Plays, Poems and Prose

by J.M. Synge, Alison Smith (Introduction, Notes)

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Genres: Poetry, Literature, Irish Literature, Drama, Ireland, Fiction, Plays

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Edmund John Millington Synge (pronounced /sɪŋ/) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He 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 during its opening run at the Abbey theatre. Synge wrote many well known plays, including "Riders to the Sea", which is often considered to be his strongest literary work.

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.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I read the various works:

Riders to the Sea **** -- This play is impressive for its beauty and stark fatalism. The human struggle against nature, it seems, is doomed to certain defeat.


Playboy of the Western World **** -- This is actually the story of my careless misreading of the play. Having only a dim memory of reading it in college, I thought it was a naturalistic tragedy.

I missed some key clues to the play’s meaning or tone in the title of the play. What is a “playboy” and where is the “western world” in the deeply Irish play? Once you understand those things, you start to understand the farcical aspects of the play.

I thought playboy meant some kind of free spirit. A playboy, so I’ve learned, is not a pipe-smoking womanizer. In fin de siècle Ireland, it is a clever hoaxer or what we would call a smooth talker – charming and eloquent, but not completely reliable. “Playboy” has a similar negative and positive connotation.

The western world is, as I thought it was, the western side of Ireland. What I didn’t realize, though, is that this part of the country is consider its heartland and virtuous center. (Much like the American heartland – or “real” America – is considered.)

>> SPOILER ALERT <<

Being oblivious of the actual meaning of the title, I started reading the play as a naturalistic tragedy about young man who murders his father. But it is really a rather farcical tale of ne’er-do-well who mistakenly thinks he has killed his father and ends up being admired for this deed by the foolish people (and especially the women) of this isolated town. That is, until his father comes, and the man is rejected. And until he kills his father again, upon which the townspeople are ready to hang him, until his father is found alive and they let him go.

The play quite effectively skewers the heroic caricature, and notions of romantic of love. And the unusual dialect gives it a beautiful strangeness of poetry – both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

(But I will admit the dialect is at times annoying – it often takes characters twice as long to say something with all the extra words and oaths. If you removed all the linguistic fripperies, this would be a one-act play.)

I highly recommend this play for those who love a good story, well told, as well as unusual language.

[Glen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Synge, along with Yeats and Lady Gregory, is one of the titans of Irish theatre, and of Irish literature in general, and this collection of plays, poems, translations of classical source material, and a sizable excerpt of his writings about life on the Aran Islands (a stronghold of Irish Gaelic to this day) goes a long way toward illustrating how such a relatively short life could have such a strong influence. Far more than Yeats, Synge sought to find an authentic Irish voice, and to attempt to found a national literature upon it. He learned the language still spoken daily in the west of Ireland, something Yeats never did, and attempted to mirror its idiosyncrasies, cadences, idioms, etc. in the spoken words of his plays, whence most of his fame. In plays like The Tinker's Wedding, The Well of the Saints, and the infamous Playboy of the Western World, he held up his version of the Irish spirit for all to see, and I think was genuinely surprised that so many were offended. Unlike Yeats, Synge was never ashamed of the preoccupations of the common man, and what he lacked in Yeats' genius, he made up for in honesty and intensity. No, he is not Yeats' equal, but The Gaiety, The Abbey, The Gate, and the rest of Dublin's and Ireland's theatres would be much more the poorer were it not for his work.