ࡱ> BDA%` bjbjNN 0,,,VVVV,p.(-------$h/h1.uuu.*.uv-u- 0O]VF-@.0p.21L22h: ..} p.uuuu   The Book of Irish Writers, Chapter 35 J.M. Synge, 18711909 I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. John Millington Synge has been called a watcher from the shadows, someone who observes - but never quite fits in. Synge, who is best remembered for The Playboy of the Western World, was born into a middle class, strongly evangelical family in Rathfarnham. His father died before his first birthday and Synge was raised by strong-minded women. A sickly child and adult he constantly found himself breaking out of his familys values and Christian beliefs. An interest in natural history led him to read Darwin when he was 16 or 17. This provoked a crisis of faith which reinforced his isolation: I laid a chasm between myself and my kindred and friends. As a young man, he attended Trinity College and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. His Music studies, considered frivolous by many in his family, lead Synge to spend at least part of each year abroad during his twenties - mostly in Paris. But his interests gradually turned away from music to literature, art and languages, including Irish. In 1896, aged 25, he met W.B. Yeats in Paris. Yeats famously advised: Give up Paris . Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people express a life that has never found expression. But this is Yeatss version - and we should take it with a pinch of salt. Synge was already engaged in the study of Ireland and its culture. As he remarked about his teenage loss of religious faith: Soon after I had relinquished the Kingdom of God I began to take a real interest in the Kingdom of Ireland. It was in 1898 that he made the first of his visits to the Arans three isolated  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island" \o "Island" islands at the mouth of  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galway_Bay" \o "Galway Bay" Galway Bay. These visits were central to his development as a writer. The habits of exact observation - which he had learned from his study of natural history - were now turned on the language, the customs, and the folklore of the islanders. The lonesome Synge envied their sense of community, but knew that he would never be a full member of it: On some days I feel this island as a perfect home on other days I feel that I am a waif among the people. The essays he began to write here were, to his mind, his first serious work. Theyre important in their own right, but they also provide material which he used in his plays and it was in the theatre where Synge finally found a community that he could fit into. His first play, In the Shadow of the Glen, was produced in 1903, when he was 32. Another five plays would follow in the six remaining years of Synges life. His greatest work is The Playboy of the Western World. Its basic plot - a stranger enters a house in the country; confusion follows had already been used by Farquhar, Goldsmith, Boucicault, Wilde, Yeats and Lady Gregory. Synges genius as a playwright was to compress the romantic, comedic, political, sexual and tragic aspects of those previous works into one play. Christy Mahon is on the run, having killed his father. He is given refuge in a shebeen or a pub - run by Pegeen Mike. Initially fearful, Christy finds that as he tells and re-tells his story so he grows in stature as it grows. Christy: its great luck and company Ive won me till Im thinking wasnt I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by? No-one condemns him as a murderer theyre too busy enjoying the way he tells the tale! But, it turns out that his father is not dead and the community which had treated Christy as a hero rejects him when his father - very much alive - re-appears! Christy pleads for Pegeens affection: Christy: Its Pegeen Im seeking only, and whatd I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself? His reference to womens underclothes was too much for the audience at the first performance in the Abbey Theatre in 1907. They took it as an insult to Irish womanhood and rioted. Cast out by the community, Christy vows to: go romancing through a romping lifetime. Pegeen is left alone to lament the loss of the richness of his language and storytelling. Despite the energy of his writing, Synge never a well man - was increasingly ill. 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