Writing to Harriet Weaver Shaw in 1916, Joyce provides, with studied casualness, a few “biographical items” that had been requested by his publisher (Ellmann, Selected Letters, 222; the moderately ironic quotation marks are Joyce’s).  Noting that “I suppose that is what he means,” Joyce encloses a brief account of his writing, including a judiciously placed bit of retrospective precociousness:  Under the subheading “Irish Literary Theatre,” Joyce writes that Yeats “invited me to write a play for his theatre and I promised to do so in ten years” (223).  Conveniently, Joyce had begun drafting Exiles in 1913 while living in Trieste.  Whether or not Exiles was anything like the play Joyce had in mind when Yeats asked him to write, Joyce evidently hoped, in 1916, that it would be interpreted as such.

Joyce’s autobiographical arrangement produces a compelling diagram of the emergence of his dramatic work.  Within this diagram, Exiles is a ten-year composition in the line of Countess Cathleen and Riders to the Sea–but one that both completes and exceeds their representations of emergent Irish lyricism among soulful Protestant landlords and suffering semi-pagan islanders.  An exiled artist returns to the Catholic middle-class suburbs he had abandoned for Rome and struggles to transform the various forms of sexual theatricality he finds into an authentic, i.e. aesthetically and affectively empowering, confession.  For Joyce, the categories of life and drama had been entangled since his earliest critical writing.  Perhaps more importantly, in the letters he wrote to Nora in 1909 while he was in Dublin and she remained in Trieste, his experiences in the Dublin theaters, his reactions to Irish sensibilities, and his “old fever of love” for Nora were all intertwined:

I am a shell of a man: my soul is in Trieste.  You alone know me and love me.  I have been at the theatre with my father and sister–a wretched play, a disgusting audience.  I felt (as I always feel) a stranger in my own country.  Yet if you had been beside you [sic] I could have spoken into your ears the hatred and scorn I felt burning in my heart.  Perhaps you would have rebuked me but you would also have understood me.  [...]  The night we went to Madame Butterfly together you treated me most rudely.  I simply wanted to hear that beautiful delicate music in your company.  I wanted to feel your soul swaying in langour and longing as mine did when she sings the romance of her heart in the second act Un bel di: ‘One day, one day, we shall see a spire of smoke rising on the furthest verge of the sea: and then the ship appears’ (174).

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