by J. M. Synge
CHRISTY (kicking and screaming). O, glory be to God!
(He kicks loose from the table, and they all drag him towards the door.)
JIMMY (seeing old MAHON). Will you look what’s come in?
(They all drop CHRISTY and run left.)
CHRISTY (scrambling on his knees face to face with old MAHON). Are you coming to be killed a third time, or what ails you now?
MAHON. For what is it they have you tied?
CHRISTY. They’re taking me to the peelers to have me hanged for slaying you.
MICHAEL (apologetically). It is the will of God that all should guard their little cabins from the treachery of law, and what would my daughter be doing if I was ruined or was hanged itself?
MAHON (grimly, loosening CHRISTY) It’s little I care if you put a bag on her back, and went picking cockles till the hour of death; but my son and myself will be going our own way, and we’ll have great times from this out telling stories of the villainy of Mayo, and the fools is here. (To CHRISTY, who is freed) Come on now.
CHRISTY. Go with you, is it? I will then, like a gallant captain with his heathen slave. Go on now and I’ll see you from this day stewing my oatmeal and washing my spuds, for I’m master of all fights from now. (Pushing MAHON) Go on, I’m saying.
MAHON. Is it me?
CHRISTY. Not a word out of you. Go on from this.
MAHON (walking out and looking back at CHRISTY over his shoulder). Glory be to God! (With a broad smile) I am crazy again! (Goes.)
CHRISTY. Ten thousand blessings upon all that’s here, for you’ve turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I’ll go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day. (He goes out.)
MICHAEL. By the will of God, we’ll have peace now for our drinks. Will you draw the porter, Pegeen?
SHAWN (going up to her). It’s a miracle Father Reilly can wed us in the end of all, and we’ll have none to trouble us when his vicious bite is healed.
PEGEEN (hitting him a box on the ear). Quit my sight. (Putting her shawl over her head and breaking out into wild lamentations) Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World.
AFTERWORD SYNGE: THAT ENQUIRING MAN
by Robert Welch
In 1893, Douglas Hyde, whose pen name in Irish was An Craoibhín Aoibhinn (the Pleasant Little Branch), published a groundbreaking volume of poems in Irish, with translations, known as The Love Songs of Connacht. This was a collection of Irish love songs from the province of Connacht in the West of Ireland, with translations into English that reflected the idiom, syntax, and grammar of Irish itself and the kind of English spoken by Irish country people, which was strongly influenced by the Irish language. Hyde’s book was one of the most important instances of a cultural revolution taking place in Ireland at the time, which involved a return to origins, to the source of identity, to what was imagined as a simpler life, to indigenous traditions. This included a return to the Irish language, which, in the period from the Great Famine (1845-50) to the 1890s, had been associated with poverty, dereliction, and marginality.
W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge delighted in Hyde’s Love Songs, Yeats acclaiming them as exemplifying “thrusts of power” that “go beyond the reach of conscious art.”1 They are arresting and full of intense and surprising images that undergo swift transitions—for example: And I thought my storeen that you were the sun and the moon, and I thought after that, that you were snow on the mountain, and I thought after that that you were a lamp from God, or that you were the star of knowledge going before me and after me.2
Yeats wrote of the paradisal quality of these songs, as they seemed to him, and of how he closed Hyde’s book with sadness. And there was, in construction at that time, an idyll of the “western world,” of an Edenic place, beyond the Shannon or in the Irish countryside, where life was simpler, closer to nature, more authentic. The fact that we have now grown cynical about these allurements should not lead us to underestimate their (to some extent enduring) power.
This construction of “the west” (and of Irish rural life in general) was part of a nationalist impulse to restore Irish “dignity” (a word, by the way, to which Lady Gregory, with Yeats and Synge one of the first Directors of the Abbey, was greatly attached). So that a reevaluation of traditional Ireland was, in effect, an important part of a modernizing process by means of which Ireland could position herself as a sovereign state free from the centuries-old dominion of Britain. The idealization of Irish rural life therefore, while attractive symbolically, was also a major element in the forging of a mind-set ready to challenge British control. The imagination, in other words, had a political context that gave evocations of “the west” an extra charge all the more exciting for being a little obscured, more inferred than asserted openly.
In the Shadow of the Glen (that was its original title; now it is frequently given the briefer, less satisfying, title The Shadow of the Glen) was first staged with Yeats’s The King’s Threshold at Molesworth Hall on 8 October 1903 by the Irish National Theatre Society. This was well before the Abbey, the name later given to the Irish National Theatre, opened its doors in Abbey Street in the old Mechanics Institute on 27 December 1904.
The Irish National Theatre Society had a Reading Committee, which included Yeats, of course, along with the poet-theosophist George Russell (“AE”), the brothers William and Frank Fay (who were actors in the Society), and Padraic Colum, the poet. In approving the play, Yeats either overruled the committee or acted unilaterally, for Hyde and Maud Gonne left the Society, in part because of their objections. Gonne was Yeats’s beloved, whom he had adored for many years, and who had taken the lead part in Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s powerful nationalist play, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, in 1902.
On the one hand, there were avid nationalists, in the tradition of the Fenian Brotherhood and ultimately the IRA, who were not going to be easy to conciliate; and on the other hand, there were the likes of Hyde, peaceful and constitutional nationalists but people easy to offend by an unflattering view of the Irish peasant. And unflattering of Irish rural values In the Shadow certainly was: Maud Gonne wrote in a letter, “from all I hear I think [the play] is horrid and I will have no responsibility for it—it was forced on the company by a trick”—the trickster being of course the person to whom this letter was addressed, Yeats himself.3
Although In the Shadowmay not be “horrid,” it is, in many ways, very shocking and perhaps even a bit horrifying if you were a militarily inclined republican or a modernizing nationalist in 1903. The people in this play are a million light-years from the idealized paradisal Gaelic pastoral entertained by Hyde and necessary for revolutionary propaganda. These people are narrow, greedy, deceitful, adulterous, violent, and drunken.
The play is set in County Wicklow in Glenmalure, which Synge knew well, the family summer residence at Tomriland being close by.4 However, he heard the story on which the play is based during his first visit to the Aran Islands in 1898. A famous seanchaí or storyteller on Irishmaan called Pat Dirarie told Synge that, one night while traveling the roads, he came to a house where he found before him a young woman who had laid out the corpse of her husband. According to Dirane’s story, what happened to him was not that different from what Synge depicts in the play. Synge’s defense, therefore, against those who accused him of traducing the innate dignity of the indigenous (and Catholic) Irish was that the play only dramatized what he had heard on Irishmaan, a cradle of Gaelic civilization in the far west.
Synge conveys the actualities of Irish country life in vivid, sharp, and energetic speech, which he makes into a poetry of ferocious reality. In a preface he wrote for The Playboy of the Western World, he tells us that his writing of In the Shadow was given energy by a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house he was staying in at the time, through which he could hear the talk of the serving girls in the kitchen below. The house was Tomriland, the story out of Aran.
Far from extolli
ng the virtues of rural life and of Irish country people Synge brings to this depiction of the adulteries latent in a Wicklow glen a grim and focused poetry in a language full of charged realization and sudden vituperations. The glen is very much in shadow—a shadow of repression, loneliness, and despair. This is how Nora, the young wife, describes her husband’s death spasm to the Tramp, who arrives in the night:... he went into his bed, and he was saying it was destroyed he was, the time the shadow was going up through the glen, and when the sun set on the bog beyond he made a great lep, and let a great cry out of him, and stiffened himself out the like of a dead sheep. (p. 9)
The black comedy of this perfectly captures the precarious balance struck in Irish rural culture between grief, coldness, and a grim fascination with the specifics of illness and death. This was (and is) how Irish country people (and, I daresay, Uzbekistani or Sardinian country people) talk about the dying and the dead. There is no room for sentiment.
At the end of the play, after her husband, who has been feigning death to catch her out, shows her the door, the Tramp offers her the companionship of the roads, which is to say homelessness, cold, discomfort, but also change, adventure, freedom. The Tramp beautifully evokes the itinerant life:... you’ll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm . . . it’s fine songs you’ll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there’ll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear. (pp. 24-25)
They leave behind, in the shadow, the old man and her would-be suitor, who get into a bottle of whiskey for consolation to cure the “great drouth” (p. 25) that’s on the two of them after all the excitement.
There was uproar at all of this—drinking, carrying on outside marriage, timorousness, and deceit, rendered all the more striking by Synge’s relentless poetry of the sordid and bleak, counterbalanced only by the black comedy of the language, and the Tramp’s envisioning of the “big thrushes” on the warm days and a life unconfined by staleness and rigor.
Arthur Griffith (1871-1922), founder and first president of Sinn Féin, was outraged by the play, and from this point onward, there was unremitting strife between the Irish National Theatre Society (later the Abbey) and Irish nationalist convictions, tensions that continue, to a greater or lesser extent, to this day more than a hundred years later.
Riders to the Sea was written during 1902 and produced, again at Molesworth Hall, on 25 February 1904. It was based on incidents that occurred during Synge’s stays on Irishmaan in 1900 and 1901. In the Shadow envisions release from dead routine through life on the open road, but Riders to the Sea evokes a pagan and material world where there is no escape from iron fate.
It is a masterpiece of concentration and structure. Maurya is awaiting news of her son Michael, who has not returned from the sea. A body has been washed ashore in Donegal (the play is set on one of the Aran Islands) and a shirt and a stocking taken from the body have been sent south. This is the bundle carried by Nora, one of the daughters, as she enters at the start of the play. Leaning against the wall are the boards ready for Michael’s coffin. Suddenly the door, which she has only half closed, is blown violently open by a surge of Atlantic wind, establishing immediately the frailty and vulnerability of life lived in a tiny cottage beaten by oceanic winds and of the boats smashed by terrible seas in which men are drowned continually. Maurya, in a dire catalogue at the close of the play, tells us that she has lost her husband, her husband’s father, and six sons to the sea: eight men in all. The play brings before us the drowning of her last son, Bartley, who is to be buried in the boards brought for Michael’s coffin.
Fate is inexorable, as is the market. Maurya’s first words, when she enters and sees Cathleen, her other daughter, hiding the bundle containing Michael’s clothes in the turf loft, are: “Isn’t it turf enough you have for this day and evening?” (p. 31). This opening rebuke underlines the harshness and poverty of Aran life, a life very far from the paradisal view of the west. Cathleen tells her mother that she wants the extra turf to make sure the bread is baked for Bartley before he crosses over to Connemara on the mainland to sell the red mare and the gray pony. And this, in a sure structural development, moves into the acrimonious debate as to whether Bartley should go sailing with the wind rising up from the northeast, a bad sign. But just as Maurya has to be watchful about the turf, in this pitilessly harsh economy, Bartley cannot miss the opportunity to get a good price for the horses in Connemara. It is not just the sea, and fate, and chance that rule these lives—it is money also.
Nothing prevails against the bleak laws of this universe, even blessings or the priest, let alone the intimacy of family. What hope can there be of survival in a house where there are no men left to take to the sea to bring in the necessary food? Maurya, so preoccupied is she with the danger Bartley is submitting himself to in taking to the sea in bad weather, fails to bless him as he goes out the door, and the sisters forget to give him the freshly baked bread to take with him. There is a ritualistic implication at work that refers to benediction, communion, and the Eucharist, but only to emphasize the ineffectuality of these devices against real life.5 And what is real life is not just bad weather, but the conspiring of ill omen and unrelenting misfortune. In a futile attempt to right her omissions, Maurya goes down to the spring well to bless Bartley and give him the bread. Instead this act of Christian ritual is frozen by what she sees, “the fearfulest thing any person has seen, since the day Bride Dara seen the dead man with the child in his arms” (p. 39), as she describes it to her two daughters.
For what she saw at the spring well was the antithesis of rebirth, blessing, communion. She saw the riders to the sea, Bartley on the red mare (red is the color of the Celtic underworld, of the sidh, the fairies) and behind him, on the gray pony, her dead son Michael with new shoes on his feet.
The 1890s and the early 1900s saw a tremendous surge of interest in folklore and folk belief all over Europe, and Ireland was no exception: Hyde’s Love Songs was but one instance of the research into and the publication of folklore. Synge was himself a student of folk belief, mythology, and legend and their role in Irish and Celtic culture; while he lived in Paris, he attended the lectures on these topics by the Celticist Henrí d‘Arbois de Jubainville at the Sor bonne. It will be clear from the above account, however, that Synge’s dramatic integration of folk culture into his creative realization of the vulnerability of Aran life is no mere primitivist coloring. His use of folk culture and the survival within it of elements of pre-Christian practices and beliefs has two functions: to convey something of the absolute terror this mind experiences when confronted with evidence of a world beyond this one; and to confront his 1904 audience with the futility of Christian blessing against the dark forces of the world, no matter what they are, whether material or inscrutable.
The play was received badly by the critics but on the whole the audience loved it: on 26 February Joseph Holloway, the diarist and chronicler of virtually every Dublin play for decades, tells us that the audience responded to the final curtain with total silence, and that it could not applaud.6
By contrast, when The Playboy of the Western World was staged on 26 January 1907 at the Abbey Theatre, there were riots. The riots came about because, once again, Synge used his considerable linguistic and dramatic powers to confront reality and to render it in scenes, transactions, and interchanges that relentlessly focus on the way things really are, not what his audience would like them to be. In the preface to this play, he wrote, “All art is a collaboration” (p. 1): between the language people use in their actual circumstances and the mind of the artist as he (or she) assembles form. The trouble was that The Playboy, instead of idealizing Irish country people, and confirming the Celtic pastoralism of Hyde and the political agenda of the likes of Arthur Griffith and Maud Gonne, attacked the notion that the Irish were in any way superior to those who governed them. Synge opens up a world of drunkenness, violence, and lawlessness in his version of
County Mayo. This world bore no resemblance to the concept of Ireland promoted by what now had come to be called Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin ideology, insisting on the right of Ireland to self-governance and independence, enshrined an ideal of Irish manhood as virtuous, disciplined, and chivalrous while Irishwomen were perceived as being modest, restrained, and gentle.
No wonder The Playboy caused a riot. To many on the opening night it seemed as if Synge (suspect anyway because of his Anglo-Irish and Protestant clerical background) had gone out of his way to be offensive to Ireland and the Irish, and especially to the people of the west. His characters are priest-ridden, hypocritical, violent, and drunken, ready at one moment to idealize a killer and at the next to reject him, torture him, and inform upon him when it looks as if their erstwhile hero may draw trouble down on themselves.
Heroism itself, especially heroism associated with violence, is one of Synge’s major themes; the other is sex. One of the things that The Playboy is about is the attraction of physical violence when it is used against an oppressive force: Christy Mahon’s supposed slaying of his father, Old Mahon, (his “old man” in the Irish rural parlance). Synge is, blasphemously, playing here on Christy as the Christ-Man and Old Mahon as St. Paul’s old man who dies in the sacrificial death of Christ the Redeemer. The audience of 1907 might not have gotten the undertones completely, but they would have smelled an atheistic rat beneath the attack on Irish peasantry.
The Mayo people, especially the girls, go crazy for this wild man from the south who has killed his da, and Synge, with total clear-sightedness, acknowledges the attractions of the idea of violence to timorous minds and dysfunctional communities: the violent man embodies what they can never be. The twist Synge gives this, of course, is that their hero worship is all very well as long as it is a story, but as soon as Old Mahon appears and Christy resolves to kill his da on their very doorstep, they turn on him. Synge is preparing his audience, many of whom were active in Sinn Féin and had come along in a restive mood in any case, with a representation of a very real dilemma. It is one thing to tell yourself and others stories of Ireland’s valor and of the glory of conflict, but what will it be like actually to kill other people? As Pegeen says, at the end of the play: “there’s a great gap between a gallows story and a dirty deed. (To MEN) Take him from this, or the lot of us will be likely put on trial for his deed to-day” (p. 121). These are views that would have been expressed in Dublin in 1916. Pegeen, incidentally, was played by Synge’s fiancée, Molly Allgood, and their difficulties caused by their differences in class and religion (Molly was an orphan and Catholic) and the dominating presence of Synge’s evangelical mother, Kathleen, are woven into the play’s complex ventures into sexuality, the nature of maleness, and the problematic aspects of the sexual charge between men and women.