The Irish have never known quite what to make of John Millington Synge (1871– 1909), a major stalwart, with Lady Augusta Gregory and William Butler Yeats, of the Irish Literary Revival and a director of the Abbey Theatre, which produced his plays. His best-known work, The Playboy of the Western World, a satirical farce that still manages to remain unclassifiable as to tone and intention, brought its author notoriety when it opened in Dublin in 1907. Nationalist reviewers found the play “dreadful,” an “offensive production,” and a “sordid, squalid, and repulsive picture of Irish life and character.” Audiences’ negative reactions led to disruptions of performances.
Like many members of the Protestant Anglo–Irish governing class, Synge was fascinated by the customs and speech of the Catholic peasantry. A fluent speaker of Irish, he found something in the musical cadences of the language, its color and extravagance of expression, that he could render in a Hiberno–English that imitated the speech he heard among the wayfarers in his native Wicklow, and especially among the fisherfolk, weavers, publicans, and plain people of the Aran Islands.
W. B. Yeats took credit in his autobiographies for having steered Synge in the direction that looks in retrospect almost preordained for him to fulfill his artistic destiny. “I said, ‘Give up Paris… . Go to the Aran Islands,’” Yeats wrote—though there seems to be some question as to whether his memory of their encounter in Paris was accurate. This has, in any event, become
