Yeats’s Doll and Donkey: Alienating the <i>Upanishads</i> in <i>The Herne’s Egg</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Herne’s Egg, like Yeats’s other late plays, is a great challenge for readers. In addition to putting forward an esoteric philosophy that evades coherent interpretation, the play is deliberately anti-heroic, grotesque, and sexually offensive. Yeats’s remark that the play is Purohit Swami’s “philosophy in a fable” has guided critics toward the Upanishads for clues. This essay questions longstanding assumptions about the Indian influence on the play, examining Yeats’s appropriation of the Upanishadic concept of the Self for his own vision of Unity of Being. Interpretations of the play that foreground the influence of the Sanskrit texts on Yeats’s dramaturgy often overlook the play’s form and genre. This essay aims to shed new light on the play by drawing attention to its style, which fuses several modernist aesthetics in a form of experimental farce. I argue that gaiety is Yeats’s way of dealing with the futility resulting from his determinist view of the universe. Yeats’s farcical style creates quasi-Brechtian alienation effects in The Herne’s Egg, sublimating existential dread to tragic joy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".