W. B. Yeats, The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March, Manuscript Materials, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 448 pp.

Richard Cave has a tangled story to tell in presenting the manuscript mate-rials for these two interlocked plays, and he tells it with exemplary clarity and scrupulous precision. From 1927, Yeats’s working relationship with Ninette de Valois and the Abbey School of Ballet that she led had made possible new productions of his dance plays: The Only Jealousy of Emer (recast as Fighting the Waves), The Dreaming of the Bones and At the Hawk’s Well. When de Valois gave notice in 1934 that she would..