In Boston, 1911, W.B. Yeats gave a lecture on “The Theatre of Beauty,” remarking on the Japanese symbolic drama: “Being a writer of poetic drama, and of tragic drama, desiring always pattern and convention, I would like to keep to suggestion, to symbolism, to pattern like the Japanese.” Later, he discovered Noh theatre through his friend and admirer, Ezra Pound, and the notes of the Harvard graduate and Imperial Commissioner of Fine Arts in Japan, Ernest Fenollosa. In the following years, from 1915-1917, Yeats began work on At the Hawk’s Well, the first of his “plays for dancers” that introduced the world to a new type of theatre, taking from Yeats’ own ideas, ancient Irish mythology, and the Noh theatre tradition of Japan. Other modernists of the period, including T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, were present at the first performance of At the Hawk’s Well. In the years following, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound appeared to be influenced in part by this symbolic performance, and by the Noh theatre style. Fifty years later, Japanese Noh theatre became prominent in the Western mind again through the work of the Japanese novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima. Mishima’s Five Modern Nō Plays, translated into English by Donald Keene and published in 1957, expressed the Westernization of Noh theatre in Japan through interesting changes from the original versions of the traditional plays. This example indicates a remarkable, if not significant, transformation in the style of traditional Noh theatre. While Yeats and other modernists of his time appear to be influenced in part by Noh, Noh theatre, in turn, appears influenced by the Westernization of Japan.
