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John Millington Synge

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   John Millington Synge
   Enlarge
   John Millington Synge

   John Millington Synge ( April 16, 1871 - March 24, 1909) was an Irish
   dramatist, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was a key
   figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the cofounders of
   the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the
   Western World, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at
   the Abbey.

   Although he came from a middle-class Protestant background, Synge's
   writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic
   peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential
   paganism of their world view.

   Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that was
   untreatable at the time. He died just weeks short of his 38th birthday.

Family background and early life

   Synge was born in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin.
   Rathfarnham was a rural part of the county at that time although it is
   now a busy suburb. He was the youngest son in a family of eight
   children. His family on his father's side were landed gentry from
   Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow and his maternal grandfather, Robert
   Traill, had been a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork and
   a member of the Schull Relief Committee during the Irish potato famine.

   His grandfather, John Hatch Synge, was an admirer of the educationalist
   Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and founded an experimental school on the
   family estate. His father, also called John Hatch Synge, was a
   barrister who contracted smallpox and died in 1872 at the age of 49.
   Synge's mother, who had a private income from lands in County Galway,
   then moved the family to the house next door to her mother in Rathgar,
   Dublin. Synge had a happy childhood here, playing and developing an
   interest in ornithology along the banks of the River Dodder and in the
   grounds of Rathfarnham Castle, both of which were nearby, and during
   family holidays at the seaside resort of Greystones, Wicklow and the
   family estate at Glanmore.

   Synge was educated privately at schools in Dublin and Bray and studied
   piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish
   Academy of Music. He was a talented student and won a scholarship in
   counterpoint in 1891. The family moved to the suburb of Kingstown (now
   Dún Laoghaire) in 1888. Synge entered Trinity College, Dublin the
   following year, graduating with a BA in 1892. At college, he studied
   Irish and Hebrew as well as continuing his music studies and playing
   with the Academy orchestra at concerts in the Antient Concert Rooms.

   He also joined the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club and read Charles
   Darwin, and developed an interest in Irish antiquities and the Aran
   Islands. In 1893, he published his first known work, a
   Wordsworth-influenced poem, in Kottabos, A College Miscellany. His
   reading of Darwin coincided with a crisis of faith and Synge abandoned
   the Protestant religion of his upbringing around this time.

The emerging writer

   After graduating, Synge decided that he wanted to be a professional
   musician and went to Germany to study music. He stayed at Coblenz in
   1893 and moved to Würzburg in the January of the following year. Partly
   because he was painfully shy about performing in public and partly
   because of doubts over his ability, Synge decided to abandon a musical
   career and pursue his literary interests. He returned to Ireland in
   June, 1894 and moved to Paris the following January to study literature
   and languages at the Sorbonne.

   During summer holidays with his family in Dublin, he met and fell in
   love with Cherrie Matheson, a friend of his cousin and a member of the
   Plymouth Brethren. He proposed to her in 1895 and again the next year,
   but she turned him down on both occasions because of their differing
   religious viewpoints. This rejection affected Synge greatly and
   reinforced his determination to spend as much time as possible outside
   Ireland.

   In 1896 he visited Italy to study the language for a time before
   returning to Paris. Later that year he met William Butler Yeats, who
   encouraged Synge to live for a while in the Aran Islands and then
   return to Dublin and devote himself to creative work. He also spent
   some time in Maud Gonne’s circle in Paris but soon dissociated himself
   from them. He also wrote an amount of literary criticism for Gonne's
   Irlande Libre and other journals as well as unpublished poems and prose
   in a decadent, fin de siècle style. These writings were eventually
   gathered together in the 1960s for his Collected Works. He also
   attended lectures at the Sorbonne by the noted Celtic scholar Henri
   d’Arbois de Jubainville.

The Aran Islands

   Synge's cottage on Inishmaan, now turned into a museum
   Enlarge
   Synge's cottage on Inishmaan, now turned into a museum

   Synge suffered his first attack of Hodgkin's disease in 1897 and also
   had an enlarged gland removed from his neck. The following year he
   spent the summer on the Aran Islands, paying a visit to Lady Gregory's
   Coole Park home where he met Yeats and Edward Martyn. He spent the next
   five summers on the islands, collecting stories and folklore and
   perfecting his Irish, while continuing to live in Paris for most of the
   rest of the year. He also visited Brittany regularly. During this
   period, Synge wrote his first play, When the Moon has Set. He sent it
   to Lady Gregory for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1900, but she
   rejected it and the play was not published until it appeared in the
   Collected Works.

   His first account of life on the islands was published in the New
   Ireland Review in 1898 and his book-length journal, The Aran Islands,
   was completed in 1901 and published in 1907 with illustrations by Jack
   Yeats. This book is a slow-paced reflection of life on the islands and
   reflects Synge's belief that beneath the Catholicism of the islanders
   it was possible to detect a substratum of the older pagan beliefs of
   their ancestors. His experiences on Aran were to form the basis for
   many of the plays of Irish peasant and fishing community life that
   Synge went on to write.

First plays

   A poster for the opening run at the Abbey Theatre. Synge's In the
   Shadow of the Glen features.
   Enlarge
   A poster for the opening run at the Abbey Theatre. Synge's In the
   Shadow of the Glen features.

   In 1903, Synge left Paris and moved to London. He had written two
   one-act plays, Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen the
   previous year. These met with Lady Gregory's approval and The Shadow of
   the Glen was performed at the Molesworth Hall in October 1903. Riders
   to the Sea was performed at the same venue in February the following
   year. The Shadow of the Glen, under the title In the Shadow of the
   Glen, formed part of the bill for the opening run of the Abbey Theatre
   from December 27, 1904 to January 3, 1905.

   Both plays were based on stories Synge had collected on the Aran
   Islands. The Shadow of the Glen was based on a story of an unfaithful
   wife and was attacked in print by Irish nationalist leader Arthur
   Griffith as "a slur on Irish womanhood". Riders to the Sea was also
   attacked by nationalists, this time Patrick Pearse, who decried it
   because of the author's attitude to God and religion. Despite these
   attacks, the plays are now part of the canon of English language
   theatre. A third one-act play, The Tinker’s Wedding was drafted around
   this time, but Synge made no attempt to have it performed at this time,
   largely because of a scene where a priest is tied up in a sack, which,
   as he wrote to the publisher Elkin Mathews in 1905, would probably
   upset "a good many of our Dublin friends".

The Playboy riots and after

   When the Abbey was set up, Synge was appointed literary advisor to the
   theatre and soon became one of the directors of the company, along with
   Yeats and Lady Gregory. His next play, The Well of the Saints was
   staged at the theatre in 1905, again to nationalist disapproval, and
   again in 1906 at the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin.

   The play that is widely regarded as Synge's masterpiece, The Playboy of
   the Western World, was first performed in the Abbey in January 1907.
   This comedy centring on a story of apparent parricide also attracted a
   hostile public reaction. Egged on by nationalists, including Griffith,
   who believed that the theatre was not sufficiently political and
   described the play as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest
   language we have ever listened to from a public platform", and with the
   pretext of a perceived slight on the virtue of Irish womanhood in the
   line "...a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts..." (a
   shift being a female undergarment), a significant portion of the crowd
   rioted, causing the remainder of the play to be acted out in dumb show.
   Yeats returned from Scotland to address the crowd on the second night,
   famously declaring "You have disgraced yourself again, is this to be
   the recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius?" and decided
   to call in the police. Press opinion soon turned against the rioters
   and the protests petered out.

   The Tinker's Wedding was completed in 1907 and performed in London in
   1909. That same year, Synge got engaged to the Abbey actress Molly
   Allgood. He died at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin. His Poems and
   Translations was published by the Cuala Press on April 4 with a preface
   by Yeats. Yeats and Molly Allgood completed Synge's unfinished final
   play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, and it was presented by the Abbey players
   in January 1910 with Allgood in the lead role.
   John Millington Synge
   Enlarge
   John Millington Synge

Legacy

   Synge's plays helped set the Abbey house style for the following four
   decades. The stylised realism of his writing was reflected in the
   training given at the theatre's school of acting, and plays of peasant
   life were the main staple of the repertoire until the end of the 1950s.
   Sean O'Casey, the next major dramatist to write for the Abbey, knew
   Synge's work well and attempted to do for the Dublin working classes
   what his predecessor had done for the rural poor.

   The critic Vivian Mercier was amongst the first to recognise Samuel
   Beckett's debt to Synge. Beckett was a regular audience member at the
   Abbey in his youth and particularly admired the plays of Yeats, Synge
   and O'Casey. Mercier points out parallels between Synge's casts of
   tramps, beggars and peasants and many of the figures in Beckett's
   novels and dramatic works.

   In recent years, Synge's cottage on the Aran Islands has been restored
   as a tourist attraction. An annual Synge Summer School has been held
   every summer since 1991 in the village of Rathdrum in Wicklow.

Works

     * In the Shadow of the Glen ( 1903)
     * Riders to the Sea ( 1904)
     * The Well of the Saints ( 1905)
     * The Aran Islands ( 1907);
     * The Playboy of the Western World ( 1907)
     * The Tinker’s Wedding ( 1908)
     * Poems and Translations ( 1909)
     * Deirdre of the Sorrows ( 1910)
     * In Wicklow and West Kerry ( 1912)
     * Collected Works of John Millington Synge 4 vols. (1962-68),
          + Vol. 1: Poems ( 1962)
          + Vol. 2: Prose ( 1966),
          + Vols. 3 & 4: Plays ( 1968)

Online texts at Project Gutenberg

     * Works by John Millington Synge at Project Gutenberg
          + In the Shadow of the Glen
          + Riders to the Sea
          + The Aran Islands
          + The Playboy of the Western World
          + The Tinker’s Wedding
          + Riders to the Sea
          + In Wicklow and West Kerry
          + Deirdre of the Sorrows

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