Lendle

This book is a comprehensive reflection on the life of John Millington Synge, his plays, and his contributions to the Irish Theatre.Edmund John Millington Synge (16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, travel 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 his play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre.Although he came from an Anglo-Irish 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 at the time untreatable. He died just weeks short of his 38th birthday and was at the time trying to complete his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows.The play widely regarded as Synge's masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, was first performed in the Abbey on 26 January 1907. The comedy centers on the story of apparent patricide and attracted a wide hostile reaction from the Irish public. The Freeman's Journal described it as "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood". Egged on by nationalists, including Arthur Griffith, who believed that the theatre was insufficiently politically active and described it 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 shift ..." At the time a shift was known as a symbol representing Kitty O'Shea and adultery. However, George Watson explained the real problem with the play when he says, "this heady mixture of English stereotypical images of Irish violence, of Irish resentment of those images, and of Synge's stress on violence, which for him is almost synonymous with vitality, is, far more than the word 'shift', what made The Playboy so explosive." A significant portion of the crowd rioted, causing the third act of the play to be acted out in dumbshow.Yeats returned from Scotland to address the crowd on the second night, and decided to call in the police. Press opinion soon turned against the rioters and the protests petered out. Years later he referred to this incident in a speech to the Abbey audience in 1926 on the fourth night of Seán O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, when he declared: "You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an ever-recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius? Synge first and then O'Casey?"Although writing of The Tinker's Wedding begun at the same time as Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen, it took Synge five years to complete, and was finished in 1907. Riders was performed in the Racquet Court theatre in Galway 4–8 January 1907 and not performed again until 1909, and only then in London. The first critic to respond to the play was Daniel Corkery, who said, "One is sorry Synge ever wrote so poor a thing, and one fails to understand why it ever should have been staged anywhere." This claim was popularly held by critics for many decades after. That same year, Synge became engaged to the Abbey actress Maire O'Neill (formerly known as Molly Allgood). He died at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin. His Poems and Translations was published by the Cuala Press on 8 April 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. Synge died in Dublin on 24 March 1909. He is buried in Mount Jerome Graveyard, Harolds Cross, Dublin, Ireland.