The Countess Cathleen

The Countess Cathleen is a verse drama by William Butler Yeats in blank verse (with some lyrics). It was dedicated to Maud Gonne, the object of his affections for many years.

The play was first published in 1892 in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (the spelling was changed to "Cathleen" in all future editions). Its text underwent many changes until the final version performed in 1911 and published in 1912 ("a complete revision to make it suitable for performance at the Abbey Theatre" and "all but a new play," according to Yeats). The variorum editor, Russell K. Alspach, remarks, "The revision for the second printing, Poems (1895), was so drastic that intelligible collation was virtually impossible." The tendency of Yeats's changes between 1892 and 1911 has been summarized as a move "decidedly away from an almost farcical realism and tentatively toward the austere, suggestive mode of the dance plays."

The play is set a historically in Ireland during a famine. The idealistic Countess of the title sells her soul to the devil so that she can save her tenants from starvation and from damnation for having sold their own souls. After her death, she is redeemed as her motives were altruistic and ascends to Heaven.

Yeats based the play on a purported Irish legend, "The Countess Cathleen O'Shea", which had been printed in an Anglo-Irish newspaper in 1867. When he later attempted to trace its origins, the story appeared to have been adapted into English from a French story, "Les marchands d'âmes", whose protagonist was named "comtesse Ketty O'Connor". This original French version appeared in the anthology, Les matinées de Timothée Trimm, by Léo Lespès without further provenance.

The play was first performed on May 8, 1899, as the Irish Literary Theatre's inaugural production, in the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin.

On February 21, 1911, Yeats attended an "amateurish" performance of the play by the Dramatic Society of the Norwich High School Old Girls' Association.

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