The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays, by
William B. Yeats and Lady Gregory

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Title: The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays

Author: William B. Yeats
Lady Gregory

Release Date: July 29, 2008 [EBook #26144]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS

AND OTHER PLAYS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS

AND OTHER PLAYS

BY

WILLIAM B. YEATS

AND

LADY GREGORY

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1908

_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1908,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

New edition. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1908.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE

About seven years ago I began to dictate the first of these Plays to
Lady Gregory. My eyesight had become so bad that I feared I could
henceforth write nothing with my own hands but verses, which, as
Theophile Gautier has said, can be written with a burnt match. Our
Irish Dramatic movement was just passing out of the hands of English
Actors, hired because we knew of no Irish ones, and our little troop of
Irish amateurs--as they were at the time--could not have too many
Plays, for they would come to nothing without continued playing.
Besides, it was exciting to discover, after the unpopularity of blank
verse, what one could do with three Plays written in prose and founded
on three public interests deliberately chosen,--religion, humour,
patriotism. I planned in those days to establish a dramatic movement
upon the popular passions, as the ritual of religion is established in
the emotions that surround birth and death and marriage, and it was
only the coming of the