W. B. Yeats, At The Hawk’s Well and The Cat and the Moon: Manuscript Materials, ed. by Andrew Parkin (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), lxiv + 267 pp.

Given how remarkably innovative was the dramaturgical transformation that came over Yeats’s playwriting with the composition of At the Hawk’s Well, it is disappointing to discover that little remains from the earliest stages of the play’s composition. The first extant manuscripts show the songs already taking a decisive shape in Yeats’s imagination: the tone, aim and to some degree even the content is immediately recognisable and some phrases were to persist with little change through into th..