Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights (Palagrave Macmillan) approaches Yeats and d’Annunzio through a queer lens, providing a comparative reading of their theatre plays. A completely new perspective we discuss with its author Professor Zsuzsanna Balázs.

I would like to start by asking you about its genesis. How did you decide to compare the two writers from this new perspective?

First, it is important to state at the beginning that this book is a rewritten and restructured version of my PhD thesis, which was titled “Between the Queer and the Normative: Unorthodox Representations of Gender, Power, and Desire in W. B. Yeats’s and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Drama.” The idea of comparing the drama and theatre of W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio originally stems from a conversation I had with Yeats and theatre scholar Dr. Ben Levitas at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland, in July 2016. At that time, I was finishing my MA in English and Postcolonial Literatures, and I had already had a PhD project proposal outline that would have looked at several Italian writers’ influence on Yeats.

At the summer school, Dr. Levitas delivered a lecture on Luigi Pirandello and Yeats, and our conversation after his lecture inspired me to narrow down my project and look at only two Italian playwrights’ influence on Yeats, who were his contemporaries: Luigi Pirandello and Gabriele D’Annunzio. As a result, the PhD project for which I received the Irish Research Council’s four-year Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship (2017-2021) conducted at the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the University of Galway originally focused on Yeats, Pirandello, and D’Annunzio.

However, over the course of my research and the writing and rewriting process, I realised that Yeats and D’Annunzio had much more in common in terms of their dramaturgical techniques, types of theatrical collaborations, and the themes that appear in their plays than Yeats and Pirandello or Pirandello and D’Annunzio. Hence, after careful deliberation and consultations with my supervisors, Dr. Ian R. Walsh and Prof. Paolo Bartoloni, I decided to focus my research on Yeats and D’Annunzio only. The gender and queer studies approach was also introduced later during my PhD research. As I was re-reading Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays for my research, I delved more deeply into the works of various queer theorists, and at the same time I was discovering my own queerness; it struck me how closely some of their plays resonated with my own experiences and with the ideas delineated by queer theorists, mostly by Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Leo Bersani, and José Esteban Muñoz as well as by French philosopher Didier Eribon.

Hence, I decided that I would apply a dramaturgical and queer approach: looking at how the plays resonate with some of the main themes discussed by contemporary queer theorists and how these plays can potentially speak to feminist and queer readers/audiences as well. I also discovered the rich queer and feminist networks these playwrights had and the life-long impact some feminist and queer women had on their drama and theatre—for Yeats, the most significant influence was Florence Farr, while D’Annunzio’s drama and theatre were mostly shaped by the influence of Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Ida Rubinstein. These women have mostly been mentioned as the playwrights’ “Muses,” which is a very reductive term, as it implies passivity, while these women were highly active agents in shaping the plays (sometimes even their productions) as well as the playwrights’ interest in the vicissitudes of socially marginalised and stigmatised individuals.

How did you conduct your research and choose the works to include by the two authors?

The vast part of the research was conducted during my PhD studies in Galway, where I had access to the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, which helped me learn more about the theater histories of Yeats’s plays and some productions’ experimentations with gender. The James Hardiman Library in Galway and the National Library of Ireland in Dublin provided every book on Yeats, D’Annunzio, gender studies, Irish and Italian modernism, and queer theory that I needed to establish the theoretical framework for my research. I also spent two weeks in the archives of La Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone Riviera, where I received access to fascinating performance reviews, letters, and performance materials that revealed how pertinent gender, sexuality, and difference were to D’Annunzio’s drama and theatre.

The decision to conduct a detailed dramaturgical and queer reading of eight plays by Yeats and eight plays by D’Annunzio was made specifically for the book, as the PhD thesis had to be significantly restructured. In my PhD thesis, there were several chapters covering various historical contexts in more detail, and it had a separate chapter for the queer and dramaturgical analyses of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays, including only five plays by each playwright. When writing the book, I decided to organise the chapters around specific themes that were crucial for the historical context and were central to the works of queer theorists, too.

For instance, in Chapter 2, I discuss the importance of the family cell in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along with the concepts of the “unhappy family,” “affect aliens,” and the “will to escape” in queer theory and how these themes appear in two plays by Yeats and two plays by D’Annunzio. Each thematic chapter in the book includes an in-depth dramaturgical and queer reading of four plays, always starting with two plays by Yeats and finishing the chapter with two plays by D’Annunzio. While analysing the plays, I point out crucial links between the plays discussed in the respective chapter and flag differences in the ways in which some themes are dealt with.

Although the book’s focus lies in the analyses of altogether sixteen plays, it also includes brief discussions of relevant performance reviews, D’Annunzio’s novels, a feminist manifesto by Florence Farr (“Modern Woman: Her Intentions,” 1910), and Michele De Benedetti’s 1913 interview with Eleonora Duse (titled “La Duse parla del femminismo”)—these were included to enrich our understanding of the gender-related themes that appear in Yeats’s and D'Annunzio’ plays.

What elements particularly caught your attention, both in their works and biographies, from a queer point of view?

There were numerous elements that caught my attention from a queer point of view, both in their plays and in the playwrights’ biographies. I would like to highlight, however, that the book intentionally centered on the various manifestations of queerness in the play texts and some of their production histories, but of course the playwrights’ biographies significantly enriched the queer dramaturgical readings included in the book. Below, I outline only a brief list of those aspects that I have found fascinating in their works and lives from a queer point of view. First, I mention the elements that caught my attention in their play texts, then in the authors’ lives. The book’s introduction includes a more detailed list of what is queer in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama and the nuanced, layered meanings of “queerness” applied in the book’s analyses.

In their plays:

Regarding Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s representations of male characters, it was fascinating to observe the nuanced ways in which the plays portray various ways of being a man. Of course, we can mostly observe hegemonic masculine behaviour in the plays’ main characters, but they are often contrasted with characters who display anxiety due to their family’s or community’s expectation of them to “man up” and to perform a violent, misogynistic form of masculinity, marry a woman, establish a family, and reproduce. Most of the male characters in D’Annunzio’s and Yeats’s plays do not conform to these expectations, and the resulting anxiety is palpable and needs more scholarly attention. They are not failed “supermen”—they are male characters trying to find alternative, less violent, non-hegemonic ways of being men or male characters “acting up” to prove their manliness to more dominant male characters.

Another interesting theme in their plays, especially in D’Annunzio’s drama, concerns female characters who often take their life and death in their own hands. For instance, in D’Annunzio’s plays, the protagonists are predominantly powerful, independent, strong-minded, highly complex women who struggle due to societal and family expectations and who have to deal with violence and insults inflicted on them both by patriarchs and matriarchs. Yet in the D’Annunzio plays analysed in the book, the lead female characters do not let others take their lives—they take their own lives either to evade impossible expectations or to deny others the pleasure of killing them.

They do not die for an abstract cause—they die for themselves. In D’Annunzio’s case, this made the plays more acceptable in the eyes of highly misogynistic theatre critics and audiences, too (and later helped evade fascist censorship, too), as it could be argued that the plays actually portrayed the consequences of defiant behaviour in women—however, close reading the plays reveals that it is impossible to offer one single interpretation for any of D’Annunzio’s plays, as all of them are intentionally imbued with ambiguity and nuanced layers of meaning, coded messages, and references.

It was equally striking to see how Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays display a palpable contrast between matriarchs who act as gatekeepers of patriarchy and independent, defiant women. Also, the plays offer highly critical representations of the so-called normative family and community (or society), which pose an immense pressure on individuals who differ in any way from the norm or wish to live or love in ways that are condemned by traditional expectations of how to be a “proper” man or a woman; a husband or a wife; a son or a daughter. Most of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s main characters wish to escape from these constraints and repressive environments. Given the centrality and sanctity of the traditional family cell in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy and Ireland, such representations of the family are worthy of more scholarly attention, especially from a queer studies perspective.

The various coded references, safe (socially acceptable) frameworks, and euphemisms through which they introduced homoerotic innuendos in the plays also caught my attention: for instance, intimate friendship between same-sex characters; sisterhood and brotherhood bonds; the supernatural realm; ambiguous diction; implicit and explicit references to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses; and biblical references.

The clash between the contradictory dramaturgical impulses of the queer and the normative is also very distinctive in their plays. This observation constitutes one of the main contentions of the book, as I believe it is exactly the ambiguous tension between normativity/authoritarianism and anti-normative dissidence in the play texts that creates spaces for queer readings today.

The omnipresence of various forms of insults directed at the defiant main characters, who always differ from the norm and who deal and cope with these insults in different ways, was equally noteworthy: some of them choose a non-biological family or the supernatural realm to escape from the world of insults, while other characters opt for revenge by assuming the manipulative strategies of their oppressors, turning those strategies against them, thus becoming oppressors themselves (which is a fascinating common theme in many of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays).

In their biographies:

The striking similarities between the roles Florence Farr and Eleonora Duse played in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s lives and their profound impact on their drama and on the playwrights’ interest in a wide range of gender and sexual possibilities. Farr and Duse were not merely passive Muses, and they were not only actors either; both used their acting as activism too, and they were extremely vocal about their fight for women’s emancipation, independence, and sexual freedom.

It also caught my attention in Elizabeth Cullingford’s groundbreaking books on Yeats that, in fact, Yeats himself had a life-long struggle defining his sexual and gender identity and had significant anxieties over how to become a man. He was in awe of gender ambiguity and any form of androgyny he perceived in other people. Once, when Yeats was in the company of his queer friend Lady Dorothy Wellesley, he was so fascinated by her androgyny that he wished he could become a woman, too, for even just a short amount of time.

Yeats was also extremely alert to his playwright friend Edward Martyn’s sexual tension and the palpable conflict Martyn experienced because of his religious devoutness, Victorian societal expectations, and his own desire for the intimate company of men over women and, at the same time, his feeling that he would rather be a woman. Strikingly, Yeats noted his observations about Martyn’s anxiety and sexual tension in his Autobiographies and portrayed them implicitly in the subtext of his play The Cat and the Moon.

It also struck me that Yeats’s life-long interest in occult practices (raised in him by his friendship with Florence Farr) was strongly related to his openness to experiment with gender and portray not only queer desire in his plays but sadomasochistic sexual attachments, too.

I was equally amazed to find that the main role models in D’Annunzio’s life were predominantly queer women (mostly Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Ida Rubinstein). I emphasise the term “role model,” because his admiration for them was not merely a heterosexual man’s interest in lesbian relationships, nor a mere case of idealising them as Muses for intellectual stimulation. Lucia Re’s studies, among others, revealed to me that D’Annunzio had wished to imitate these women and had fashioned himself after these queer icons and divas—it is by no accident that D’Annunzio was often referred to as an effeminate “uomo-donna” by his contemporaries and was regularly compared to Oscar Wilde. Regarding Wilde, it was also striking to see how much D'Annunzio sympathised with Wilde at a time when in Italy the so-called “Oscarwaldismo” was looked at with great suspicion.

D'Annunzio’s collaboration with Ida Rubinstein was one of the most thrilling aspects of his biography for me from a queer point of view. It is striking to realize how much she was in control of even some of the productions of D’Annunzio’s plays and the extent of their theatrical collaboration (they were playing with gender roles even during the rehearsals of Le Martyre).

It was equally interesting to find how, despite Rubinstein’s androgynous queer stage presence, the discomfort and awe she induced in critics and audiences with her husky voice, Russian accent, and unusual movements, D’Annunzio insisted on working with her even after, for instance, Le Martyre had been banned by French Catholics and the Vatican in 1922 and Phaedra had been equally blacklisted by the Vatican in 1926 because of Rubinstein. Looking at the performance materials of plays that were written and produced during their collaboration, it is fascinating to see how Rubinstein’s queerness and her unorthodox stage presence and movements increased D’Annunzio’s interest in experimentations with corporeality and, by extension, in a wide range of gender and sexual possibilities on the stage.

Yeats demonstrated a similarly defiant attitude after the fiasco of the 1894 production of his highly homoerotic play The Land of Heart’s Desire in London’s Avenue Theatre, along with the fiasco of John Todhunter’s A Sicilian Idyll, in which Farr played a Hellenistic New Woman. The production of these plays was arranged by Farr to showcase Irish avant-garde plays in London, but critics clearly dismissed the transgressive female characters who were the protagonists of these plays. Despite this experience, Yeats continued to work with Farr—what is more, in the first production of his play The Countess Cathleen in Dublin in 1899, after the negative experience in London, Farr played the male bard Aleel, whose love for Cathleen runs through the entire play, and thus audiences could see highly intimate scenes between two women on the Irish stage. What is more, the play was presented alongside Edward Martyn’s equally homoerotic play The Heather Field as an inauguration of the Irish Literary Theatre.

Lastly, at the end of their lives, both Yeats and D’Annunzio were deeply mourned by their queer friends. Lady Dorothy Wellesley and her partner Hilda Matheson were with Yeats beside his deathbed in Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Cap Martin on the French Riviera. The news of Yeats’s death was telephoned through to Yeats’s family by Vita Sackville-West (Virginia Woolf’s former lover) as instructed by Wellesley. D’Annunzio’s last days and death were recounted by Marguerite Radclyffe Hall’s partner, Una Troubridge, in a series of unpublished essays which demonstrate that they spent much time with D’Annunzio in his last months, and according to Troubridge’s accounts, Radclyffe Hall was profoundly shaken by D’Annunzio’s death and wept for days.

As a d’Annunzio scholar, I would like to ask how you hope the general perception and understanding of Phaedra and Le Martyre could change after your book.

The book’s topic is so niche that I am not sure it will reach enough people even within Irish and Italian scholarly communities to induce significant changes in the perception of the plays. However, my hope is that the book will change the perception of D’Annunzio as primarily an Italian national poet and will foster a deeper understanding of his role in modernist drama and theatre production. I also hope that my readings of D’Annunzio’s plays in the book and my non-intentionalist, queer, and dramaturgical approach to the plays will encourage more nuanced interpretations that do not focus on authorial intentions. As I underlined in the book, I have not come across any dramaturgical readings of D’Annunzio’s plays in scholarship (except for Jason James Hartford’s queer reading of Le Martyre), which would focus on what the play texts could convey to contemporary, more global and diverse audiences (including the LGBTQA+ community, too) about more global, topical socio-political issues.

Analysing the play texts in the context of D’Annunzio’s biographical details and the historical contexts in which they were written and produced on the stage is certainly crucial and enriches our understanding of D’Annunzio as a playwright, yet I would still encourage dramaturgical approaches that let the texts speak for themselves. Such approaches do not threaten the validity, value, and existence of historical and biographical readings—they would only add another potential approach that might prove to be more exciting for some students, for instance, those who find D’Annunzio’s long and often obscure texts imbued with heavy symbolism difficult to relate to.

I believe that gender and dramaturgical readings can help make D’Annunzio’s play texts more relatable to people who thus far have never considered reading D’Annunzio’s plays or did not find anything relatable or interesting in them. I reckon that a shift from historical and biographical readings to more global and topical biopolitical interpretations is long overdue. My hope is that the book might encourage students, scholars, or even theatre makers to look at D’Annunzio’s plays as texts that are alive and full of nuanced meanings and potentials for today’s diverse audiences, readers, and socio-political contexts instead of being treated as knowable objects that only have one single codified meaning tied to a certain historical context or biographical details.

As to the perception of Phaedra, I hope that my reading will encourage more nuanced psychological interpretations of the play and more research on the impact of serious physical, sexual, or psychological trauma on the behaviour of D’Annunzio’s female protagonists, including Phaedra. The subtexts are crucial in D’Annunzio’s drama, as they often include information central to the plot—in this case, for instance, references to rape and physical violence which male characters had committed and which had profoundly affected Phaedra. It is also striking that readings of this play almost exclusively focus on Phaedra as the problem—some biographies even call her perverse and use similarly degrading adjectives to characterise her as contemporary misogynistic reviews of the plays’ productions had applied to describe transgressive fin-de-siècle New Women.

D’Annunzio rewrote the story of Phaedra in this play, and my reading highlights how the dramaturgical techniques applied in the play reverse traditional perceptions of Phaedra as evil and perversion embodied—D’Annunzio’s Phaedra rejects being a victim and refuses to be subjugated, humiliated, and constantly shamed. She rejects living at the mercy of a family and community that demonises her. D’Annunzio makes her declare herself a victor for a reason. I encourage everyone who reads this play to scrutinise the male characters’ behaviour and close-read the subtextual references to male violence instead of focusing only on Phaedra’s behaviour towards the male characters and those who surround her.

As to Le Martyre, I trust that my dramaturgical reading of the play will encourage scholars and students of D’Annunzio to pay more attention to D’Annunzio’s use of various euphemisms and ambiguous diction, which can serve to include subtle homoerotic desires in his plays. I also hope that my reading will emphasise how crucial Ida Rubinstein, as a well-known queer icon, was in creating the first genderqueer Sebastian on the European stage and in introducing intentionally homoerotic innuendoes in the play text and in its performances. In the case of Le Martyre, the play’s theatre history and Ida Rubinstein’s fascinating life and collaboration with D’Annunzio significantly contribute to the play’s nuanced, highly ambiguous meanings.

While preparing for the first production of Le Martyre, the boundaries of on- and offstage were completely blurred in D’Annunzio’s and Rubinstein’s collaboration, which, according to queer theorist Jack Halberstam, is characteristic of queer performance. I hope that my reading will foster the understanding of Le Martyre as a queer text and its theatre history as an example of an outstanding queer performance and the result of queer theatrical collaboration—we need to understand that a performance can be made queer not only by the explicit or implicit messages in its text but also by the contexts in which they are created or by the actors who make the performance happen. In this regard, Le Martyre bears striking resemblance to the performance history of and queer theatre collaboration behind The Rite of Spring (first performed in Paris in 1913 with Vaslav Nijinsky in its lead role), which is analysed in depth by Jack Halberstam in their book Wild Thigs: The Disorder of Desire (2020).

May I ask if you are already working on new literary projects?

Since the publication of my book, my attention has turned to representations of transgenerational trauma in modern and contemporary Irish drama, and I have also begun to examine the phenomenon of authoritarian soft censorship in contemporary Hungarian theatre practice (especially since the country’s ban on gender studies as a discipline in 2018). Currently, I am also working on two book chapters for Cambridge University Press: one on the representations of non-hegemonic masculinity in Yeats’s drama and another one on corporeality in D’Annunzio’s plays. However, these are short-term projects for conference papers, book chapters, and journal articles. I have yet to find a new, long-term research project that I could potentially write another book about.

Since I started teaching communication, academic writing, and mentoring subjects at a Hungarian university’s Faculty of Business and Management in 2022 as Assistant Professor, it has proved to be extremely challenging to find time and intellectual stimulation to focus on literary research projects, because the university does not have any research groups or archives that would help humanities- or social science-related research, not to mention the fact that research involving gender studies and queer theory is definitely not welcome in Hungary at the moment.

Academic and artistic freedom are at risk, and at the same time there is tremendous pressure to produce several publications in WoS and Scopus-indexed journals, which, for my research interests, poses an immense challenge. Since my faculty’s research focus is on economics, funding for literary research or conference attendance is not available, which makes it harder to attend Irish, Italian, and modernist studies conferences that I used to frequent regularly during my PhD. My hope is that the situation might change in Hungarian higher education in the near future and I can join research groups that align with my research interest.