Autograph manuscript draft of The Kings Threshold

W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory

Autograph manuscript draft of The Kings Threshold

1903

Gregory began to assist Yeats soon after they met: taking dictation, organizing his manuscripts, and typing them up. She initially reveled in helping a man who represented himself as the Shelleyan ideal of poet, legislator, and seer. This manuscript in her handwriting is for his play The King’s Threshold, in which a poet threatens to starve himself to death to protest the loss of hereditary respect given to bards. It extols poets as “creators of all values. . . . No woman would be beautiful if they had not praised beauty.” Gregory soon contributed directly and ever-more widely to Yeats’s work, by 1908 collaborating with him on more than a dozen plays. In an acquiescence that had benefits for her at the time but rankled later, Gregory saw them published under his name alone.

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations