Purgatory (drama)
drama by William Butler Yeats
Purgatory is a drama by the Irish writer William Butler Yeats. It was first presented in at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 19 August 1938, a few months before Yeats' death.
Story
It tells a family saga of decline and fall, through its two remaining members: an Old Man (the father) and a Boy (his sixteen-year-old son). It is set outside the former family home, which the Old Man's father had drunkenly burned down, causing him to kill his father as the building perished. The Boy is skeptical about tales of his family's former grandeur and is repelled by the Old Man's story of losing his own mother as she gave birth to him, and the decline subsequent events wrought on the family. Tonight, the Old Man tells the Boy, is the anniversary of his mother's wedding night. This was the night on which he was conceived after a bout of drunken carousing by his father, and thus when his mother's fate was sealed. At this point a ghostly figure appears illuminated in a window of the wrecked house. In an attempt to wrest his mother's soul from purgatory, he suddenly stabs and kills the Boy. However, it appears to be in vain: approaching hoof beats of his ghostly father returning to the bridal bed signal that no spirits have left the place, and the grim cycle begins again...
“Purgatory (drama)” enters the record as drama by William Butler Yeats. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Purgatory, drama and William can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7261205. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1938.
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This entry incorporates text from “Purgatory (drama)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.