SOURCE: Barbera, Jack. “The Emotion of Multitude and David Rabe's Streamers.” American Drama 7, no. 1 (fall 1997): 50-66.

In the following essay, Barbera details the dramatic techniques used by Rabe to express what W. B. Yeats called the “emotion of multitude.”

In a single-paragraph essay on drama, “Emotion of Multitude,” W. B. Yeats makes a dramatic claim about what “all the great masters have understood.” “There cannot be great art,” he says, “without the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it.” What Yeats calls the “emotion of multitude” is evoked when a playwright is able to stimulate our imagination, so we feel the drama ringing out into wider significance. And how do playwrights so stimulate our imagination? Greek drama “got the emotion of multitude from its chorus,” Yeats tells us...