The King’s Threshold
Augusta Gregory (1852–1932) and William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Manuscript draft of The King’s 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
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