John Millington Synge

John Millington Synge (1871-1909), Irish dramatist and dominant figure of the Irish Renaissance, a literary revival of the last years of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. Synge's great achievement was his unusually musical and poetic dialogue, which created a dramatic effect when coming from the mouths of his peasant characters. His humor, while occasionally ironic and bitter, was pronounced and at times boisterous. Synge’s plays were produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which was established to perform plays about Irish subjects written by Irish playwrights.

Synge was born in Rathfarnham, a village near Dublin. He was a sickly, solitary boy who pursed his interest in languages at Trinity College, Dublin, where he won prizes for Hebrew and Irish and earned his B.A. degree in 1892. After graduation Synge studied music in Germany, then made his way to Paris, where he attended lectures on modern languages and on Celtic, a language group that includes Irish, the ancient language of Ireland. In 1896 Synge met Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who encouraged him to travel to the isolated Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, where he could study the language and ways of life of people who still spoke Irish. Synge made the first of five visits to the Aran Islands in 1898, spending most of his time on Inishmaan, the most remote of the islands. His experience provided him with sketches for the book The Aran Islands (1907), with plots for the plays Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), and especially with exposure to a distinctive dialect called Hiberno-English. This dialect, which he used in his writings, combines English vocabulary with Irish syntax (sentence structure) and inflection.

Synge's first play, In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), was based on an Irish folktale about an old man who pretends to be dead to find out whether his young wife is faithful to him. Some Dubliners complained that the play insulted chaste Irish women, because at its end the wife leaves with a tramp. His second play, Riders to the Sea, also drew on Irish subject matter in portraying the tragedy of an Aran woman who loses her husband and her five sons to the sea. The Well of the Saints, about a blind couple who wish for sight but then regret having it back when they realize that by visual standards they are old and ugly, was staged in 1905. That year, Synge joined Yeats and Irish playwright Lady Gregory as a director of the Abbey Theatre.

Synge's masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, caused a riot when it was produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1907. The play's portrayal of a man who boasts that he has killed his father—and of the gullible villagers’ protection of him—was regarded as a libel on the Irish people, especially at a time when nationalistic feelings in Ireland were intense. The villagers admire the young man for his deed until his father turns up; they then drive both men out of town. In its humorous treatment of the subject, the play explores the transforming power of language and the difference between fantasy (referred to in the play as “a gallous story”) and reality (referred to as “a dirty deed”). When the play toured in the United States in 1911 and 1912, the actors were threatened and were arrested in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for performing a play viewed by some as indecent. Synge was working on the play Deirdre of the Sorrows, an adaptation of an old Irish saga called 'Deirdre and the Sons of Usnach,' when he died.