Synge, (Edmund) John Millington

Synge, (Edmund) John Millington (1871–1909), Irish dramatist, with Yeats a leading figure in the Irish dramatic movement. Although he died prematurely, his six completed plays establish him as the greatest of modern Irish dramatists. His control of structure, whether in comedy or tragedy, is assured; his revelation of the characters and thought-processes of a subtle and imaginative peasantry is penetrating; his language, and especially his imagery, is rich, live, and essentially poetic. An early play, When the Moon Has Set, apparently written in 1901 and rejected for production by Yeats and Lady Gregory, was found among his papers after his death and published with his other works in 1962–8; but the first of his plays to be performed, by the Irish National Dramatic Society, was In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), the first of a series of grave, original studies of Irish thought and character which drew upon the author the hostility of some of his early audiences. It was first seen in London in 1904, and was followed by Riders to the Sea, produced by the Abbey Theatre in the same year, a one-act tragedy whose brevity and intensity make it one of the best of modern short plays. It was first seen in London in 1904, in a double bill with In the Shadow of the Glen, and in New York in 1920. A third play, The Tinker's Wedding, begun as early as 1902 but revised several times before its publication in 1908, was given its first production in London in 1909, being considered ‘too dangerous’ for an Abbey audience; but its comedy, drawn from the life of the Irish roads, is richer and more jovial than any other that Synge wrote. It was seen in New York, with Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen, in 1957. The Well of the Saints (Dublin and London, 1905; NY, 1931) is another comedy in which poetic beauty is mingled with an underlying irony that is potentially tragic. The climax of Synge's achievements in the theatre is the comedy of bitter, ironic, yet imaginative realism, The Playboy of the Western World (1907). The unsparing though sympathetic portraiture in this play caused riots in the Abbey Theatre on its first production, and disturbances led by certain Irish patriots when it was first produced in New York in 1911. It had its first London production in 1907. It has long been accepted as Synge's finest work; his power is here seen at its fullest, as it could not be in the unfinished and unrevised Deirdre of the Sorrows, his last play, in which he turned back, as Yeats had done before him, to the ancient legends of Ireland. This was first produced posthumously at the Abbey in 1910 and was seen in London in the same year.