make the rest of the play disappear from readers’ minds, for throughoutKing Lear
the King is repeatedly in tears and finds himself ‘bound|Upon a wheel of fire that
mine own tears|Do scald like molten lead’.^43
In Yeats’s poem, there is Hamlet, there is Lear, there is Ophelia, there is Cordelia.
But where is the great soldier, Caius Martius, whose eyes, at the climax of his play,
are made ‘to sweat compassion’?^44 Where, above all, isMacbeth,themanliestand
bloodiest of plays, the play much admired by Nietzsche, whose notion of tragic joy
underlies Yeats’s poem, the Nietzsche who had an especial admiration forMacbeth?
Thus Nietzsche writes inDaybreak:
Whoever thinks that Shakespeare’s theatre has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth
irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks
Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds
this its image withjoy; and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest
spice in the hot draught of this joy. Can the poet himself have felt otherwise?...This would
be to stand the poets on their head: they, and especially Shakespeare, are enamoured of the
passions as such and not least of theirdeath-welcomingmoods—those moods in which the
heart adheres to life no more firmly than does a drop of water to a glass.^45
Yet perhaps Yeats must excludeMacbethfrom his catalogue of Shakespearean tragic
heroes because that play offers the most eloquent refutation of the Yeatsian posture.
Told of the murder of his wife and children, Macduff is counselled by Malcolm to
‘Dispute it like a man’. Macduff’s reply, in its humane simplicity, is unanswerable:
‘I shall do so;|But I must also feel it as a man.’^46
(^41) Shakespeare,King Lear, iv. vii. 71. (^42) Ibid. ii. ii. 249–51. (^43) Ibid. iv. vii. 46–8.
(^44) Shakespeare,Coriolanus, v. iii. 200.
(^45) Friedrich Nietzsche,Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality,trans.R.J.Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 140; italics original. For more general views of
Nietzsche’s influence on Yeats, see Erich Heller, ‘Yeats and Nietzsche: Reflections on a Poet’s Marginal
Notes’, inThe Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought, 4th edn. (London:
Bowes and Bowes, 1975), 329–47; and Otto Bohlmann,Yeats and Nietzsche: An Exploration of Major
Nietzschean Echoes in the Writings of William Butler Yeats 46 (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Shakespeare,Macbeth, iv. iii. 219–21.