page_title: The Countess Cathleen
section_title: Editions and revisions
hierarchical_section_title: The Countess Cathleen / Editions and revisions
caption_attribution_description: English: Florence Farr in Yeats' play Kathleen Ni Houlihan in 1904.
context_page_description: The Countess Cathleen is a verse drama by William Butler Yeats in blank verse. It was dedicated to Maud Gonne, the object of his affections for many years.
context_section_description: The play was first published in 1892 in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (the spelling was changed to "Cathleen" in all future editions). Its text underwent many changes until the final version performed in 1911 and published in 1912 ("a complete revision to make it suitable for performance at the Abbey Theatre" and "all but a new play", according to Yeats). The variorum editor, Russell K. Alspach, remarks, "The revision for the second printing, Poems (1895), was so drastic that intelligible collation was virtually impossible." The tendency of Yeats's changes between 1892 and 1911 has been summarized as a move "decidedly away from an almost farcical realism and tentatively toward the austere, suggestive mode of the dance plays."
caption: Florence Farr as "Aleel" in The Countess Cathleen
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