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Boston College has published an online edition of Love and Death - the first play by Irish Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats, which has never before been published or performed. The play, which is presented in both digital form and through images of the original manuscript, can be viewed at bc.edu/loveanddeath.
The digitization is part of a broad effort by the University Libraries to make rare materials from BC's special collections more readily available to scholars and the public.
Love and Death was acquired by the University in 1993 from Senator Michael B. Yeats, son of W.B. Yeats, and is now part of the Yeats Collection at BC's Burns Library, the world's largest repository of original Yeats manuscripts outside of the National Library of Ireland.
The early manuscript is contained in five notebooks, some of which include loose-leaf paper inserts. Yeats wrote the play in 1884, the same year that he began his earliest published plays, Mosada and The Island of Statues.
The Yeats project is a reflection of University Librarian Tom Wall's "vision of the University Libraries facilitating humanities scholarship through the digitization of our unique holdings."
Love and Death sheds light on the poet's other work from the period, and is likely to be of keen interest to Yeats scholars, particularly those studying the poet's juvenilia, as well as to scholars of Irish literature and to a general public eager to read some of his earliest writings.
Marjorie Howes, an associate professor of English and a faculty member in BC's Irish Studies Program, provided scholarly guidance to librarians involved in the project and to graduate student Dathalinn O'Dea, who created a transcription comprised of a full draft of the play and Yeats’ partial revisions, including faithful recordings of his corrections, cancellations, and occasional spelling errors. O’Dea will continue her work with the manuscript by giving a presentation on the digitization at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland this summer.
"The digitization of this manuscript will make available a complete and previously unknown work by one of the twentieth century's greatest writers," said Howes. "Such a genuinely new addition to an important writer's known works happens very rarely, and Love and Death offers scholars and students a number of significant insights into the origins, ambitions, and challenges of Yeats's early career."
The project included the efforts of a team of some 15 staffers from the University Libraries that included Scholarly Communications Librarian Jane Morris and Digital Collections Librarian Betsy McKelvey, Digital Preservation Manager Bill Donovan, archivist Amy Braitsch, Reference Librarian Justine Sundaram and Conservator Barbara Adams Hebard.
Burns Librarian Robert K. O'Neill expressed his gratitude to benefactor Brian P. Burns of Palm Beach, Florida, as well as to the late Senator Michael Yeats and his widow, Mrs. Grainne Yeats, for making the Yeats acquisition possible.
The John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections is named in memory of the Honorable John J. Burns, a 1921 BC alumnus who was one of its principal benefactors. It houses more than 250,000 volumes, 16 million manuscripts and impressive holdings of artifacts, maps, paintings, photographs, ephemera and architectural records, including the internationally-noted Boston College Irish Collection, the largest repository of Irish research materials outside of Ireland.