"He has chosen death: Refusing to eat or drink, that he may bring Disgrace upon me; for there is a custom, An old and foolish custom, that if a man Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve Upon another's threshold till he die, The common people, for all time to come, Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold, Even though it be the King's." from The King's Threshold The King's Threshold was first performed in Dublin by the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903 and first published in New York in 1904. The Cornell Yeats edition of this play about a bard's hunger strike includes the preliminary notes and first prose drafts dictated by Yeats to his patron and collaborator, Lady Gregory, in March and April 1903. As well as providing an outline of the play, these preliminary notes identify contemporary persons on whom some of the characters were based. Other features of this edition of The King's Threshold include Yeats' first blank verse drafts, heavily revised and corrected typescripts and galley proofs, and notes for the changes made between 1904 and 1906. A major revision added a tragic ending to the version published in 1922, and this ending has remained in place ever since. Uniquely, this edition presents all four versions of the play, spanning thirty years of Yeats' efforts to perfect it. Declan Kiely presents the biographical and historical context of the play's genesis and Yeats' revisions, and gives accounts of several productions and revivals of the play. The Introduction also explores the relationship between theatrical production and textual revision."
Author
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. —from Wikipedia
