by J. M. Synge
Christy is the playboy, in whom the masculine sexual impulses are “at play”: he plays at being the boy, the “boyo.” But he also plays in other fields. It should be recalled that, at this time in history, Sig mund Freud was developing his theories of sexual complexes and of the psychopathology of sex, and that Carl Jung was beginning work on the archetypal structure of the unconscious, which included analysis of the anima, as the feminine impulse, repressed in the male at a cost.
Act Two opens with a strange scene: Christy is looking at himself in the mirror, alone on stage, and he thinks that he has begun, physically, to change now that he has assumed the role of the hero who killed his da (the Freud connection is obvious). Looking into the mirror he says: “Didn’t I know rightly I was handsome.... I’ll be growing fine skin from this day, the way I’ll have a soft lovely skin on me” (pp. 74-75). Now the girls arrive, Christy sees them through the window (he says, “Stranger girls” [p. 75], and Synge in this phrase acknowledges the strangeness of male/female encounters in highly charged states) and hides. They arrive, bearing gifts for the parricide hero, and are disappointed not to find him there. One of the girls wonders if the en crustations on his boots are blood, but Sara, bolder than the rest, says its just the rusty bog water, and pulls one on. Again Synge is deliberately turning his play into a play on boys and girls, what they are and how they look (mirrors again) and this theme of cross-dressing is another implication in the play of the shifting nature of sexual identity. While the audience would not necessarily be conscious of the theme, they would certainly not be too happy with this type of carrying-on. The transvestism theme returns at the end of the play, when Sara and the Widow Quin try to dress up Christy in one of Sara’s petticoats so he can get away from the crowd, who now want to hang the hero they earlier elevated to superman status. This is what T. S. Eliot called “savage farce” when he attempted to describe the mixture of comedy, horror, grim cruelty, and irrepressive life in Marlowe’s late play The Jew of Malta.7The instability of sexual identity is linked to instability in the way communities perceive themselves and others; there is an instability of self-perception (Christy’s not the man he thought he was, or is he?); and there is instability in others (Sara says of Pegeen: “Her like does often change” [p. 117]). And there is a great change coming over the playboy himself. It is, quite evidently, a play in which everything is shifting. Far from there being in it a vision of the west as charming, consoling, full of blarney, a friendly drink, and mild delight, with the odd frisson of violence to liven things up (as in John Ford’s film The Quiet Man), Synge’s west is dark, unpredictable, driven by sexual tensions and frustrations, where drink is a means of ensuring temporary oblivion from the chaos of suspicion, hatred, and petty greed. Is there such a thing as a personality or character at all? One of Synge’s favorite locutions from Hiberno-English (“The likes of,” “her like,” “it’s like I’m saying”) more than hints that what is thought of as identity may be no more than gestures of simulation rather than something ordained and laid down.
All of this goes to explain why an audience, packed with Sinn Féin adherents, found this play offensive. So that when Christy says he wouldn’t give Pegeen for “a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself” (p. 119), there had been so much shifting about and inference and insinuation going on that they were ready to blow. And there was total uproar, because the audience did not know what kind of Ireland this was that Synge was presenting to them. In all kinds of ways, their reaction was entirely understandable. This was an insult to Irish womanhood, Irish civility, Irish hospitality, Irish goodness. There were shouts of “Sinn Féin forever,” “Bring out the author and we’ll deal with him,” “This is not the west.”8
On the opening night, Yeats was in Aberdeen, where he received a telegram from Lady Gregory, saying, “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.”9 Disturbances continued through the week: on Tuesday, 29 January, the police were called in, a act that was guaranteed to inflame Sinn Féin, and on Monday, 4 February, there was a public debate during which Synge had few to defend him. He himself did not appear. He was ill, and it is hardly any wonder, given that his health was unsure anyway, and now he was suffering the added strain of seeing the woman he loved, Molly Allgood, subjected to public odium for playing the part of (what seemed to many) something not too remote from a whore.
The gap between reality and what the human mind, in its efforts to console itself, makes of it—in particular, the reality of relations between men and women—is what drives the inquiry that is The Playboy, and became the subject of Synge’s last, unfinished, play, Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910). But Synge was dead before the Abbey produced it.
Yeats described Synge, very accurately, as “that enquiring man.”10 He did not “celebrate” rural or ancient Ireland; he explored it, as would a psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist. The language he developed in his work is quite different from what Hyde and Lady Gregory achieved. While they used Gaelic forms in Hiberno-English syntax to bring life and vitality to their work, his became an instrument of keen incision into the body of his material. His language is poetic, yes, and wild and baroque at times, but he is always alert to how its forms convey the actuality of the situation. Toward the end of The Playboy, Christy turns on his da, this time in front of everyone. Old Mahon puts him down, trying to assert his old authority: “Shut your gullet and come on with me.” But Christy replies, shifting now into a new gear, “I’m going, but I’ll stretch you first” (p. 119). That is the way people talk in fights. It is real, but it is also attentive to the reality of power and change in father-son relations. This is no local color: this is Vienna, Freud, the reality of violence in everyday life.
Synge’s influence on Irish drama has been immense, in one way. His language seemed more picturesque than it was, and it has had many lesser, though not uninteresting, imitators: T. C. Murray, R. J. Ray, Rutherford Mayne, and down to Martin McDonogh in the late 1990s. But very few dramatists or artists face the challenges that Synge faced, brilliantly described by Yeats in the same stanza of the poem already quoted, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”: he “chose the living world for text.” Synge’s drama is crammed with the life of his time, which makes it, like Ben Jonson‘s, timeless.
ENDNOTES
1 Robert Welch (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 93.
2 Douglas Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht (Irish University Press, Shannon, 1968; reprint of the 1893 edition published by T. Fisher Unwin, London), p. 43.
3 Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (eds.), The Gonne-Yeats Letters: 1893-1938 (Hutchinson, London, 1992), p. 174.
4 W. J. McCormack, Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge (Weiden feld & Nicolson, London, 2000), p. 236, where the location is identified specifically as “a Glenmalure cottage, close to the Black Banks.”
5 See Mary C. King, The Drama of J. M. Synge (Fourth Estate, London, 1985), p. 63.
6 Robert Hogan and Michael J. O‘Neill (eds.), Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from His Unpublished Journal (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1967), p. 35.
7 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (Faber & Faber, London, 1932), p. 123.
8 R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life: Volume I: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford University Press, New York, 1997), p. 360.
9 ibid.
10 W. B. Yeats, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” Collected Poems (Macmillan, London, 1958), p. 149.
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