J. M. Synge
Personal Information
Description
Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Tinker's Wedding (1909). Although he came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background, his writings mainly concern working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Owing to his ill health, Synge was schooled at home. His early interest was in music, leading to a scholarship and degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music. He abandoned this career path in 1894 with a move to Paris where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and then returned to Ireland. Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease. He died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer, while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered by some as his masterpiece, though unfinished during his lifetime. Although he left relatively few works, they are widely regarded as of high cultural significance. Source: [Wikipedia](
Books
The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays
This volume from one of Ireland's greatest playwrights includes "In the Shadow of the Glen," "Riders to the Sea," and "The Playboy of the Western World."
The complete plays
The Playboy of the Western World (Hereford Plays)
A young man stumbles into a rural public house in western Ireland claiming to be on the run after having killed his father. He immediately becomes a source of awe and an object of adoration, and even love. But what happens when the inhabitants of this tiny village find out all is not as the stranger claims? J. M. Synge first presented The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the 26th of January, 1907. The performance immediately offended Irish nationalists by seemingly insulting the Irish people and language, and the general public, by being an offense against moral order. Before it was even finished, it was disrupted by a riot that soon spread out into the city. When it was performed in 1911 in the U.S., the play was again greeted with scorn and the company arrested for an immoral performance. But as Synge himself attempts to explain in the preface to his play, rather than attack Irish Gaelic, he wanted to show the relationship between the imagination of the Irish country people and their speech, which is “rich and living,” and that his use of such language reflects reality in a way missing from other modern drama. He later insisted that his plot was not to be taken as social realism, but died in 1909 before the play finally gained broader appeal in the wider world. Since then the significance of The Playboy of the Western World has been recognized and celebrated both for its characterizations and its rich use of dialect.
The Aran Islands
"In the late 1890s, John M. Synge, in his middle twenties and unsure of his vocations made his way to Paris intending to study French literature and become a literary critic. There he met William Butler Yeats. The eminent poet advised Synge to drop his involvements with fin de siecle French authors, return to Ireland, and describe a society with which he had some natural connection. Yeats recommended that Synge visit the Aran Islands, primitive and absolutely authentic places about which little had yet been written."--BOOK JACKET. "Synge first traveled to the Aran Islands in 1898. His six-week trip proved to be a wonderfully fruitful and decisive experience. He then went back for part of each summer until 1902. The book that he wrote - and that he called his "first serious piece of work" - was published in 1907. What he learned from his visits to the Aran Islands led directly to the great plays for which he is chiefly remembered."--BOOK JACKET.
Short Plays
Irish writer George Bernard Shaw began his career as a novelist. But he is most remembered as one of the greatest English-language playwrights of the modern era. Shaw’s best-known plays are his long-form, evening-length works like Man and Superman. But over his long career, he also wrote many shorter works. This edition collects Shaw’s short English-language plays published between 1901 and 1927. There are historical works like “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” which imagines a meeting between William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I, and “Great Catherine,” set in Imperial Russia. There are short farces like “How He Lied to Her Husband” and “The Fascinating Foundling,” and political pieces like “Press Cuttings” and “Augustus Does His Bit.” Then, too, there are serious works like the heartwrenching “The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet” and the existential drama “The Glimpse of Reality.” Where Shaw wrote prefaces to these shorter plays, they are also included here.