The story in the railway carriage

The best stories I have listened to outside the theatre have been told me by farmers or sailors when I was a boy, one or two by fellow travelers in railway carriages, and most had some quality of romance, romance of a class and its particular capacity for adventure; and our theatre is a people’s theatre in a sense which no mere educational theatre can be, because its plays are to some extent a part of that popular imagination. It is very seldom that a man or woman bred up among the propertied or professional classes knows any class but his own, and that a class which is much the same all over the world, and already written of by so many dramatists that it is nearly impossible to see its dramatic situations with our own eyes, and those dramatic situations are perhaps exhausted—as Nietzsche thought the whole universe would be some day—and nothing left but to repeat the same combinations over again.

—W.B. Yeats, “A People’s Theatre”