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Since Yeats' infamous rejection of The Silver Tassie on behalf of the Abbey's board of directors in 1928, it has become common critical practice to address the play in the terms first set by Yeats, either to endorse Yeats' complaint with the play's aberrant discontinuity, or to disclaim it by pointing out elements of thematic and even formal continuity between the expressionistic second Act and the allegedly naturalistic other three. It is implicitly assumed that structural discontinuity is a fault, of which the play is either found guilty or exonerated.1 2 It is worth briefly quoting Yeats' letter of rejection:
... you are not interested in the great war; you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions. You illustrate those opinions by a series of almost unrelated scenes, as you might in a leading article; there is no dominating character, no dominating action, neither psychological unity nor unity of action; and your great power of the past has been the creation of some unique character who dominated all about him and was himself a main impulse in some action that filled the play from beginning to end.2
As Christopher Murray has remarked, "This is a description of Aristotelian drama complete with Aristotelian hero".3 It implicitly consents to Aristotle's suggestion that a tragedy should be organized as harmoniously and coherently as a "beautiful animal",4 a template which continues to frame most critical responses to The Silver Tassie and to individual productions of the play. Thus both Patrick Mason's 1990 Abbey production and Garry Hynes' 2010 Druid production were either acclaimed for introducing elements of continuity between the four Acts (usually by stressing the expressionistic potential of Acts I, III and IV) or blamed for failing to cover up entirely the play's fragmentary, discontinuous nature. In what follows, I will argue that structural and formal discontinuity is in fact essential to the play's aesthetic project, and suggest that it owes less to Aristotelian dramaturgy than to the tradition of the Passion play to which it bears an ambiguous relationship.
The pattern of the Passion play is used ironically in The Silver Tassie and exposed as an ideological fallacy. While the Passion story, relying as it does on the...