<i>Ubu Roi</i> in W.B. Yeats’s <i>The Green Helmet</i> and <i>The Player Queen</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
W.B. Yeats’s presence at the December 1896 Paris performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi has become well known for the famous phrase that it inspired: “After us the Savage God.” Yet the significance of Jarry’s play to Yeats’s drama has been almost entirely overlooked. Expanding on my previous work in Yeats and European Drama, this article illustrates the profundity and the significance of Jarry’s revolutionary avant-garde play for two of Yeats’s plays: The Green Helmet (1910) and The Player Queen (1922). Following a discussion of the connections between Ubu Roi, The Green Helmet, and the disturbances at the Abbey Theatre during the performance of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, I address the deep affinities that Jarry’s play also has with another later play by Yeats: The Player Queen. Although it was first performed long after the Symbolist movement in literature and drama had passed, The Player Queen carries strongly Symbolist features. Like Ubu Roi, however, Yeats’s play disturbs the religious ideals of Symbolism through a tension that it sustains between mysticism and animality, a tension that I explore through the medieval aspects of both plays. Taken together, The Green Helmet and The Player Queen demonstrate the continuing influence that the European avant-garde in general, and Jarry’s work in particular, had on Yeats’s dramaturgy throughout his career.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
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".