Will Hobbs Book

This short play is an indulgence of Yeats's research on Jonathan Swift. He was a life-long celibate. Some say he was too repulsive to marry, others that he was secretly gay, but Yeats says that the evidence points to a man so out of tune with the coming modern world that he couldn't bear to sire children in it. But the play is also a dramatic seance scene, in which the practice is vindincated by an uneducated woman vividly depicting emotionally charged scenes between Swift and his would-be lovers that only a scholar could have deliberately faked.

This is not a great work for the ages but has a lot of worth if you care about Swift's biography, about the fad of seance clubs and about the literary culture of the time it was written - certainly such a work would have no audience in today's age. Also out of historical interest we can gleam the link (embodied by Yeats) between this strength of belief in literary culture's virtues and the nationalist sentiment in Ireland:

John Corbet: I am writing an essay on Swift and Stella for my doctorate at Cambridge. I hope to prove that in Swfit's day men of intellect reached the height of their power - the greatest position they ever attained in society and the State, that everything great in Ireland and in our character, in what remains of our architecture, comes from that day; that we have kept its seal longer than England. p.159 "Selected Plays" ed. Jeffares