Playing with Voices and with Doubles in Two of Yeats’s Plays: The Words upon the Window-pane and A Full Moon in March

Despite the apparent allegiance of Yeats’s drama to classical rules, one of its key features, even from his early plays, lies in debunking one of the most standard of elements of mainstream drama in the western tradition: the notion of character. When the poet declares in Per Amica Silentia Lunae that ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (Myth 331; CW5 8) the poet expresses an inner duality that has been energizing his thought and his p..