The King’s Threshold, Calvary, The Death of Cuchulain: Yeats’s Passion Plays

For those playwrights and theatre practitioners who challenged the primacy of realism on the stage at the turn of the twentieth century, the dramatic treatment of ghosts often became the test of a new conception of theatre which set itself the task of making the invisible visible. Maeterlinck strove to display ‘immense invisible and fateful powers’ in his plays, and experimented with marionettes to create a theatre in which ‘it seems that the dead are talking to us […] in august voices’. Edwa..