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2. John Millington Synge (1871-1909)
Life
John Millington Synge was born in I87I in Rathfarnham, now absorbed into the
suburbs of south Dublin. His father died in the following year, and Mrs
Synge, left with five children and a reduced income, moved to a house next
door to her mother in nearby Rathgar. John was a sickly asthmatic child, and
labored under the burden of his mother's vivid belief in hell-fire. An early
love of the countryside and wildlife afforded some relief from the fond
oppressions of home. Within a few years he no longer regarded himself as a
Christian, but as a worshipper of a new goddess, Ireland. He gulped the
patriotic balladry published in a nationalist newspaper, the Nation, and
scoured the countryside in search of the Irish antiquities he read about in
the writings of George Petrie.
Synge's enthusiasm for Irish matters did not close his
mind to a wider cultural heritage. He took up the violin, and, while
scraping through a second-class degree at Trinity College, which introduced
him to the Irish and to the Hebrew, he worked for and won a scholarship in
counterpoint from the Royal Irish Academy of Music. It seemed that music was
going to be his life.
In 1898 Synge visited Aran; he must have carried with him a
heavy freight of moods, ideas and expectations. Synge lived for a month on
this more primitive island, and also briefly visited Inis Oirr. He spent his
time drowsing on the walls that looms over the cottages, wandering with
Mairtin or alone, taking photographs of the islanders (photographs
mysteriously in tune with the moods of his prose), and picking up folktales
and anecdotes, including those that were to grow into The Shadow of the
Glen and The Playboy of the Western World. And above all, he
wrote. A frequent entry in his laconic diary is the single word 'Ecrit'.
Some at least of this writing was done in little notebooks that would fit
into the palm of the hand and that he could use outdoors.
In November 1901, Synge delivered the manuscript of
The Aran Islands to a London publisher Yeats had suggested, Grant Allen,
who soon returned it. He doggedly pursued his commitment to the Celtic by
following a course in Old Irish at the Sorbonne, where he was frequently the
lecturer's sole hearer. These were his seasons of endurance, and they were
at last rewarded by a creative outflow; during the next summer, which he
spent with his mother in a rented house in Wicklow, he wrote The Shadow
of the Glen and Riders to the Sea, and began The Tinker's Wedding.
The two completed plays were very welcomed to Yeats and Lady Gregory, for
their Irish National Theatre was more blessed with talented actors than with
plays worth acting. Synge spent twenty-five days in Inis Oirr in October but
did not visit Inis Meain; it was his last trip to the islands and was not
reflected in his already completed book.
The Well of the Saints
The Well of the Saints was performed in February
I905, and evoked the same rage in nationalist quarter as had The Shadow
of the Glen. In The Shadow of the Glen a vagrant went to Nora’s
house for raining. She keeps deathwatch for her husband but it’s a fraud for
her husband did not actually die and his aim is to find out Nora’s adultery.
Nora later finds out her lover’s desire is just her husband’s property after
they are caught. Conversely, the sympathetic vagrant is pleased to take her
a new life after she had been driven away by her husband. The work expressed
heroine’s expectation of pursuing love and freedom as well as attacked
typical marriage without love in contemporary Irish village. In The Well
of the Saints a happy blind couple are cured miraculously by the well of
the saints and find the other is ugly which they had never thought so. The
world is also very hard to be accepted for its ugliness and corruption. The
original harmony and happiness are broken. Sometimes people’s happiness is
sustained in the support of vision, to a great extent. Some seeming grace
will possibly bring disaster. Indeed this grim and comic morality of
uncaring youth and foolish age, in which even sanctity and miracle appear as
tactless intrusions into hard-won if fantasizing accommodations with
reality, holds little comfort for anyone.
In writing a play, Synge was able to select stories told and
phrases daily spoken by living Irish men and women (of course, it is the
pickings of his selection, and their arrangement, that Synge's critics
attack). His characters are penetrating and acceptable, his language is
rich, alive and poetic, in some measure. The diction and the style were
entirely owned and used by a common people, forcing the audience collected
in the theatre to consider its common culture peculiar and artful. By the
structure and limitations of a play, Synge didn't interfere with intrusive
comments; he focused his audience first to the language and lives of their
countrymen. Likewise, he didn't use England's blank verse or couplets, or
France's Alexandrines: historically the schemes used to carry the lines
recited in the theatre. He deemed the rhythms inherent in common country
speech worthy of transcription and performance, believing his audience would
think the same by showing some backward facets of defects in Irish people.
Like Shakespeare, Synge was a master of language, and held the strongest ken
for creating characters so real that all could believe in.
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