Collected Plays, Poems and the Aran Islands

by J.M. Synge

This edition includes "The Shadow of the Glen", "Riders to the Sea" and four other plays, in addition to the "Playboy of the Western World". Also included are "Poems and Translations" and the complete text of "The Aran Islands", Synge's account of life off the Western coast of Ireland.

Genres: Ireland, Poetry, Plays

382 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1996

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

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Millington Synge was a rising poet and playwright, among other things, in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Ireland. His contemporaries included W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory who also helped to found the Irish National Theatre. Unlike Yeats and Gregory, however, Synge was content to let Gaelic fall to the wayside and he wasn't as dramatic in nature as his counterparts. He wanted to preserve Ireland, but not cripple it during its forward progression.

The book is a great compilation of Synge's work. It includes a number of his famous, and controversial, plays that teeter ever so awkwardly between the dark and the comedic. It also includes several of his poems, also following in the same character as his plays, along with the writings he compiled on the Aran Islands. These islands number three and were some of the last primitive settlements still available to Ireland. Much like the flora and fauna of isolated islands that Darwin was so fascinated with, Synge was impressed with the people and harsh landscape of the Aran Islands. Much of his poetry and plays borrowed not only from the language of the islands, but the customs and beliefs as well.

Synge lived a very short life, dying at the age of 37, but he left a timestamp on the world of Ireland that helps current readers to understand and appreciate the lives of post-modern Ireland.