Re-Staging the 1934 Abbey Theatre Production of Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower: An Evaluation and Critique

This essay investigates and critiques an attempt from the surviving evidence to re-stage the first performance of Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower at the Abbey Theatre in 1934. This dance-drama was the last of four collaborations between the playwright and the dancer-choreographer, Ninette de Valois, during the period when she established for him a School of Ballet at the Abbey in Dublin. A wealth of evidence survives from which a performance text (as distinct from the printed text) may be inferred. The limitations to be found in various kinds of extant data concerning performance (music scores, set designs, photographs, revisions to play scripts, reviews, correspondence, reminiscence) are discussed in the light of the writer’s experience of bringing such a re-staging into production. The dangers of overly hypothesising or historicising are examined and devices for negotiating gaps in the evidence while being wholly transparent in one’s efforts are discussed. Finally the essay explores the many and diverse levels of collaboration on which a successful staging of one of Yeats’s dancedramas depends. In the course of that discussion the meaning of the word, collaboration, is interrogated and to some degree re-defined

Attention and binding in visual working memory : two forms of attention and two kinds of buffer storage

We review our research on the episodic buffer in the multicomponent model of working memory (Baddeley, 2000), making explicit the influence of Anne Treisman’s work on the way our research has developed. The crucial linking theme concerns binding, whereby the individual features of an episode are combined as integrated representations. We summarize a series of experiments on visual working memory that investigated the retention of feature bindings and individual features. The effects of cognitive load, perceptual distraction, prioritization, serial position, and their interactions form a coherent pattern. We interpret our findings as demonstrating contrasting roles of externally driven and internally driven attentional processes, as well as a distinction between visual buffer storage and the focus of attention. Our account has strong links with Treisman’s concept of focused attention and aligns with a number of contemporary approaches to visual working memory

The King’s Threshold: Manuscript Materials, edited by Declan Kiely, Yeats in Manuscript Series (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. lxi + 620.

There is no denying that The King’s Threshold held a special place of affection and honour for the poet amongst his theatrical output. It was in many ways a personal manifesto, a defence of the art of poetry, music and song. Inevitably the play was destined to undergo repeated revision, particularly as Yeats’s own youthful adoption of Shelley’s view of poets as the great legislators of the world came under repeated attack. The play in the form of a morality drama was one of several conceived ..

Italian Perspectives on Late Tudor and Early Stuart Theatre

This essay reports on a number of recent exhibitions in Italy, which raise issues relevant to study of the content, the ideologies underlying the dramaturgy, and the staging of types of Elizabethan and early Stuart drama. Several such exhibitions re-assemble from galleries around the world evidence of the princely magnificence of the great dynastic households, which do not focus attention on the individual art-work but on the modes of patronage that established, developed and extended family collections over several generations. The breadth of art (fine and applied) on display has required processes of curating that are wholly interdisciplinary in their approach, since the focus is on the contextualizing of individual works within overlapping rhetorics relating to connoisseurship and displays of power. This line of approach in its turn suggests new ways of interrogating especially the sources of plays based on Italian subject matter (usually historical), the better to highlight the dramaturgical choices made by playwrights drawing on such materials. Two particular instances are examined here in relation to Webster’s tragedies; and one in relation to Middleton’s Women Beware Women, while the theme of patronage allows for discussion of a particular theme in Jonson’s work. The latter half of the essay discusses two further exhibitions with an emphasis on traditions in the staging of courtly spectacle in Florence and Milan between 1439 and the 1660s. While these were vastly informative for scholarship concerning performance and the Stuart masques and Italian influences on Inigo Jones’s inspiration, it was also the mode of presenting the exhibited materials which impressed. The curators had found highly innovative means by which to teach visitors how to read extant documentation relating to performance; and their chosen methods suggested new ways in which research into performance history might present its findings for a general public as well as the scholarly community

The King’s Threshold: Manuscript Materials, edited by Declan Kiely, Yeats in Manuscript Series (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. lxi + 620.

There is no denying that The King’s Threshold held a special place of affection and honour for the poet amongst his theatrical output. It was in many ways a personal manifesto, a defence of the art of poetry, music and song. Inevitably the play was destined to undergo repeated revision, particularly as Yeats’s own youthful adoption of Shelley’s view of poets as the great legislators of the world came under repeated attack. The play in the form of a morality drama was one of several conceived ..