John Millington Synge

Edmund John Millington Synge (; 16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909), popularly known as J. M. Synge, was an Irish playwright, poet, writer and collector of folklores. As a key figure of the Irish Literary Revival during the early 20th century, he is widely regarded by critics and scholars as the most prolific playwright in Irish literature of the Edwardian era, and by several of his peers, among them William Butler Yeats.

His play The Playboy of the Western World (1907), one of his best-known works, was initially poorly received, due to its bleak ending, crude depiction of poor Irish peasants, and the idealisation of patricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and street riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Tinker's Wedding (1909). Most of his plays were known for their highly realistic depictions of Irish society and culture, and included plots, themes, landscapes, and settings drawn from places he visited during his travels.

Synge came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background, and mainly wrote about working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and what he saw as their pagan worldview. Owing to his ill health, he was schooled at home. His early interest in music led to a scholarship and a degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music. In 1894, he moved to Paris, where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and later returned to Ireland.

Synge had a relatively short career (c. 1903–1909), but his works continue to be held in high regard due to their cultural and literary significance. He was also one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, along with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. He suffered from Hodgkin's disease, and died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910), considered by some as his masterpiece, though it was unfinished during his lifetime. Since his death, Synge has become one of Ireland's most popular and significant playwrights, and his works continue to be studied and discussed in Irish literary circles. He had a direct influence on later writers such as Samuel Beckett and Brinsley MacNamara, and several of his plays are still occasionally performed in Dublin.

Biography

Early life Synge was born on 16 April 1871, in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, the youngest of eight children of upper-middle-class Protestant parents.

Synge's father died from smallpox aged 49 and was buried on his son's first birthday. His mother moved the family to the house next door to her mother's house in Rathgar, County Dublin. Although often ill, Synge had a happy childhood. He developed an interest in bird-watching along the banks of the River Dodder, and during family holidays at the seaside resort of Greystones, County Wicklow, and the family estate at Glanmore.

He was home-educated at schools in Dublin and Bray, and studied piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He travelled to the continent to study music, but later decided to focus on literature. Between November 1889 and 1894 he took private music lessons with Robert Prescott Stewart.

Synge later developed an interest in Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, and became a member of the Irish League for a year. He left the League because, as he told Maud Gonne, "my theory of regeneration for Ireland differs from yours ... I wish to work on my own for the cause of Ireland, and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement." In 1893 he published his first known work, a poem influenced by Wordsworth, in Kottabos: A College Miscellany.

Early work After graduating, Synge moved to Germany to study music. He stayed in Coblenz during 1893 before moving to Würzburg in January 1894. Because of his shyness about performing in public, coupled with his doubt about his own ability, he abandoned music to pursue his literary interests. He returned to Ireland in June 1894 before moving to Paris in January 1895 to study literature and languages at the Sorbonne. He met Cherrie Matheson during summer breaks with his family in Dublin. He proposed to her in 1895 and again the next year, but she turned him down on both occasions because of their differing views on religion. The rejections greatly affected him and reinforced his determination to move abroad.

In 1896, he visited Italy to study the language before returning to Paris. He planned on a career in writing about French authors. That year he met W. B. Yeats who encouraged him to spend time on the Aran Islands, after which he returned to Dublin. In 1899 he joined Yeats, Augusta, Lady Gregory and George William Russell to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which later established the Abbey Theatre. (These writings were eventually gathered in the 1960s for his Collected Works. ) He also attended lectures at the Sorbonne by the noted Celtic scholar Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville.

Aran Islands and first plays

In 1897, Synge suffered his first attack of Hodgkin's, after which an enlarged gland was removed from his neck. He visited Lady Gregory's home, at Coole Park near Gort, County Galway, where he met Yeats again and also Edward Martyn. He spent the following five summers there, collecting stories and folklore, perfecting his Irish, but living in Paris for most of the rest of each year. He also visited Brittany regularly. During this period he wrote his first play, When the Moon Has Set which he sent to Lady Gregory for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1900, but she rejected it. The play was not published until it appeared in his Collected Works.

Synge's first account of life on the Aran Islands was published in the New Ireland Review in 1898 and his book, The Aran Islands, completed in 1901 and published in 1907 with illustrations by Jack Butler Yeats. The book conveys Synge's belief that beneath the Catholicism of the islanders, it was possible to detect a substratum of the pagan beliefs of their ancestors. His experiences in the Arans formed the basis for the plays about Irish rural life that Synge went on to write.

Synge left Paris for London in 1903. 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 staged 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 27 December 1904 to 3 January 1905.

The Shadow of the Glen is based on a story about an unfaithful wife, and was criticised by the Irish nationalist leader Arthur Griffith as "a slur on Irish womanhood". Griffith's criticism encouraged more attacks alleging that Synge described Irish women in an unfair manner. but later critics have stated he idealised the Irish peasantry too much.

When the Abbey Theatre was established, Synge was appointed literary adviser and became a director, along with Yeats and Lady Gregory. He differed from what they believed the Irish theatre should be. He wrote to Stephen MacKenna:I do not believe in the possibility of "a purely fantastic, unmodern, ideal, breezy, spring-dayish, Cuchulainoid National Theatre" ... no drama can grow out of anything other than the fundamental realities of life, which are never fantastic, are neither modern nor unmodern and, as I see them, rarely spring-dayish, or breezy or Cuchulanoid.

Synge's next play, The Well of the Saints, was staged at the Abbey in 1905, again to nationalist disapproval, and then in 1906 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The critic Joseph Holloway asserted that the play combined "lyric and dirt".

Playboy riots and after

Synge's widely regarded masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, was first performed on 26 January 1907, at the Abbey Theatre. A comedy about apparent patricide, it attracted a hostile reaction from sections of the Irish public. The Freeman's Journal described it as "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood". Arthur Griffith, who believed that the Abbey Theatre was insufficiently politically committed, described the play as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform", and perceived a slight on the virtue of Irish womanhood in the line "... a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts ..." At the time, a shift was known as a symbol representing Kitty O'Shea and her adulterous relationship with Charles Stuart Parnell.

A section of the audience at the opening rioted, causing the third act to be acted out in dumbshow. The disturbances continued for a week, interrupting the following performances. Years later, after a similar disturbance at the opening of The Plough and the Stars by Seán O'Casey, Yeats said the audience had "disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an ever-recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius? Synge first and then O'Casey?"

The writing of The Tinker's Wedding began at the same time as Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen. It took Synge five years to complete.

Death Synge died from Hodgkin lymphoma at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin on 24 March 1909, aged 37, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin.

The collected volume Poems and Translations, with a preface by Yeats, was published by the Cuala Press on 8 April 1909. Yeats and the actress and one-time fiancée Molly Allgood (Maire O'Neill) completed Synge's unfinished final play, Deirdre of the Sorrows. It was performed by the Abbey players on Thursday 13 January 1910, with Allgood as Deirdre. Masefield said that Synge's view of life originated in his poor health. In particular, Masefield said "His relish of the savagery made me feel that he was a dying man clutching at life, and clutching most wildly at violent life, as the sick man does".

Yeats described Synge as timid and shy, who "never spoke an unkind word" yet his words could "fill the streets with rioters". Richard Ellmann, the biographer of Yeats and James Joyce, stated that Synge "built a fantastic drama out of Irish life.

Synge was a political radical, immersed in the socialist literature of William Morris and in his own words "wanted to change things root and branch". Much to the consternation of his mother, he went to Paris in 1896 to become more involved in radical politics, and his interest in the topic lasted until his dying days when he sought to engage his nurses on the topic of feminism.

Legacy

Synge is generally considered by critics as the most prolific Irish playwright of the Edwardian era. While Yeats and Lady Gregory were "the centrepieces of the Irish theatrical renaissance, it was Synge ... who gave the movement its national quality ..." His plays helped set the dominant style at the Abbey Theatre until the 1940s. 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 Synge had done for the rural poor. Brendan Behan, Brinsley MacNamara, and Lennox Robinson were all indebted to Synge.

The Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier was among the first to recognise Samuel Beckett's debt to Synge. Beckett was a regular member of the audience 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.

Synge's cottage in 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, County Wicklow. Synge is the subject of Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín's 1999 documentary film, Synge agus an Domhan Thiar (Synge and the Western World). Joseph O'Connor wrote a novel, Ghost Light (2010), loosely based on Synge's relationship with Molly Allgood.

Selected 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 Deirdre of the Sorrows, 1910