Throughout his life, W. B. Yeats used the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ in relation to the theatre.However, it is clear that his understanding of these terms did not derive from Aristotle.He also frequently mentions Nietzsche, and particularly Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy; however, he uses Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy in an unique and distinctive way.For Yeats, tragic theatre was what he referred to as 'subjective', a term he develops in his occult and philosophical works, particularly A Vision, and which he relates to vision, thought, and the individual.'Comedy', by contrast, is what Yeats considers to be 'objective', concerned with the material world and its manifestations, including the body, and rationality.Based on this opposition, Yeats lays the foundations for a theory of theatre that is distinctive, and which shapes his own theatrical practice.

W. B. Yeats began with the view that the theatre should offend what he called 'the regular theatre goer', but during his time with the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey), he came to understand that the energy and bank of imagery that an audience brought to the theatre could constitute the life of the performance. He thus came to understand the audience as both the origin and the destination of performance. For Yeats, the audience were the origin of the performance, in that they shared and produced the collective pool of images from which his theatre drew.At the same time, he also understood the theatre in magical terms akin to those of the writings of Artaud, in which precisely chosen actions and words had the power to influence a much wider population.This understanding of theatre developed originally in the context of his engagement with Irish nationalism in the early 1900s, but continued throughout his life, ultimately producing an understanding of the spectator that stands with the writings of Artaud in its originality and radicalism.