Shakespeare in Purgatory: ‘A Scene of Tragic Intensity’

I When W. B. Yeats came to write Purgatory, the last of his plays to be staged during his lifetime, at the Abbey Theatre Festival on 10 August 1938, he drew on a lifetime of seeing and thinking about the work of other dramatists, both Irish and European. Traces of many earlier works can be found in the play. Michael McAteer has argued, for example, that Purgatory was indebted in several respects to the Expressionist theatre of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. To scholars of Irish drama, meanwhi..