Why would anyone now read a play about a Muslim girl, Mosada, tried by Monks, one of whom is her lover Gomez? Sure, the author's famous, but there's only three characters, one a handicapped boy, Cola, who says "Lame-footed/ I am, one shoulder turned awry--why /Should I be good?…The beetles, and the bats,/ And spiders are my friends…but you are like butterflies…." Who could possibly find interest in a century old play, never popular as a book--only 50 copies privately printed in 1943--reprinted in 1970 by Irish University Press.
A Monk inquisitor praises, "Hear, thou enduring God, / Who giveth to the golden-crested wren / Her hanging mansion…" (I footnote as an American birder, This wren builds like the Oriole crossed with the Carolina Wren.) Mosada hears from her cell the construction of the circling auto-de-fe, but says, "I'm not of that pale company whose feet/ Ere long shall falter through the noisy square…" And she prays, "Oh, Allah! it was thus that they shone that night,/ When my lost lover left these arms."
Perhaps some reader might make a hasty comparison of Christian executions a millenium ago, and Islamic now. Some may like Yeats's straightforward verse. But some may not value a plot twist that increases irony while it diminishes drama. ( )