1 Yeats, W. B., “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” [1915], in Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, 1968), 221–37, at 221Google Scholar.

2 Yeats published Pound's translations as Certain Noble Plays of Japan through his sister's Cuala Press (Churchtown, Dundrum, 1916) in Ireland. The plays saw wider circulation (without Yeats's introduction) as Fenollosa, Ernest and Pound, Ezra, “Noh,” or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan (London: Macmillan, 1916)Google Scholar. The plays finally were reunited with Yeats's introduction in Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (New York: New Directions, 1959).

3 Peter Kenny, comp., “Manuscript Material from the Library of W. B. Yeats and George Yeats” (Collection List No. 96), National Library of Ireland, Dublin. Folder MS 40,585 includes more postcards, MS 40,586 more photographs. A few captions provide some basic context. The noh play Ataka and the related kabuki adaptation Kanjinchō are both photographically represented; among the kabuki actors pictured are Matsumoto Kōshirō VII and Nakamura Ganjirō I.

4 Chekhov was important for modern Japanese theatre, with translations of his plays as early as 1903 and performances starting in 1909. See Nagata, Yasushi, “The Japanization of Chekhov: Contemporary Japanese Adaptation of Three Sisters,” in Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations, ed. Clayton, J. Douglas and Meerzon, Yana (New York: Routledge, 2013), 261–73Google Scholar.

5 Latrell, Craig, “After Appropriation,” The Drama Review 44.4 (2000): 44–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Euro-American critics’ lament about the “pillaging” of non-Western forms (44), Latrell shows, comes with a side-effect condescension toward the traditions they (or we) try to defend. In seeking to protect the other, that is, scholars fix those traditions as static and historical, casting their practitioners as guardians of a legacy. Latrell points out that “we deny to other cultures the same sophistication and multiplicity of response to ‘foreign’ influences that we grant to ourselves” (45). The broad-strokes assumption that these transactions are unidirectional, imperial, and exploitative is also ill-fitting for the case of Yeats in the 1910s, as he was a colonial subject adapting the art of imperial Japan.

6 Yoko Chiba, “W. B. Yeats and Noh: From Japonisme to Zen,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Toronto, 1988); Yamauchi, Shotaro, “Yeats and Hōjin Yano: Yeats's Japan, Yano's Japan,” Journal of Irish Studies 33 (2018): 104–10Google Scholar.

7 Yeats, Four Plays for Dancers (London: Macmillan, 1921), 3.

8 Katherine Biers and Sharon Marcus's special issue on “World Literature and Global Performance” (Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 41.2 [2014]) charts this development in the late nineteenth century, an account updated for the twentieth in “Modernism on the World Stage,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4.3 (2019), ed. Rebecca Kastleman, Kevin Riordan, and Claire Warden.

9 Buse, Peter, “Stage Remains: Theatre Criticism and the Photographic Archive,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 12.1 (1997): 77–96, at 77Google Scholar.

10 Yeats, “At Stratford-on-Avon,” Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, 1968), 96–110, at 99.

11 Ibid., 97.

12 Ibid., 99.

13 Ibid., 100.

14 Quoted in Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England ([1983] Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 42.

15 In 1977, Bonnie Marranca gathered contemporary American avant-garde theatre—particularly the work of Robert Wilson, Lee Breuer, and Richard Foreman—under the banner of “the theatre of images.” Bonnie Marranca, ed., The Theatre of Images (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977).

16 Mayer, David, “‘Quote the Words to Prompt the Attitudes’: The Victorian Performer, the Photographer, and the Photograph,” Theatre Survey 43.2 (2002): 223–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mayer provides crucial historical guidance for reading images of the theatrical past, including the fact that prior to the twentieth century photographs would have been staged in studios rather than theatres (227).

17 Brook, Peter, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 136Google Scholar. David Wiles suggests that a given play can be condensed into such a silhouette, “this shape will be the essence of what it has to say.” See Wiles, “Seeing Is Believing: The Historian's Use of Images,” in Representing the Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010), 215–39, at 235.

18 There is a 1997 special issue of Theatre Research International on “Theatre Iconography” (22.3; ed. Robert L. Erenstein) and a 2017 special issue of Theatre Journal on “Theatre, Performance, and Visual Images” (69.4; ed. Joanne Tompkins).

19 Anderson, Joel, Theatre & Photography (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, rev. 2d ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996), 347.

21 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 231.

22 J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, vol. 2: Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 62.

23 Yeats, The Shadowy Waters, in The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, new ed., With Five Additional Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 95–110, at 99.

24 Ibid., 107.

25 Jeffares, A. Norman and Knowland, A. S., A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 58–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 425.

27 Yeats, Four Plays, 4, 29.

28 Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 135–68, at 164. Beckett famously praised Yeats's plays while slighting Shaw's, remarking “that he would give the ‘whole unupsettable applecart’ of George Bernard Shaw's dramatic canon ‘for a sup of the Hawk's Well’”; see Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 382.

29 Yeats, Collected Plays, 438–9.

30 Quoted in David Ewick, “Strange Attractors: Ezra Pound and the Invention of Japan, II.” 英米文学評論 Essays and Studies in British and American Literature 64 (2018), 1–40, at 5–6; cf. Ezra Pound, “Affirmations VI: The ‘Image’ and the Japanese Classical Stage,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 53.1 (1991): 17–23, at 17.

31 James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats & Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 202.

32 F. T. Marinetti, “The Joy of Mechanical Force,” in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds on Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 431–5, at 431.

33 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 221.

34 Carrie J. Preston, “Introduction: Modernism and Dance,” Modernist Cultures 9.1 (2014): 1–6, at 1.

35 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 221.

36 Emily Apter, “Acting Out Orientalism: Sapphic Theatricality in Turn-of-the-Century Paris,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 15–34, at 24.

37 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 231.

38 Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.

39 Ibid., 105.

40 Ibid., 138.

41 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 231.

42 Wayne Chapman, “The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-Title Catalog” (2006), https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cudp_bibliography/1/, accessed 24 June 2021. Yeats had comparatively little material on Japanese theatre in his private collection but volumes on other art forms. Works published prior to 1915—early enough for Yeats to consult them for the Plays for Dancers—include a catalog of ceramics, Tales of Old Japan, The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest, and several of Yone Noguchi's books.

43 Shotaro Oshima, “An Interview with W. B. Yeats,” in W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols., ed. E. H. Mikhail (London: Macmillan, 1977), 2: 233–8, at 234.

44 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 226.

45 Seán Golden, “Introduction,” in Yeats and Asia: Overviews and Case Studies, ed. Seán Golden (Cork: Cork University Press, 2020), 1–18, at 1.

46 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 225.

47 Ibid., 226–7.

48 Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 197; David Ewick, “W. B. Yeats, Certain Noble Plays, and Japan,” in Japonisme, Orientalism, Modernism: A Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse of the Early 20th Century (2003), http://themargins.net/bib/B/BL/00blintro.html, accessed 29 April 2021.

49 Chiba, “W. B. Yeats and Noh,” xxxi.

50 Fenollosa and Pound, “Noh,” or Accomplishment, 5. (The cover of the [retitled] Dover reprint edition features a kabuki print, in another instance of the general confusion: Fenollosa and Pound, The Noh Theatre of Japan [New York: Dover, 2003]).

51 Ibid.

52 Chiba, “W. B. Yeats and Noh,” 246.

53 Ibid., 73, 111, 244.

54 Ibid., 149. In a more speculative essay Monika Fludernik shows how Yeats's early plays actually “were much closer to the Kabuki theatre than to classical Nô,” despite his having had little exposure to them at the time. See Fludernik, “Ichinotani Futaba Gun'ki: A Kabuki Parallel to On Baile's Strand,” The Harp 6 (1991): 6–26, at 8.

55 Yeats, “The Theater of Beauty,” Harper's Weekly 55 (11 November 1911), 11.

56 Martin Puchner, “Goethe, Marx, Ibsen and the Creation of a World Literature,” Nordlit, no. 34 (2015): 1–14.

57 Olga Taxidou, Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 128.

58 Yeats, Four Plays, 3.

59 Siyuan Liu, “Adaptation as Appropriation: Staging Western Drama in the First Western-Style Theatres in Japan and China,” Theatre Journal 59.3 (2007): 411–29, at 415.

60 Ibid., 416.

61 Katherine Biers and Sharon Marcus, “Introduction: World Literature and Global Performance,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 41.2 (2014): 1–12, at 7.

62 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 53, 64.

63 Carrie J. Preston, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 104.

64 Chiba, “W. B. Yeats and Noh,” 63.

65 Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 63–5. Arrowsmith more broadly stresses that Europeans were latecomers in adapting Asian works, with artists in China, Korea, and Japan looking to Europe “since the beginning of the nineteenth century” (Modernism and the Museum, 3).

66 Michelle Ying Ling Huang, “The Influence of Japanese Expertise on the British Reception of Chinese Painting,” in Beyond Boundaries: East and West Cross-Cultural Encounters, ed. Michelle Ying Ling Huang (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), 88–111.

67 Laurence Senelick, “Early Photographic Attempts to Record Performance Sequence,” Theatre Research International 22.3 (1997): 255–64, at 255.

68 Yeats, “An Introduction to My Plays,” Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, 1968), 527–30, at 528.

69 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 230–1.

70 Ibid., 233.

71 Ibid., 233–4.

72 Ibid., 235.

73 August Strindberg, “Miss Julie” and Other Plays, trans. Michael Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 56.

74 Zola quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, rev. and enlarged ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 94.

75 Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, & Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 151.

76 Min Tian, The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre: The Displaced Mirror (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 78, 81.

77 Sylvia C. Ellis, The Plays of W. B. Yeats: Yeats and the Dancer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 86.

78 Preston, Learning to Kneel, 114.

79 Yeats, “Certain Noble Plays,” 222.

80 Penny Farfan, “‘The Picture Postcard is a sign of the times’: Theatre Postcards and Modernism,” Theatre History Studies 32 (2012): 93–119; Sharon Marcus, “The Theatrical Scrapbook,” Theatre Survey 54.2 (2013): 283–307.

81 Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 173.

82 Raju Thakrar, “Playing the ‘Hooligan’: Re-Calling Kabuki's Earthy Roots,” Japan Times, 17 June 2007, www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/06/17/general/playing-the-hooligan/#.WpUbUmaB27o, accessed 24 June 2021.