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Edmund John Millington Synge
The Irish dramatist Edmund John Millington Synge (1871-1909), one of the greatest playwrights of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, made the folklore and dialect of the Irish peasantry the subject of his plays.
John Millington Synge was born on April 16, 1871, in Rathfarnham, a suburb of Dublin. He was the youngest of the eight children of John Hatch Synge, a lawyer who died when John Millington was an infant, and Kathleen Traill Synge, the daughter of a Protestant clergyman. As a child, Synge showed signs of the tubercular condition that claimed his life at the age of 38.
Synge attended private schools in Dublin and was awarded a bachelor of arts degree by Trinity College in 1892. He then traveled to Germany, intending to study the violin; but after a year of wandering, he joined the diversified group of Irish expatriates then studying in Paris. There Synge lived an almost ascetic life in the midst of bohemian surroundings, a pattern his later life also followed.
Synge's career took an unexpected turn in 1896, when he was introduced to William Butler Yeats in Paris. The older Irish poet urged Synge to abandon his French studies and to devote himself to a study of his own people and their culture, for which his knowledge of Gaelic had well prepared him. Synge took Yeats's advice. After intensive research in the remote Aran Islands and in County Wicklow, he presented his first play, The Shadow of the Glen (1903), to the Irish National Theatre. Irish newspapers greeted it as "an insult to every decent woman in Ireland."
In 1904 Synge became codirector of the Abbey Theatre with Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. The Abbey produced his classic tragedy of the Aran Islands, Riders to the Sea, in 1904. Synge's plays met with continued hostility because of their seeming slight to Irish country people. Audiences walked out of The Well of the Saints (1905); The Tinker's Wedding (1907) has never been produced professionally in Ireland.
Synge's comic masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World (1907), caused riots upon its presentation both in Dublin and in the United States. The author once commented mildly on the furor caused by his work, "We shall have to establish a Society for the Preservation of Irish Humor." His last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows (1909), was produced posthumously; it was found nearly completed in the Dublin nursing home where Synge died on March 24, 1909. He had been nursed in his final illness by Marie O'Neill, a leading actress of the Abbey Theatre, whom he had hoped to marry.
Further Reading
An early and still useful biography of Synge is Maurice Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (1913). Several later studies bring to light information not available to his first biographer: David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, John Millington Synge, 1871-1909 (1959); Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1965); and Donna L. Gerstenberger, John Millington Synge (1965).
On Synge's work with the Abbey Theatre, Alan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama (1961), and Elizabeth Coxhead, John Millington Synge and Lady Gregory (1962), provide the necessary background, while Adelaide D. Estill, The Sources of Synge (1939), discusses the materials Synge used in his plays. The best short study of Synge is Denis Johnston's pamphlet, John Millington Synge (1965). Important references to Synge are in William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies (1914; repr. 1961), and valuable essays on him are in Robin Skelton and David R. Clark, eds., Irish Renaissance; A Gathering of Essays, Memoirs and Letters from the Massachusetts Review (1965), and Robin Skelton and Ann Saddlemyer, eds., The World of W. B. Yeats: Essays in Perspective (1965).
Additional Sources
Bickley, Francis Lawrance, J. M. Synge and the Irish dramatic movement, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1975.
J.M. Synge, 1871-1909, New York: New York University Press, 1989.
J. M. Synge: interviews and recollections, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977.
Kiely, David M., John Millington Synge: a biography, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.
Masefield, John, John M. Synge: a few personal recollections with biographical note, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978.
Stephens, Edward M., My uncle John; Edward Stephens's life of J. M. Syng, London, Oxford University Press, 1974.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
John Millington Synge
For more information on John Millington Synge, visit Britannica.com.
Irish Literature Companion:
[Edmund] John Millington Synge
Synge, [Edmund] J[ohn] M[illington] (1871-1909), playwright. Born in Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin, to a family of ecclesiastics and landowners. In childhood Synge began to study Charles Darwin, and found it increasingly difficult to accept his mother's religious outlook. Educated at TCD, where he learnt Irish, his interest in the language was rewarded with the Irish Prize (1892). He travelled to Germany, where he studied music; but, turning to literature, he settled in Paris in 1895. He attended lectures on Celtic civilization given by Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville at the Sorbonne, and wrote criticism for various journals. In 1896 in Paris Synge met W. B. Yeats, recently returned from Aran. Yeats urged Synge to abandon the attempt to make himself an interpreter of French literature in England, but to go to Aran and-as Yeats put it-‘express a life that has never found expression’. In 1897 Synge suffered the first attack of the Hodgkin's disease which would kill him. In May 1898 he visited Inishmore, largest of the Aran Islands, before moving on to Inishmaan. He returned to Aran in the summers of 1899, 1900, 1901, and 1902, amassing his notes for The Aran Islands. Later visits to the congested districts of Connemara and Mayo, as well as to West Kerry, further enriched his knowledge of the west; but he did not give up his residence in Paris until 1903. In translations from Keating and other Irish originals Synge attended to the distinctive codes and rhythms of Irish; and drawing also upon the persistence in Hiberno-English of Gaelic speech patterns, he forged his uniquely bilingual dramatic language. Hyde had employed a similar technique in Love Songs of Connacht (1893), but no one prosecuted this method with the wide-awake linguistic intelligence of Synge. Calling for a theatre which would once again reconcile reality and joy, Synge achieved this fusion in a language based on the actual speech of Irish people. Synge, recognizing that there was no tradition of Irish-language drama, and that none of the Abbey actors was a native speaker, decided that his dramatic language would be a form of English based on the syntax and locutions of Irish. Synge's early work, such as Vita vecchia (1895-7) and Étude morbide (1899), fails through mawkishness and over-subjectivity. He completed The Aran Islands late in 1901, and in it he describes the shock of his encounter with the reality of people living their lives in close contact with nature and the elements. In 1902 he wrote In the Shadow of the Glen (produced 1903); and Riders to the Sea (produced 1904), based on an incident he had heard recounted on Aran; and drafted the comedy The Tinker's Wedding (produced 1909). By the time the Abbey Theatre opened in 1904 Synge was accepted by Yeats and Lady Gregory as the leading playwright of the literary revival, becoming a Director in 1905, and Managing Director in 1908. In 1905 the Abbey staged The Well of the Saints, a play brutally contrasting the world of illusion with that of harsh fact. The Playboy of the Western World, in many respects the master-work of the Abbey Theatre, was staged in January 1907, provoking riotous demonstrations. The hero, a verbal master drawing upon the vocabulary of Connacht love-song, is also cowardly and vicious. The play subjects imagination to unflinching moral scrutiny. The riots occurred because the play offended a nationalist audience who wanted simpler images of the Western world. The role of Pegeen Mike was created for Molly Allgood, to whom Synge became engaged; but then Hodgkin's disease recurred, leading to the post-ponement of their marriage plans. The realization that his disease was fatal hangs over the mood of his last play, unfinished at his death, Deirdre of the Sorrows. Synge's poetry, published in Poems and Translations (1911), reflects his view that verse would have to become brutal if it was to recover its full humanity. Synge based his work on his own experience of Irish country people, and his writing reflects a ‘collaboration’, a term he used in the Playboy preface, between hardship and imagination.
Bibliography
Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language (1979); and Mary C. King, The Drama of J. M. Synge (1985).
Columbia Encyclopedia:
Synge, John Millington
(sĭng) , 1871–1909, Irish poet and dramatist, b. near Dublin, of Protestant parents. He was an important figure in the Irish literary renaissance. As a young man he studied music in Germany and later lived in Paris, where he wrote literary criticism. In Paris he met his compatriot William Butler Yeats, who persuaded Synge to live for a while in the Aran Islands and then return to Dublin and devote himself to creative work. All of Synge's plays reflect his experiences in the Aran Islands. Intense and poetic in style, his works depict the bleak and tragic lives of Irish peasants and fisherfolk. His first two one-act plays—In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), a comedy, and Riders to the Sea (1904), a tragedy—were presented by the Irish National Theatre Society. In 1904 this group, with Synge, Yeats, and Lady Gregory as codirectors, organized the famous Abbey Theatre. Two of Synge's comedies, The Well of the Saints (1905) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), were presented by the Abbey players. The latter play created a furor of resentment among Irish patriots stung by Synge's spoof of heroic ideals and nationalism. His later works were The Tinker's Wedding, published in 1908 but not produced for fear of further riots, and Deirdre of the Sorrows, a tragedy unfinished at the time of his death but presented by the Abbey players in 1910. The Aran Islands (1907) is Synge's journal of his stay on the islands.Bibliography
See biographies by D. H. Greene and E. M. Stephens (1959) and D. Gerstenberger (1964); studies by D. Corkery (1931, repr. 1965), M. Bourgeois (1913, repr. 1969), W. B. Yeats (1911, repr. 1971), R. Skelton (1971), and M. C. King (1985).
Wikipedia:
John Millington Synge
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| Born: | 16 April 1871 Rathfarnham, Dublin, Ireland |
|---|---|
| Died: | 24 March 1909 (aged 37) Elpis Nursing Home, Dublin, Ireland |
| Occupation: | novelist short story writer playwright poet essayist |
| Nationality: | Irish |
| Genres: | Drama, fictional prose |
| Literary movement: | Folklore Irish Literary Revival |
| Influences: | William Butler Yeats Seán O'Casey William Wordsworth |
| Influenced: | Samuel Beckett Padraig Pearse Peig Sayers Seamus Heaney |
Edmund John Millington Synge (IPA: /sɪŋ/) (April 16, 1871 – March 24, 1909) 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. He wrote many famous stories like "Riders to the Sea" which was his best literary work.
Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that was then untreatable. He died just weeks short of his 38th birthday and was at the time trying to complete his last play, The Last Black Supper.
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 Great Irish Famine (1845–1849).
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 . His reading of Darwin coincided with a crisis of faith and Synge abandoned the Protestant religion of his upbringing around this time.
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
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.
Aran Islands
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 Butler 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
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 initially made no attempt to have it performed, 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".
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 Theater in Berlin.
Playboy riots and after
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. The Freeman's Journal described the play as "an unmitigated,
protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood".[1] Egged on by nationalists, including Arthur Griffith, who believed that the theatre was insufficiently politically active 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, and decided to call in the police. Press opinion soon turned against the rioters and the protests petered out. Yeats later 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? | ” |
The Tinker's Wedding was completed in 1907 and performed in London in 1909. That same year, Synge got 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 April 8 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.
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),
Notes
- ^ Ferriter, Diarmaid (2004). The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000. Profile Books, 94-95. ISBN 1861973071.
References
- Greene, David H. & Stephens, Edward M. "J.M. Synge 1871–1909" (The MacMillan Company New York 1959)
- Igoe, Vivien. A Literary Guide to Dublin. (Methuen, 1994) ISBN 0-413-69120-9
- Kiely, David M. John Millington Synge: A Biography (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1994) ISBN 0-312-13526-2
- McCormack, W. J. Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge (New York University Press, 2001) ISBN 0-8147-5652-2
- Mercier, Vivian, Beckett/Beckett (OUP 1977) ISBN 0-19-281269-6
- Ryan, Philip B. The Lost Theatres of Dublin. (The Badger Press, 1998) ISBN 0-9526076-1-1
- Synge, J.M.. The Complete Plays. 1st. New York: Vintage Books, 1935.
- Synge, J.M.; "The Aran Islands" edited with an introduction by Tim Robinson (Penguin 1992) ISBN 0-14-018432-5
Online
- John Millington Synge, Princess Grace Irish Library. Retrieved on 2007-08-31.
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
| Works by John Millington Synge | |
|---|---|
| Plays: | In the Shadow of the Glen ♦ Riders to the Sea ♦ The Well of the Saints ♦ The Aran Islands ♦ The Playboy of the Western World ♦ The Tinker’s Wedding ♦ Deirdre of the Sorrows ♦ In Wicklow and West Kerry |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Irish Literature Companion. The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Copyright © 1996, 2000, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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