The Rendering of Irish Characters in Selected Plays by J.M. Synge Diplomarbeit

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The Rendering of Irish Characters in Selected Plays by J.M. Synge

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Deborah SIEBENHOFER

am Institut für Anglistik Begutachter: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Martin Löschnigg

Graz, 2010

I dedicate this thesis to my mother in profound gratitude for her endless patience, support, and encouragement.

Pastel drawing of J. M. Synge by James Paterson, 1906

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place, Towards nightfall upon a race Passionate and simple like his heart

(W. B. Yeats, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”) 2

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations ...... 5 1. Introduction ...... 6 1.1. The Irish National Theatre ...... 8 1.2. The Stage Irishman ...... 12 1.2.1. The Stage Irishman up to the 19th Century ...... 12 1.2.2. The 19th Century ...... 14 1.2.3. The 20th Century ...... 16 2. John Millington Synge and Irish Drama ...... 18 2.1. A Brief Biographical Note ...... 18 2.2. The Evolution of the Dramatist - Darwin and the Aran Islands ...... 19 2.2.1. “He found his genius and his peace” – The Aran Islands ...... 20 2.2.2. Nature and Naturalism ...... 22 2.3. Primitivism and Synge‟s Conception of „Irishness‟ ...... 23 2.3.1. „Orientalism‟ ...... 26 2.4. “The delicate harmony of thought and phrase” - Synge‟s Concern with Language . 28 2.4.1. Linguistic Devices and Anglo-Irish Features in Synge‟s Drama ...... 30 2.4.2. “Every life is a symphony” – Rhythm in Synge‟s Drama ...... 32 3. The Shadow of the Glen ...... 34 3.1. The Play ...... 34 3.1.1. Source and Adaptation ...... 35 3.1.2. Setting ...... 36 3.1.3. Cognitive Dissonance ...... 37 3.2. The Portrayal of Irish Characters in Shadow ...... 38 3.2.1. Dan Burke and Michael Dara ...... 39 3.2.2. The Tramp and Patch Darcy ...... 41 3.2.3. Nora Burke ...... 45 3.3. Sex, Marriage, and Divorce ...... 47 3.4. An Un-Irish Play? – Audience Reception of Shadow ...... 49 3.4.1. Nationalist Reception of Shadow ...... 50 4. Riders to the Sea ...... 53 4.1. The Play ...... 53 4.1.1. Source and Adaptation ...... 54 4.1.2. Setting ...... 57

4.1.3. “Tá sé imighte uaim” - The Keen ...... 58 4.2. The Portrayal of Irish Characters in Riders ...... 59 4.2.1. Bartley ...... 60 4.2.2. Cathleen and Nora ...... 61 4.2.3. Maurya ...... 63 4.2.4. Offstage Characters ...... 66 4.3. Forebodings of Doom: Celtic Mythology in Riders ...... 68 4.3.1. Transgressing Folk Customs ...... 69 4.4. “We need sunshine badly” –Audience Reception of Riders ...... 70 4.4.1. A Universal Piece of Art ...... 71 5. The Playboy of the Western World ...... 73 5.1. The Play ...... 73 5.1.1. Source and Adaptation ...... 74 5.1.2. Setting ...... 76 5.1.3. Playboy as Satire of Celtic Heroic Circles – “A hero for the modern world” ... 78 5.2. The Portrayal of Irish Characters in Playboy ...... 80 5.2.1. Christopher “Christy” Mahon ...... 81 5.2.2. Margaret Flaherty – Pegeen Mike ...... 85 5.2.3. Shawn “Shaneen” Keogh ...... 88 5.2.4. Widow Quin ...... 89 5.2.5. Michael James Flaherty and Old Mahon ...... 91 5.3. Paganism versus Christianity...... 94 5.4. “Irish humour is dead, MacKenna, and I‟ve got influenza” – Audience Reception of Playboy ...... 95 5.4.1. The Playboy Riots ...... 95 5.4.2. Nationalism and Synge‟s Stage Irishmen ...... 98 6. Conclusion ...... 100 Bibliography ...... 104 Primary Literature ...... 104 Secondary Literature ...... 104 Webliography ...... 111

List of Abbreviations

AI: Synge, J. M. (1992). The Aran Islands [1907]. Ed. Tim Robinson. London: Penguin. CLI/II: Saddlemyer, Ann, ed. (1983). The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge: Volume I/II. Oxford: OUP. CoW: Synge, J. M. (2008). The Complete Works of J. M. Synge: Plays, Prose and Poetry. Ed. Aidan Arrowsmith. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. CWI-IV: Synge, J. M. (1966/1982). Collected Works I-IV. Ed. Robin Skelton. Oxford: OUP. NB: Synge‟s notebooks TS: Synge‟s typescripts Playboy: The Playboy of the Western World (1907) Riders: Riders to the Sea (1904) Shadow: The Shadow of the Glen (1903)

1. Introduction

John Millington Synge (1971-1909) was probably the most controversial Irish dramatist of his time and a key figure of the Anglo-Irish literary revival. In his daring and innovative attempt to portray Irish rural life realistically, he refused to adhere to conventional stereotypes. Instead, he created an unsentimental, naturalistic peasant drama based on his observations of Irish customs and comparative folk literature. In the attempt to forge a new national Irish consciousness Synge advocated a discourse of liberation focusing on the conflict between native pagan folk beliefs and superimposed Christian attitudes. Contemporary audiences, accustomed to decades of colonial misrepresentations of the Irish character, mistook Synge‟s complex and sometimes unflattering portrayals of the Irish peasantry as slander and felt that the very essence of their social and moral traditions was being criticised. John Millington Synge was a dramatist, poet, and essayist who, in his brief but influential career, produced a significant body of work. He remains best known for his only novel The Aran Islands (1907) and his dramatic canon, which includes The Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), The Playboy of the Western World (1907), produced by the Irish National Theatre during Synge‟s lifetime, as well as The Tinker’s Wedding (1909) and Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910) which were performed posthumously. The first chapter will investigate the historical background leading to the formation of the Irish National Theatre Society and will provide an introduction to the aims and motives of the Anglo-Irish Revival, which constituted the basis for John Synge‟s dramatic career. Further, the emergence and development of the Stage Irishman will be outlined. This popular stereotypical way of depicting Irish characters as belligerent, blundering drunkards was challenged by dramatists of the revival and fundamentally recast by John Synge. Chapter two will examine various biographical and academic influences on Synge as a dramatist as well as his idea and ideals of Irishness. The fundamental influence of his reading of Charles Darwin as well as his journeys to the Aran Islands will be highlighted. Synge possessed a keen gift for observation and was highly interested in Irish folk mythology. In his affinity for peasant naturalism, Synge engaged in a controversial, modern form of primitivism, idealizing rural Ireland for its beauty as well as its savagery. With an Orientalist 6

attitude, he focused on the „otherness‟ of the Aran Islanders and primitive peasants. John Synge is especially noted for his unique dramatic language. For the conscientious artist, the realistic portrayal of peasant characters involved an accurate reproduction of the Irish rural dialect. Synge‟s poetic use of the Anglo-Irish idiom will be analysed, as well as his concern with intonation and rhythm. The next three chapters will focus on the analysis of three prominent plays by John Synge. After a brief summary, source and setting of the dramatic pieces will be discussed, followed by an in-depth investigation of Synge‟s explicit and implicit figural characterisation of Irish attributes in the respective plays. Finally, an exploration of the audience reception will place the pieces in a social and political context. Chapter three will examine The Shadow of the Glen, Synge‟s first play produced by the National Theatre Society. The cruelly realistic portrayal of a lonely woman living on a distant, foggy glen, cheating on her husband, and finally leaving with a tramp caused offence and outrage amongst contemporary audiences, who perceived the play as a slander on Irish womanhood. Synge wove many particular themes of folk custom and beliefs into the drama‟s rich texture and a close analysis of the Irish characters in the play will clearly substantiate Synge‟s claim to realism. The fourth chapter will discuss Riders to the Sea, Synge‟s only tragic play without the usual humorous irony and relief, which is often cited as his masterpiece. The drama can be seen as Synge‟s attempt at exploring the native Irish consciousness. Drawing heavily from Celtic mythology, he depicted the arduous realities of life on the Aran Islands. All characters are gravely portrayed, with a focus on the power of maternal feeling, pagan instincts and their dealing with the omnipresent menace of death. It is a universal drama, illustrating the human predicament of being subject to uncontrollable forces. Chapter five will analyse The Playboy of the Western World, the most famous and controversial of Synge‟s plays. This drama, which depicts a rural community idolizing an alleged murderer who is furthermore wooed by the local womanhood, written in what was perceived to be vile language, caused great indignation and week-long riots. The characters in the play were considered libellous in the tradition of the worst kinds of stage Irishmen. Synge‟s tendency to introduce violent and grotesque elements caused the audience to overlook the fact that the play was a deeply nationalistic manifesto of liberation from social repression. The characters in the drama exemplify the power of language to create and shape reality.

The present thesis investigates John Synge‟s rendering of dramatic characters, demonstrating that the language and character of his Irish peasants was truthful and realistic, breaking with the earlier comic tradition of the Stage Irishman. In the early 20th century, Synge‟s portrayal of Irish characters, especially women, aroused nationalist and Catholic outrage and was accused of furthering cultural imperialism. However, this thesis will provide an insight into Synge‟s anti-imperialist philosophy as he used his characters to revolt against conventional social norms and values. John Synge created dramatic characters with unconventional complexity, often ahead of his time, defining each with meticulous artistry, compassion, and humour.

1.1. The Irish National Theatre

Even though Ireland possesses the oldest written literature in Western Europe (cf. Fitz- Simon 1983: 7) the Irish had to wait long centuries for their own national theatre. Two factors kept theatrical movements from flourishing in Ireland. Firstly, the very nature of the Irish Gaelic literary tradition, which is essentially an oral tradition that found expression in a bard reciting for a rather small crowd gathered around the hearth or out in the open. Secondly, the fact that in Ireland the population was scattered and for a long time there were no cities in the European sense. Only in the 12th century, did the Anglo-Normans begin to create their own administrative and commercial centres that eventually sought public entertainment. Entertainment in the form of theatre came exclusively from England, as most playwrights and actors originated from there. Irish writers usually went to London due to better earning prospects, and those in Ireland committed themselves to English or classical themes. Stage dialogue was always performed in the English vernacular and never in local Irish dialects. Dublin depended on London for most of its stage material and actors until the post- restoration period, which finally marked a shift in this tendency. The first unsuccessful attempt at an Irish national theatre was made in the late 18th century by the actor-manager Robert Owenson. He was a native Irish speaker, who lived in London as an actor for some time. When he returned to Ireland to manage Fishamble Street Theatre in Dublin he committed himself to advocating real Irish actors, writers, themes and music. Although be produced some plays by Irish authors, his ambitious plan for a National Theatre ultimately failed when Richard Daly successfully petitioned to acquire the theatrical

monopoly in Dublin for his own Crow Street Theatre (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 78-79). Ireland unfortunately had to wait for another hundred years for its own national theatre. In 1797 theatres had to close due to the agitation preceding the Rising of 1798. After the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished the Irish Parliament, social stability was restored to some extent and theatres resumed their productions. An era of pessimism followed, numerous small theatres closed and Ireland was once again dependant on London for actors and plays (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 82). Crow Street Theatre in Dublin closed in 1820 and the London manager Henry Harris was awarded the theatre patent for Dublin. He built the new Theatre Royal, which lasted until 1880. Several other theatres were constructed that principally showed opera, music hall variety and other types of spectacle, but rarely dramatic performances of any literary value (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 86). Ireland remained a theatrical province of London until it founded its first professional theatre company. The contributing factors that led to the formation of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1898 and consequently to the National Theatre Society Ltd. in 1902 were deeply rooted in Ireland‟s political and cultural history. In the 19th century a growing interest in the Irish heroic and mythological past fuelled nationalist pride and led to a re-examination of Irish characters and plays. There was renewed emphasis on the Irish language and folklore which had previously been brutally suppressed by the British authorities (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 134). Irish scholars started to collect and translate tales and novels of the Irish mythical and heroic past. In 1893, Douglas Hyde, shocked to find only six remaining Irish books in print, founded The Gaelic League to promote the use of the Irish language and the nationalist cause. Finally, the pivotal meeting of Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats in 1898 laid the foundation of an Irish national theatre. Edward Martyn joined the cause, and together these three members of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy were “responsible for the foundation of a theatre which in due course would express the spirit of an Ireland quite different from that known to other members of their social class” (Fitz-Simon 1983: 134). Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) had been writing novels and short stories about the Orient before a trip to the Aran Island awoke her interest in Irish folklore. She started to learn Gaelic and to collect and translate Irish folklore. After she met Yeats and Martyn, Lady Gregory became an active member of the Irish Literary Theatre and co-authored some of Yeats‟ plays. She wrote over 30 plays that were performed at the Abbey, usually concerned with Irish folklore and mythology such as The Dragon (1919) or The Golden Apple (1920). She also translated epics, mainly from the Ulster Cycle, such as Cuchulain of Muirthemne 9

(1902) or Gods and Fighting Men (1904). Lady Gregory attempted the use of a transliteration of the Irish dialect for her quaint plays, which particularly impressed John Synge. She remained an active director of the Abbey until 1928, accompanying the Abbey players on their famous tour through America after the Playboy riots. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was the shining beacon of the Irish Literary Revival. His early poetic drama was influenced my Maeterlinck, mysticism and symbolism and by what he entitled the „Celtic Twilight‟ (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 146). He collaborated with Lady Gregory on the nationalist dramas Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and The Pot of Broth (1904), both written in what Fitz-Simon calls “bucolic prose” (1983: 146). Yeats further wrote plays about Irish mythology, especially about the ancient hero Cuchulain, such as The Green Helmet (1910), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939). While Yeats may not have been among the great dramatists of the Irish Dramatic Movement, he was certainly the driving intellectual force, dominating every phase of the Irish Literary Revival and defending his ideals to the last. He possessed immense creative integrity and courage and continually pressed forward to seek visions and attempt new methods of expression. Yeats wrote a manifesto to gain subscriptions for the Irish Literary Theatre which sums up the idealism and main aims of the enterprise: We propose to have performed in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience, trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom of expression which is not found in the theatre of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment, as it has been presented, but the home of an ancient idealism […] (cited in Fitz-Simon 1983: 135)

The Irish Literary Theatre lasted three seasons. Martyn and Yeats provided plays for the first season, The Heather Field (1899) and The Countess Cathleen (1899) respectively. The third season featured the first plays in the Irish language ever produced on a professional stage with Casadh an tSugáin (The Twisting of the Rope) (1901) by Douglas Hyde. Eventually the Irish Literary Theatre transformed into the Irish National Theatre in 1902. The aim of this society was to create a “poetic, national, but not nationalistic, theatre that would offer a platform and an encouragement to young Irish dramatists” (Trunninger 1976: 81), which it certainly did for John Millington Synge. This new national theatre met with strong opposition. The Gaelic League argued that a theatre could only be called Irish or national if its writers exclusively employed the Gaelic language. Nationalists accused the Irish National 10

Theatre of not furthering the nationalist cause and consequently opposing it. Generally, critics disapproved of the fact that most members of the theatre belonged to the Protestant Anglo- Irish ascendancy and were therefore not even entitled to call themselves Irish. Ireland‟s national theatre was further heavily influenced by European theatre, most notably experimental French theatre, the everyday-life, realistic drama of Ibsen, and the symbolic school of Maeterlinck (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 136). A contemporary critic declared bluntly: “It may really be said that, for a time at least, the title of “The Irish National Theatre” was entirely correct, except that it was not Irish, it was not national, and it had very amateurish claims to be a theatre.” (cited in O‟Donnell 1904: 10) The irony remains that in a curious reversal of earlier centuries there were no suitable native Irish actors available for the early national theatre and all actors had to be imported from London. This finally changed when the poet AE (George Russell) met the Fay brothers, William and Frank in 1901. The Fays had run the Ormond Dramatic Society and devised and performed countless plays and sketches in small halls in Dublin and around the country (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 138). AE introduced them to Yeats and the brothers were immediately enthusiastic about the creation of a professional group of national Irish actors and formed the Irish National Dramatic Company. The Fays were accomplished actors and stage-managers and took over the theatre management of the Irish National Theatre Society. The new Irish company was invited by the Irish Literary Society in London to give two performances in 1903, which were the highlight of the theatrical season, and induced Miss Annie Horniman, a wealthy English lady, to offer “to provide and equip a small theatre in Dublin and maintain it free of charge for a number of years” (Fitz-Simon 1983: 140). The former Mechanics‟ Institute in Abbey Street was purchased and with an adjoining building transformed into the Abbey Theatre1, which opened its gates on 27th December 1904 with two short plays, Yeats‟ On Baile’s Strand (1904) and Lady Gregory‟s Spreading the News. In 1905 John Synge was appointed to the Abbey Theatre‟s board of directors. The first decade of the Irish National Theatre ended with the departure of William and Frank Fay due to severe managerial disagreements, the death of Synge and the withdrawal of the Miss Horniman‟s subsidies after she deemed the theatre too anti-British. The Abbey Theatre had by then become a national institution; new actors and managers joined, and a new theatre was built after the original Abbey building was destroyed by a fire in 1951. The new

1 The Irish National Theatre Society thereupon became popularly known as the „Abbey Theatre‟. 11

Abbey Theatre reopened in 1966 and continues to show “world-class theatre that actively engages with and reflects Irish society, placing the writer and theatre artist at the heart of the organization2” until today.

1.2. The Stage Irishman

Ever since the earliest representations of Irish characters in drama as well as novels, certain stereotypical traits can be detected which outline the stock character of the stage Irishman. The characteristics of the stage Irishman differ throughout the centuries as they generally reflect the contemporary anti-Irish stereotypes and were shaped by the social and political situations of the epochs. The Irish National Theatre, in Lady Gregory‟s words, intended to perform “an attack on the stage Irishman, the vulgar and unnatural butt given on the English stage [and] had the destroying of that scarecrow in mind among other things in setting up our Theatre” (Gregory 1972: 68-69).

1.2.1. The Stage Irishman up to the 19th Century

The first significant stage Irishman was certainly Sir John Falstaff, who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One (1597), Part Two (1599), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and was highly popular with contemporary audiences. Falstaff is a fat, cowardly, vainglorious knight who leads the prince into trouble and is ultimately repudiated. The typical stage Irishman‟s traits were clichéd language, bragging, swearing, fighting, laziness, cowardice, naiveté, whiskey-drinking, admiring females and a scruffy outmoded appearance. Up to the 18th century, Irish characters were not a prominent feature in English drama and appeared only as minor characters. In Elizabethan times two main stock types of the stage Irishman emerge, the servant and the braggart, which have their source in the Roman and Greek stock types of the parasite-slave and the Miles Gloriosus3 respectively. Irish characters were presented as either barbarian, bloodthirsty yet cowardly mercenaries, reflecting the

2 “Mission & Artistic Policy” of The Abbey Theatre, www.abbeytheatre.ie 3 The Latin term „miles gloriosus‟ literally means „famous or boastful soldier‟. As a name it first appeared in the play Miles Gloriosus by Plautus where it refers to the main character who brags openly and repeatedly about his supposed greatness. He has come to denote a stock character in drama and refers to a posturing and self- deceiving boaster or bully. (cf. David Krause in Viol 1998: 10) 12

atrocious armed conflicts between England and Ireland, and presenting their supposed savagery as a serious threat to the English. Otherwise they featured as sly, unreliable, often ignorant, sometimes even delinquent servants. The latter reputation stems from the fact that the English aristocracy tended to import servants from Ireland, who due to the Penal Laws and overpopulation were usually very poor and had to be inventive and cunning in order to survive. The Irish servant was created by English dramatists and remains a static character that disappears from the stage completely in the 19th century. “Eloquence [was] the Irishman‟s main weapon against dreary reality and English coercion.” (Trunninger 1976: 75) Before the Restoration, Irish dramatists wrote largely for the London stage. Their portrayal of Irish characters had to adapt to English tastes and was therefore hardly more realistic than the one created by English writers. Even though Irish dramatists tended to draw a conventional picture of the Irishman, they bestowed upon him more agreeable qualities than English playwrights had done previously. Positive traits were emphasized, such as a sense of humour and wit. English dramatists eventually followed suit and the characterization of the stage Irishman slowly changed to the positive throughout the centuries. In his play The Twin Rivals (1702), George Farquhar, for example, features Teague4, an Irish footman and the classic example of the faithful servant, who exhibits many traits of the old stock type, such as laziness, a naïve Catholic faith and a thick brogue5. However, Farquhar also endows Teague with positive qualities, such as kind-heartedness, common sense and a genuine commitment to his master (cf. Trunniner 1976: 33). A further reason for the more favourable portrayal of Irish characters was the fact that the Irish no longer posed a potential political or religious threat to the English, as the country had been militarily and politically subdued. Therefore the primitive and cowardly mercenary and savage barbarian slowly transformed into a fortune hunter or even an Irish gentleman. The fortune-hunter was a creation of Irish dramatists and had its heyday in the 18th century. The Penal Laws forbade trade, education, and the possession of land for Irish Catholics, thus the impoverished Irish upper class tried to improve their fortunes by marrying rich English heiresses. Generally the Irish fortune hunter was unfashionable, unfamiliar with the intrigues of London society, and often failed miserably in his endeavour, frequently ending up

4 „Teague‟ (Tadgh) is Gaelic for „poet‟ or „a man in the street‟. In England it soon became a generic term to denote a lower-class Irishman, often a servant, and was generally used in a contemptuous manner. In the late 18th century it became synonymous for „fool‟ and the generic name for Irishmen shifted to „Paddy‟ after Saint Patrick (cf. Trunninger 1976: 19-20). 5 „Brogue‟ is an Irish term that, since the mid-19th century, is commonly used to denote the Irish dialect (cf. Trunninger 1976: 47). 13

marrying the chambermaid of the rich lady in question. The novelty about this stage Irish character was that he for the first time showed nationalism and patriotism and usually wanted to return to Ireland as soon as possible. However, the Irish fortune hunter was usually merely introduced for comic relief. In the course of the 18th century the stage Irishman starts to appear as a generous gentleman with a strong sense of wit and humour, yet nevertheless endowed with naïve credulity and provincialism. George Farquhar created such a character in Macahone in The Stage Coach (1704). Macahone is still quite conventionally drawn, a gullible man, blurting out bulls6 and oaths. Thomas Sheridan‟s The Brave Irishman (1743) presents an amiable, well-to-do gentleman in Captain O‟Blunder. As his name indicates, blunders7 are used for comic effect, however, except for a few common oaths, O‟Blunder speaks Standard English, wears ordinary clothes, and is courageous and eloquent. For the first time, an Irishman is the principal character of a play and O‟Blunder‟s patriotic enthusiasm was a model for successive stage Irishmen such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan‟s Sir Lucius O‟Trigger (cf. Trunninger 1976: 35-36).

1.2.2. The 19th Century

At the beginning of the 19th century no major changes from the stage Irishman of the 18th century can be detected, except for a successful shift in setting, as dramatists chose to set their plays in Ireland for the first time. Historical and social realities of the time, such as the Act of Union and the Rising, had little direct influence on the stage Irishman, as any open criticism of English rule was subjected to censorship. Generally Ireland was romanticized and the stage Irishman confined to farce and melodrama. The mid-19th century is often incorrectly thought to be the period which introduced the stage Irishman, due to the immense popularity of Dion Boucicault‟s Irish trilogy of plays featuring Miles na Coppaleen in The Colleen Bawn (1860), Shaun the Post in Arrah-na-Pogue (1865), and Conn in The Shaughraun (1874) (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 94). The rise of a middle- class audience and the availability of America as an outlet for actors and plays resulted in the

6 „Bulls‟ or „Irish bulls‟ are particular kinds of speech blunders, usually either absurdly false statements, contradictions in words, or a mixing of metaphors (cf. Trunninger 1976: 21). 7 „Blunders‟, in the context of stage Irishmen, are exaggerations, inaccurate metaphors, or unusual similes during the telling of a tale. In addition to speech blunders, the stage Irishman also performs blunders in action (cf. Trunninger 1976: 21). 14

spreading of the concept of the stage Irishman as Irish plays were now able to reach vast audiences. Boucicault‟s The Coleen Bawn is set in the romantic Lakes of Killarney and “epitomized everything which American and British audiences regarded as charmingly and hilariously Irish” (Fitz-Simon 1983: 101). Boucicault shut his eyes to social injustice in Ireland, idealized the peasant and romanticized the old stock type. Surprisingly, Irish audiences received the play enthusiastically, without accusations of „buffoonery‟, which followed about half a century later (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 100-101). In the course of the 19th century, a decisive shift in the portrayal of stage Irishmen can be detected. Irish dramatists of the time tried to create a new image of their nation and national character. “By taking the Irishmen from the sub-plots and promoting them to the rank of comic heroes they created a vogue.” (Viol 1998: 126) The Irish vernacular was rendered more accurately, due to renewed linguistic interest and amplified presence of Irish immigrants in England. On stage, the Irish brogue was confined to lower-class Irishmen, whereas the Irish gentry spoke Standard English. The stage Irishman‟s appearance became anglicized. Even though certain stage Irish traits persisted, such as blundering, credulity, and love of alcohol and women, the emphasis was now on the Irishman‟s wit, the imaginative eloquence of his language, and new character traits such as craftiness. A focus was further laid on Irish atmosphere, native customs and folk belief. The belief in leprechauns, fairies, and the banshee replaced the stage Irishman‟s former blind faith in St. Patrick‟s omnipotence (cf. Trunninger 1976: 77). The new types of stage Irishmen that appeared were the Irish tradesman and tenant, a character usually employed by English dramatists, and the Irish vagrant or shaughraun8 who evolved from the fortune hunter and was preferred by Irish writers. The Irish woman and the Irish priest also became more common. Irish women until then were typically brutish domestic servants and or merely introduced as an appendage of a stage Irishman. Only one notable Irish woman appeared on stage as an independent character before the 19th century, Sally Shamrock, a wandering peddler girl in Samuel James Arnold‟s The Shipwreck (1796). Sally is portrayed as a pretty, light-hearted, carefree girl, chiefly concerned with her love interest and not averse to alcohol and merriment, a stereotypical Irish colleen9. This type of

8„Shaughraun‟ derives from the Gaelic term „seachrán‟ for wanderer or vagabond (cf. Fitz-Simon 1983: 103) 9 „Colleen‟ is a generic term referring to Irish women and girls, which is used in drama to denote the stock character of the beautiful, charming, yet often untamed or unrefined Irish girl. (cf. „Colleen‟, wikipedia.org) 15

stage Irishwoman was later taken up by Boucicault and remained popular throughout the century.

1.2.3. The 20th Century

The Land Act of 1903 finally regulated the ownership and distribution of land in Ireland, which caused the renewed interest of Irish farmers in agriculture and the purchase of land. Overpopulation still forced many sons and daughters of farmers to emigrate to America or England as there was not enough land to subdivide. The value of a man was now determined by his possession of land and cattle, which resulted in a renewed flaring up of patriotic pride. On stage, a new emphasis on certain Irish traits became noticeable. The Irishman‟s imagination was no longer portrayed as ridiculous credulity and naïve dreaming but as a creative power. Drinking, still a prominent trait, was no longer a bad habit, but a means of sociability. Catholicism became important yet again and was portrayed as an inherent part of Irish character and life (cf. Trunninger 1976: 93). The formation of the Irish National Theatre marked a great shift in the portrayal of the stage Irishman. The new school of dramatists attempted to portray characters from real life, with realistic speech and dress, firmly set in their own cultural surroundings, in order to draw “a joyous, extravagant, imaginative image as in an impressionistic painting” (W.B. Yeats in Trunninger 1976: 82). The new genre of peasant plays emerged and two main stock types predominate, the noble peasant10 and the playboy, which were in many ways a complete antithesis of old stock types and traits. The Irish peasant was a novelty in drama, a refurbished version of the Irish servant with noble characteristics. He accepts the authority of the Church and is securely rooted within his community. In addition he exhibits patriotic feelings and a genuine love for his land. Writers of the Celtic Twilight tended to mystify the Irish peasant by connecting him to the Irish heroic past. The Irish playboy on the other hand can be traced back to the Miles Gloriosus. He is a continuation and further development of the shaughraun, a wandering poet, frequently also a rebel or a social outcast. He is characterized by his sociability, vivid imagination, and eloquence and is typically portrayed as a loquacious dandy.

10 The „noble peasant‟ is a variant of the „noble savage‟ that originated in mid-eighteenth century Romantic naturalism and included the cult of scenery, the child, the peasant, and the savage. The “Noble Savage is a free and wild being who draws directly from nature virtues that raise doubts as to the value of civilization itself because they are virtues that were previously thought to be held only by civilized persons.” (Fleming 1995: 54) 16

Contemporary audiences accepted the character of the new peasant but rejected the playboy as a calumny of the Irish nation. Dramatists of the Irish National Theatre were often accused of having replaced the old stage Irish stereotype with a new but equally distorted, in Synge‟s case even defamatory, representation of the national character. While Synge employs certain stage Irish characteristics in the portrayal of his peasants and playboys, these traits are not based on stereotype or convention but on his observations of Irish peasant life and folk customs. Synge‟s rendering of Irish characters is further influenced by his studies of Gaelic folk mythology. By incorporating the actual realities of Irish life into his dramatic creations, he attempted to forge a new national culture through art.

2. John Millington Synge and Irish Drama

While most Irish dramatists aspired to create a national drama by mythologizing the Irish past, John Synge examined the Irish dramatic heritage in a European and scientific context. His extensive academic background and his genuine philological interest made academe as much part of his literary make-up as the biographical facts of his life. Synge was one of the very few Irish writers who “europeanized Ireland without deanglicising it” (Bourgeois 1968: 63). He managed to combine an intense national spirit with a broad-minded international culture. Synge‟s drama may be limited concerning locations and characters, primarily dealing with peasants from the West of Ireland, however, he instinctively chose what is fundamental concerning manners and motives, thus making his plays “though local, […] universal, though national, international” (Ellis-Fermor 1971: 185).

2.1. A Brief Biographical Note

Edward John Millington Synge was born in April 1871 into a conventional, middle- class Anglo-Irish protestant family in Rathfarnham, a Dublin suburb. A year later his father died and he was brought up by his devout mother. In his “Autobiography” (1896-8), Synge describes himself as an impressionable child, intimidated by the grim doctrine of Hell and sin which his mother was constantly preaching. From an early age he suffered from chronic asthma and frequent attacks of influenza, and thus he received most of his formal education from private tutors. Already as a child, Synge showed an intense delight with nature and applied himself to amateur nature studies (cf. Greene 1989: 8). At the age of sixteen, he began violin lessons at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and embarked upon tentative private studies of European literature. As a young man, Synge spent considerable time walking and cycling in the hills of Wicklow and became closely acquainted with the language and nature of the peasants living there. At the age of eighteen John Synge went to Trinity College in Dublin, where he won competitions in Irish and Hebrew. Otherwise his academic career was uneventful and fruitless and he merely received a pass degree. Synge seems to have been a solitary and quiet young man, as evidenced by letters from his mother: “He leads a queer solitary life poor boy. He

plays his fiddle a great deal and reads and takes a walk. I wonder what he will turn into by and by.” (Kathleen Synge cited in Greene 1989: 21) Synge did not leave his native Ireland until 1893 when he went to Germany to study music. Unfortunately he could not overcome his intense stage fright and eventually had to give up music. In 1896 he moved to Paris to try his hand at writing. Residing mainly in Paris, Synge continued to spend his summers in Ireland in the Wicklow countryside with his family, and remained very close to his mother despite their differing views on religion. Kathleen Synge had a crucial influence on his literary career (cf. Thornton 1979: 15). Synge‟s sensitivity to natural beauty, which was always regarded as a hallmark of his work, owed much to his mother‟s early encouragement. Mrs. Synge saw in nature a special gift from God to man. She strongly believed that God- given talents should be used to the best of one‟s possibilities, a belief that Synge embraced fully. The concept of God, so strongly advocated by his mother‟s ardent Protestantism, remained an issue throughout his life. In his notebooks11 he describes God as the source of his mind and intellect: “If He gives us our minds it is clear to me at least, that He wishes us to use them. It is a sin not to do so, and a virtue to fulfill [sic] his wish” (TS cited in Thornton 1979: 24). Synge‟s early writings were not crowned with success as he did not manage to have any of his work published except for a few minor book reviews. His early attempts at poetry and drama were thought by Yeats to be “full of that kind of morbidity that has its roots in too much brooding over methods of expression, and ways of looking upon life, which come, not out of life, but out of literature, images reflected from mirror to mirror” (Yeats 1985: 298). This changed dramatically with Synge‟s decisive visit to the Aran Islands in 1898, which initiated his highly influential and controversial dramatic career. John Synge suffered from Hodgkin‟s disease, of which he eventually died in 1909 at the height of his career.

2.2. The Evolution of the Dramatist - Darwin and the Aran Islands

Two fundamental perceptual shocks were vital for Synge‟s literary career. At the age of fourteen, Synge obtained a copy of Charles Darwin‟s On the Origin of Species (1859) which triggered a major crisis of faith. In his “Autobiography” he describes it as follows:

11 Synge‟s notebooks, reading diaries, and typescripts are available in the library of Trinity College Dublin as part of “The Synge Manuscripts”. 19

I flung the book aside and rushed out into the open air – it was summer and we were in the country – the sky seemed to have lost its blue and the grass its green. I lay down and writhed in an agony of doubt. […] My memory does not record how I returned home nor how long this misery lasted. I know only that I got the book out of the house as soon as possible […]. (CWII: 10-11)

Synge then proceeded to read works of Christian evidence but his doubts grew stronger. At the age of sixteen or seventeen he renounced Christianity. “I felt a sort of shame in being thought an infidel, a term which I have always used as a reproach.” (CWII: 11) His guilt about not sharing his family‟s beliefs was massive. Synge started to set himself apart and see himself as alienated from the rest of the world. He claimed that until the age of twenty- three he never knew anyone who shared his religious opinions (cf. CWII: 11), a conviction that further confirms his unworldly attitude. The reading of Darwin was an intellectual crisis for the young Synge. It threw all of his assumed knowledge of natural science and religion into a completely new perspective. In addition, it triggered a moral dilemma for which only his visits to the Aran Islands provided a solution, when he finally realized how variable and arbitrary received ideas and concepts of religion and life are. The tension or even disjunction of thought and feeling or dream and actuality plays a major role in Synge‟s early development and can be found extensively in his dramatic work.

2.2.1. “He found his genius and his peace”12 – The Aran Islands

Synge‟s first visit to the Aran Islands in 1898 was essential for his short but influential dramatic career. It turned a man of ostensibly mediocre talent into a writer of genius. There are some speculations as to his reasons for travelling to the islands. Yeats claims the credit in his 1905 preface to The Well of Saints: “I said: “Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Simons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.” (Yeats 1985: 299) However, this meeting occurred as early as 1896 and it is questionable whether it was Synge‟s main impulse to travel. Rev. Alexander Hamilton, Synge‟s uncle, had travelled to the islands as a missionary in the 1850s, which might have sparked his curiosity. Yet the most likely reason, as evidenced in Synge‟s

12 Yeats 1985: 325 20

notebooks, was his desire to learn Irish in an environment where it was still spoken as a native tongue, largely uncorrupted by foreign influences. In The Aran Islands, Synge mentions that he “decided to move to Inishmaan, where Gaelic [was] more generally used, and the life [was] perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe.” (AI: 10) His repeated stays on the Aran Islands gave Synge access to a mode of thought and perception that was strikingly different from anything he had known before. It generated “another perceptual shock, complementary to the one earlier given by Darwin, but this one liberating rather than constricting” (Thornton 1979: 44). He encountered a worldview that had not succumbed to the rationalistic aspects of Christianity and that had seemingly escaped the impact of Western thought since the advent of science. According to Bourgeois, “the most striking feature of the Irish peasant is his intense Catholic faith” (1968: 90). Irish country people to this day are devout Christians and at times carry their religious feeling to absurd excesses of superstition or even fetishism. On the Aran Islands, Synge found practising Christians, who nevertheless moved easily between pagan and orthodox ideas. The islanders had adopted Christianity as a supplement to, or an extension of their native religion rather than a replacement. The religious outlook of the Aran islanders involved a curious blend of Christianity and paganism, of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, in addition to a belief in a wide range of supernatural phenomena, which to a rational mind like Synge‟s would have seemed inconsistent and anomalous at first. The dramatist, however, was fascinated by the islanders‟ attitude, which can be seen, for example, in his description of a funeral in The Aran Islands: While the grave was being opened the women sat down among the flat tombstones, bordered with a pale fringe of early bracken, and began the wild keen, or crying for the dead. […] In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas. […] Before they covered the coffin an old man kneeled down by the grave and repeated a simple prayer for the dead. There was an irony in these words of atonement and Catholic belief spoken by voices that were still hoarse with pagan desperation. (AI: 31-32)

The a-dogmatism with which the islanders moved between supposedly contradictory or at least mutually exclusive worldviews provided a direct contrast to everything Synge had previously known. It made him aware that the most implicitly accepted ideas, even emotional reactions, were neither absolute nor natural, but socially conditioned. This realization allowed Synge to escape his isolation and guilt and finally creatively make use of his literary talents.

He returned to the Aran Islands for four successive visits in 1899, 1900, 1901, and 1902. Even though his initial visit had the most crucial influence on him, it took some time of „gestation‟ before Synge could put the experiences he had made into dramatic form. Yeats saw the Aran Islands as an „objective correlative‟, enabling Synge to find “set out in the light of the day […] what lay hidden in himself” (Yeats 1985: 330), a way of objectifying his thoughts and feelings, and a new awareness and perspective. Without his journeys to the Aran Islands, it is doubtful whether Synge‟s literary canon would have come into existence. On the islands he found a way of life that resonated deeply with him. “[T]he Aran Islands fused both richness and reality, and brought the whole soul of Synge into activity.” (Price 1985: 89) Further, his journeys allowed him to gain access to the living traditions of Irish folk culture and countless incidents and narrations provided him with a wealth of prose material for his dramatic plots: “I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of these fine people.” (CoW: 67)

2.2.2. Nature and Naturalism

Synge had always shown a strong interest in nature. He knew every corner and crevice of the Wicklow hills, and initially supported the Wordsworthian concept of nature as man‟s guardian and mentor. On the Aran Islands, however, Synge experienced something entirely different. He encountered people who lived in continual, unmitigated contact with the most fierce and demanding aspects of nature. He was immediately struck by the desolation he found, the unrelenting stone and sea, the raw force of nature which could no longer be regarded as benign. Synge was face to face with a reality of life he had not experienced before. During one of his stays on the islands, a young man‟s drowned body was washed to the shore13. Synge was confronted with the incredible force of the sea, which to the islanders was both, a source of sustenance and a continual antagonist. Nevertheless, a kind of sympathy between man and nature seems to persist. Synge remarked in his notebook: “I cannot say it too often, the supreme interest of the island lies in the strange concord that exists between the people and the impersonal limited but powerful impulses of the nature around them.” (NB cited in Thornton 1979: 81)

13 This incident was also the basis of the drama Riders to the Sea; cf. chapter 4.1.1. 22

Nature in Synge‟s work is almost carried to the point of “neurotic hyperaesthesis [sic]” (Bourgeois 1968: 92). He rarely painted scenery for its own sake but always to express a physical essence or human atmosphere. Synge often deliberately represses externals and only vaguely suggests his landscape rather than developing it fully, in order for his audience to grasp the inner significance of the scenes. However, in several plays he casts nature as a protagonist, most notably in The Shadow of the Glen, where it shapes the characters‟ actions, moods, and fates. “Like the Irish lyricists, he recognized that nature was both a rejuvenator and destroyer. Peasants who looked daily upon the natural world looked also upon their own fate.” (Fleming 1995: 101) Nature is an ever-present setting in Synge‟s drama with the exception of Playboy, where it nevertheless remains a continual source of imagery and incidental reference. Synge wrote poetic drama within the severe limits of naturalism. Una Ellis-Fermor argues that there is a paradox or dualism in Synge‟s art. It seems firmly rooted in nature mysticism, which is usually incompatible with dramatic expression (cf. 1971: 163). Due to his experiences on the Aran Islands, Synge found imagination and material that enabled him to work with this peculiar combination. “[T]he two things are one in him […] each […] is revealed in terms of the other, nature in terms of man‟s character, thought and fate, and man himself in great part in terms of his relationship with nature” (Ellis-Fermor 1971: 174). The roots of Synge‟s attitude are found in ancient Irish nature poetry which advocates a sense of intimacy between man and nature. On the Aran Islands Synge found people who seemed inheritors of the ancient worship of nature.

2.3. Primitivism and Synge‟s Conception of „Irishness‟

Part of the philosophy of the Irish Literary Revival was a primitivist worldview that involved the idealization of the old Gaelic society and contemporary folk culture. Primitivist philosophy embraces the idea of civilization as a destructive force (cf. Fleming 1995: 47). The writers of the Irish National Theatre sought to create a pastoral vision of Ireland in which the rural population is more closely in touch with national spirit than workers or townspeople. A paradigm of pre-modernist primitivism is that the “best values of civilization [are] projected onto the primitive society in question, and a value system based on similarity is presumed” (Garrigan 2004: 136). The primitive is seen as more moral and more pure than civilization

itself. While the newly urbanized town dwellers did not want to live like peasants, they wanted to believe that country people led lives of pious devotion and virtue. Primitivists regarded the peasants as uncorrupted by the bourgeois mind of urban centres, however, most revivalists neglected to acknowledge that those peasants, given the opportunity, were potentially eager bourgeoisie (c.f. Fleming 1995: 51). For many critics the much cited, “we were always primitive” (CWII: 7), automatically places John Synge among the primitivists. Certainly Synge applied various primitivist approaches but his academic background and genuine philological interest set him apart from traditional primitivism. Synge‟s primitivist philosophy informed how he interpreted the material he collected on the Aran Islands. “He was interested in the people and in every aspect of their lives, from the colorful homespun dresses of the women to the intonations of their voices and the more subtle manifestations of how they looked and the limited and desolate world around them” (Greene 1989: 84). After his initial visit to the islands he deepened his scientific knowledge of anthropological studies and socio-cultural evolutionism and in doing so revised and refined the narrative of his visits as well as his literary style. Synge was torn between his instinctively romantic primitivism and a modern version of the primitive, which was conditioned by his study of comparative sciences and literature. As his reading diaries prove, Synge was familiar with a wide range of authors, such as Anatole le Braz, Frazer Nutt, Louis Petit de Julleville, and Anatole France, some of these were primitivist and some anti-primitivist. His intense engagement with scientific comparativism enabled Synge to liberate himself from the mists of the Celtic Twilight. He aspired to a fusion between the impersonal laws of science and the creative subjectivity of individual imagination. John Synge held the modernist belief in the „otherness‟ of the primitive psyche (cf. Garrigan 2004: 131) and aimed at a sincere and unprejudiced approach to the primitive and the archaic. He instinctively relied upon the notion of man as an organic part of the natural world: “A human being finds a resting place only where he is in harmony with his surroundings and is reminded that his soul and the soul of nature are of the same organization.” (NB cited in Bushrui 1972: 110) David H. Greene proposes that Synge‟s delight in the primitive inspired his visits to the Aran Islands (cf. Garrigan 2004: 133). On the Aran Islands practices and attitudes that may be called archaic have survived largely undisturbed into the twentieth century, which was mainly due to the difficulty of access. Until 1891 there was no regular steamer service to the islands, and even then solely to Inishmore. Social and geographical factors rendered 24

technology almost inapplicable. The two smaller islands in particular were, in Synge‟s time, largely uninfluenced by modern technology and virtually identical to what they had been a thousand years ago (c.f. Thornton 1979: 59-60). Synge remarked: “It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilization in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went on the sea.” (AI: 12) Synge possessed strong empathy with the islanders and in The Aran Islands he often attempts to emulate them in order to fit in. One episode in the book powerfully affirms his attitude toward the primitive spirit of the islands. In a dream he is caught in a supernatural dance and instinctively knows he has to resist his urge to yield to it. Last night, after walking in a dream among buildings with strangely intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of music beginning far away on some stringed instrument. It came closer to me, gradually increasing in quickness and volume with an irresistibly definite progression. When it was quite near the sound began to move in my nerves and blood, and urge me to dance with them. I knew that if I yielded I would be carried away to some moment of terrible agony, so I struggled to remain quiet, holding my knees together with my hands. The music increased continually, sounding like the strings of harps, tuned to a forgotten scale, and having a resonance as searching as the strings of the cello. Then the luring excitement became more powerful than my will, and my limbs moved in spite of me. In a moment I was swept away in a whirlwind of notes. My breath and my thoughts and every impulse in my body, became a form of dance, till I could not distinguish between the instruments and the rhythm and my own person or consciousness. For a while it seemed an excitement that was filled with joy, then it grew into an ecstasy where all existence was lost in a vortex of movement. I could not think there had ever been a life beyond the whirling of the dance. Then with a shock the ecstasy turned into agony and rage. I struggled to free myself, but seemed only to increase the passion of the steps I moved to. When I shrieked I could only echo the notes of the rhythm. At last with a moment of uncontrollable frenzy I broke back into consciousness and awoke. (AI: 55)

In this passage, an insight is suggested into a form of primitivism which goes far beyond its usual romantic formulations. Synge finds himself caught between the primitive world and the civilized life which he is familiar with. He can sympathize with the people of Aran and share certain moments, yet he can never truly belong to them14. Synge maintains in his essay “In Connemara” (1905) that nearly all characteristics that gave colour and attractiveness to rural Irish life were bound up with a social condition close to penury (cf. CoW: 190). Maurice Bourgeois goes so far as to suggest, “had Synge been given

14 This attitude is further reinforced, when Synge reveals: “In some ways these men and women seem strangely far away from me. […] On some days I feel this island as a perfect home and resting place; on other days I feel that I am a waif among the people.” (AI: 66) 25

the choice between the local note of distinction and the peasant‟s material welfare, there is little doubt that, for all his abundant sympathy, he would have chosen the former” (1968: 89). Synge examined peasant life from a largely artistic standpoint, however, he found in the richness of the peasants‟ language an inbuilt critique of the poverty of their social condition. He may have aestheticised the problem of oppression, but he did this without losing sight of the dire economic conditions of peasant life. Synge advocated a reincorporation of the past into the present through art, in order to save a remnant of Ireland‟s cultural heritage and used rural or isolated communities as a metaphor for vanishing values. At the end of The Aran Islands, the islands remain an emblem of the primitive spirit the modern civilized world has lost. However the narrator no longer carries the romantic illusion that such a spirit is accessible to the civilized mind: “I became indescribably mournful, for I felt that this little corner on the face of the world, and the people who live in it, have a peace and dignity from which we are shut forever.”(AI: 114) Primitivism for Synge was based on a compromise between primitive and modern attitudes, between past and present, and involved a dynamic and imaginative engagement with nature and science. What Synge brought to the Irish stage can be called controversial primitivism. The primitive spirit in his work is portrayed as violent, sexual and threatening and anathema to the typical romantic primitivism exhibited by the National Theatre. Synge‟s work exhibits conventional primitivist spirituality, passion, and exoticism, but underneath something more savage can be detected. Contemporary Irish audiences sensed this undercurrent and reacted to his plays with violent criticism.

2.3.1. „Orientalism‟

During the Celtic Revival, Irish Literary Orientalism15 flourished. W.B. Yeats, AE or James Stephens provoked new directions of decolonization for Irish culture with anti- materialist and anti-colonial imaginings. Cultural nationalists created cross-colonial and anti- imperial narratives, inspired by the ancient Irish-Oriental connections. Irish writers highlighted the constructed nature of cultural representations and reversed Orientalist Irish stereotypes in order to overturn the colonial images. However, revivalists were „colonizing‟ the Irish for their own artistic purposes by identifying what was different and mysterious

15 „Orientalism‟ usually refers to Western depictions of Easters cultures. Edward Said used the term in his seminal book Orientalism (1995) in order to denote the constructed discourse of European imperialism. 26

about them. Even though their representations were favourable and their motives noble, they nevertheless “sought to speak for people other than themselves, to „represent‟ them to the world” (Fleming 1995: 21) and depicted Irish peasant society in order to establish a new national culture. Their approach represents the core of the Saidian interpretation of Orientalism: Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-á-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text – all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf” (Said 1995: 20).

The last section of this quote mirrors Yeats‟ early advice to Synge to “express a life that has never found expression” (Yeats 1985: 299). One of John Synge‟s ambitions was, without a doubt, to chronicle the life of primitive rural Ireland before it vanished into modernization. He frequently mentioned that he “wished to do for the peasantry of Western Ireland what M. Loti16 had done for the Breton fisherfolk” (Bourgeois 1968: 53). With an Orientalist attitude, Synge focused on the „otherness‟ of the Aran islanders and frequently described them as „primitive‟, „archaic‟, or even „barbaric‟, qualities which apparently fascinated him. Synge was drawn towards the islanders and instinctively admired their dexterity, strength of character and emotional maturity while he analysed them with anthropological curiosity: These strange men with receding foreheads, high cheekbones, and ungovernable eyes seem to represent some old type found on these few acres at the extreme border of Europe, where it is only in wild jests and laughter that they can express their loneliness and desolation. (AI: 93) The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal, while the general simplicity of their lives has given them many other points of physical perfection. (AI: 21)

However, Synge did not merely observe the Irish island and peasant folk but also challenged the Orientalist ethnographic conventions of his time with his presence on Aran (cf. Veerendra, muse.jhu.edu).

16 cf. 4.1.1. 27

2.4. “The delicate harmony of thought and phrase”17 - Synge‟s Concern with Language

The language of Synge‟s dramatic pieces remains particularly fascinating. Before the 20th century, English as well as Irish dramatists applied various stereotypical mechanisms to denote the nationality of Irish characters through their speech. They usually endowed them with a thick brogue, interspersing ordinary English expressions with cliché Gaelic words, especially in exclamations and emphatic phrases, and continually employed bulls and blunders. John Synge, however, chose a new and innovative approach. Fascinated by the rich idiom he discovered on the Aran Islands, he created a unique style of prose, emphasizing peculiar native constructions and implementing new and striking combinations of English words in his drama. Synge‟s Irish characters speak a highly melodic language full of exotic intonation and charm. The language Synge used in his dramatic pieces is a version of Anglo-Irish18, also called Hiberno-English. The Anglo-Irish idiom is a contact vernacular, a form of English modified by Gaelic habits of speech, imagery and syntax. The words and meanings remain English while the word-order usually corresponds to Gaelic. Hiberno-English can be seen as deriving from the language of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy mixed with older Tudor Anglo- Irish, which was then acquired and modified by a population with a Gaelic speech-basis (cf. Price 1961: 36). The Hiberno-English idiom was first suggested by Douglas Hyde as a literary medium in his book Besides the Fire: a collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories (1890). Lady Gregory subsequently experimented with the idiom in her translation of Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902). Synge was enthusiastic about Gregory‟s book, studied it carefully, and claimed that it was exactly the dialect he was trying to master: “Your Cuchulain is part of my daily bread” (Gregory 1972: 75). Lady Gregory established the Anglo-Irish idiom and made it popularly known through further transliterations of heroic legend and folk-tales. However, it was John Synge who perfected the idiom in his dramatic work. Irish was still largely spoken on the Aran Islands at the time of Synge‟s visits. The native Gaelic culture had survived largely due to the persistence of the Irish language, which was the primary vehicle of the oral tradition. There were of course attempts to narrate ancient Irish stories in English, yet certain qualities of the oral tradition were considered

17 Ernest A. Boyd cited in Price 1961: 44 18 Another term for this idiom is „Irish English‟ 28

untranslatable due to the mystical attitude commonly held towards the Irish language. “Primitive languages generally excel in rich vocabularies, because of their synthetic character; for the abstraction of the ideas from the objects is still unknown.” (Frenzel 1970: 22) Every word is closely connected with the object it describes, which results in a certain concreteness of speech, which is then combined with the native Irish tendency towards metaphorical expression. W.B. Yeats maintains that in the archaic language of the peasants of the West of Ireland, Synge found an idiom that suited his temperament: “The cadence is long and meditative, as befits the thought of men who are much alone, and who […] listen patiently [...] taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words and in their sound.” (Yeats 1985: 334) Synge himself did not hesitate to declare his indebtedness to the Irish peasant idiom: When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by servant girls in the kitchen.[…] [I]n countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use is rich and living, it is possible for the writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.” (CoW: 67)

Even though Synge‟s dramatic dialect is firmly rooted in the language spoken by Irish peasants, it nevertheless remains an artefact. “Synge‟s characters speak „a selection, refraction, compression of the language that Synge had known from boyhood, among the people of the Dublin, Wicklow and Galway countryside, [...] reinforced and enriched by his life in the Aran Islands and in West Kerry.” (T.R. Henn cited in Thornton 1979: 73) Synge was in the habit of taking down curious figures of speech, fragments of dialogue, proverbs, and tirades in his notebooks wherever he went. He reproduced the peculiarities of the Irish peasant‟s quaint turns of phrases with painstaking accuracy and minutely remarked upon and compared pronunciation and intonation before he translated them into English (cf. Greene 1989: 84). Synge composed his dramatic idiom by directly drawing upon peasant speech in order to create his own poetic language, which was authentic and credible and in a way more exact and representative than the actual utterances on which they were based. He was aware that his dramatic speech needed to be more precise, beautiful, and meaningful than ordinary speech in order to make the appropriate impact upon an audience within the short duration of a play. While it remains unlikely that contemporary Irish peasants talked consistently in the language of Synge‟s characters, his was nevertheless a truthful representation of the peasant idiom in that it contained hardly a word or phrase they would not actually have used: “In writing The Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I have used one or two words

only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read that newspapers.” (CoW: 67)

2.4.1. Linguistic Devices and Anglo-Irish Features in Synge‟s Drama

Synge‟s plays exhibit a compelling simplicity in language, events and language are an entity. Poetry nevertheless arises through his use of the Anglo-Irish idiom. Characteristic devices Synge applied to his dramatic work show his obsessive concern with language. With almost rhythmic frequency he employs rich poetic imagery, similes, and descriptive comparisons, deriving from the everyday world of man and nature. He is known to have reworked his plays in countless drafts until he was entirely satisfied with syntax, cadence and idiom. Sentences in the finished versions of his pieces are frequently noticeably longer compared to earlier drafts, yet without exhibiting more content, due to his extreme focus on rhythm. All characters speak roughly the same language and every person is speaking for effect. In significant scenes the rhythm is intensified to emphasize the power of language to create character. Throughout his canon, Synge liberally employs dramatic irony. In Riders to the Sea, for example, the priest warns the sisters not to tell their mother of Michael‟s death lest “she‟ll be getting her death […] with crying and lamenting” (CoW:17). Speeches in this drama further stand out through composure and consistency as Synge frequently uses repetitions, parallel syntax and anaphoric structures (cf. Stork 1969: 97). In The Playboy of the Western World the device of dramatic contrast is used with infinite variety and resource; almost every speech creates a new situation or farcically reverses its preceding one. Ambivalence is patent in the play‟s comic incongruity. Pegeen, for example is considered safe when left alone with a killer, while Christy, the murderer, did his deed with “the help of God” (CoW: 77) and sees himself as a law-fearing man who would never fire a gun without a licence. Another beautiful example of irony and ambiguity is Synge‟s use of the verb “destroyed”, which derives from the Irish word “mill”, for “ruin” or “spoil” and in his texts usually denotes either “exhausted” or “damned”. In Riders to the Sea, Cathleen laments, “It‟s destroyed he‟ll be surely” (CoW: 20), when the girls realize they have forgotten to give Bartley lunch for his journey. While she means to express his exhaustion, through the second meaning of the word she unwittingly hints at his impending doom. In The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western

World Synge further heightens the comedy and irony by employing the device of superior audience awareness. A few concrete examples19 of Synge‟s use of the Anglo-Irish syntax and idiom deserve mentioning. While he strictly avoids stage-Irishisms in the depiction of his characters, peculiar and, to English speaking audiences curious and pictorial, constructions arise nevertheless due to the Gaelic origin of the Anglo-Irish dialect. Synge, for example, frequently employs literal translations such as the calque “lady of the house” which mirrors the Gaelic “bean a‟tighe” and phrases like “get my death” or “I‟m killed” deriving from “mo bhás a fhagháil” and “tá mé marbh” respectively. He also deploys common Gaelic expressions including „the way‟ meaning „so that‟, for example, “not a decent house within four miles, the way every living Christian is bona fide” (CoW: 74). The quaint construction “after+ verb-ing” used as a substitution for past tense constructions is also found extensively in Synge‟s plays: “you‟re the one I‟m after lacing my heart-strings” (CoW: 116). The formula “and+ pronoun+ verb-ing” is used instead of a Standard English subordinate clause. Generally, verb phrases involve an “-ing” form. A form of “to be” is used to link noun phrases or noun phrases and adjectives. Most actions are expressed with verbal nouns. The Gaelic sentence structure emphasizes meaning, thus the most important word comes immediately after the verb „to be‟: “It was my own son hit me” (CoW: 99). „To be‟ is also used to form tenses and moods like the imperative, “Let you be making yourself easy” (CoW: 7). It is also applied to suggest a habit of frequency, “the things they do be saying in the glen” (CoW: 5). In Gaelic, extensive use of prepositions is common. Probably the most frequently used preposition remains „agus‟, literally „and‟, which is used for most conjunctions and to introduce subordinate clauses. Synge liberally applies this construction, for example in: “What way would I live, and I an old woman” (CoW: 10), meaning, “when I am an old woman”. The reflexive pronoun “myself” is used instead of standard “me”, as well as “himself” and “herself” to denote “he”/”his” and “she”/“her” respectively. The frequency with which Synge begins sentences with a phrase like “It is,” “It‟s,” “It is not,” “It‟s I,” “It is not I,” or “That is,” “There is” lends an almost ritual quality to his language. The omission of introductory conjunctions or relative pronouns sometimes result in a certain stiffness of

19 All Gaelic examples are taken from Price 1961: 44-50. 31

Synge‟s dramatic language which, however, heightens the realistic effect, as the actual people portrayed are dialect carriers (cf. Stork 1969: 96-99). Synge‟s knowledge of Irish Gaelic and consequent correct execution of the Anglo- Irish idiom in his plays was strongly disputed in the past. Declan Kiberd conclusively settled the scholarly debate by proving beyond doubt that John Synge indeed possessed an impressive command of the Irish language (cf. Kiberd 1979: 19-54). An academic experiment further demonstrated that all peculiar or unconvincing sounding English phrases in Synge‟s drama can easily be translated verbatim into Irish by any native speaker (cf. Todd 1989: 72), providing ample evidence of the de facto Irish origin of Synge‟s Hiberno-English.

2.4.2. “Every life is a symphony20” – Rhythm in Synge‟s Drama

John Synge‟s drama exhibits a fine sense of assonance, a careful rounding off of phrases, and a delicate feeling for rhythm. Synge‟s early musical training at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and later on the continent certainly had an influence on his literary technique. Hints in his notebooks and in drafts of his plays clearly show that musical theory entered into his aesthetic and compositional aims (cf. Thornton 1979: 35). He aspired to a universal harmony, the supreme example of which is music. While Synge adopted Walter Pater‟s prescription that “[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (cited in Bushrui 1972: 109), he further enlarged on this conception when he reached the conclusion that music is not the ends but a means of achieving unity with the universe. From his frequent sojourns outdoors, he knew the sounds and savours of nature, such as the musical feeling wind and rain could create. He was highly aware of the rhythm in people‟s language and their everyday occupations. Synge was influenced by music with reference to language and dramatic technique rather than subject matter. He could “make the English language dance with loveliness and rapture” (Jones 1994: 89). He was not content to meticulously reproduce his version of peasant dialect in written form but also carefully monitored the actors‟ translation from the page to the stage. William Fay recalls the painstaking accuracy with which John Synge practised diction with the actors of the Abbey Theatre (cf. W.G. Fay in Mikhail 1977: 27). He was present at almost every rehearsal and helped them perfect the musical intonation of his

20 J.M. Synge cited in Drury 2004: 3 32

unique idiom, which some critics affectionately call „Syngesong‟ (cf. Ann Saddlemyer in O‟Ceallaigh 2002: 77). When the Abbey cast had initial difficulty in dealing with the unfamiliar cadences of Synge's idiosyncratic language, he advised them to simply speak the lines for their meaning and melody and rhythm would follow naturally (cf. Jones 1994: 28). W. B. Yeats was fascinated with the beauty of Synge‟s language: “[H]e made word and phrase dance to a very strange rhythm, which will always [...] be difficult to actors who have not learned it from his lips. It is essential for it perfectly fits the drifting emotion, the dreaminess, the vague yet measureless desire, for which he would create a dramatic form.” (Yeats 1985: 299) The effect Synge‟s stage Anglo-Irish dialect had on an attentive well- disposed audience is beautifully illustrated by Austin Harrison, a contemporary spectator and critic: English is not a musical language, but the speech of these Irish players is [...] a flow of speech which ripples like the splashing of laughing waters. The Irish voice is naturally round, full, melodious, lulling. I have never heard the English language sound so graceful and musical before. The sibilant characteristics of the tongue are unnoticeable. Nothing jars, neither word not stage action. And the language itself is singularly beautiful. (cited in Jones 1994: 34)

Yeats maintains that while, to his knowledge, no actual Irish countryman ever spoke with the exact rhythm of Synge‟s characters, he is certain that had Synge been born a countryman, he would have spoken exactly like that (cf. Yeats 1985: 300). Synge‟s idiosyncratic dramatic language was the result of meticulous and conscious artistic choice. He deployed Irish cadences, syntax, and idiom in order to create a language that resonated with the inner consciousness of the characters he presented. Synge transformed the richness of peasant language into a code and took the image of a noble language living in an impoverished environment as a metaphor of heroic human vitality fading under institutional pressure (cf. Daniel Casey in Deane 1997: 37). He used language to heighten and intensify the perception of reality and his characters often develop the capacity of „poetry talk‟ against oppression, greed and conformity. Even though his idiom is an artificial construct, it represents fundamental realities of life. In the preface to The Playboy of the Western World Synge discloses the compositional philosophy of his dramatic pieces: On stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that it why the modern intellectual drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality. In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or an apple. (CoW: 67-68)

3. The Shadow of the Glen 3.1. The Play

The one-act play The Shadow of the Glen21 (1903) was Synge‟s first completed play to be performed by the Irish National Theatre Society. It was first produced at Molesworth Hall on 8th October 1903 and first printed in Samhain in December 1904; a revised final version appeared in May 1905. The play is set in a typical cottage kitchen in the “last cottage at the head of a long glen in County Wicklow” (CoW: 3). A peasant woman, Nora Burke, prepares the room for the wake of her much older husband, Dan Burke, who has unexpectedly died at dusk. It is raining heavily outside and a tramp knocks at her door. She asks him in and offers him the usual courtesies of a wake, whiskey and tobacco. She then leaves to notify the neighbours of her husband‟s death. When the Tramp is left alone with the supposed corpse, it suddenly comes back to life. Dan Burke then exposes the whole set-up as staged in order to prove his wife‟s infidelity. Nora returns in the company of Michael Dara, a young shepherd, who, upon seeing the old man dead, immediately starts counting her money and mapping out wedding plans. Nora laments the fate of living alone on the glen where there is nothing but fog and desolation. She reveals that she has only married Dan Burke out of economic necessity and that her life since then has been cold and lonely. “Making talk with the men passing” (CoW: 15), such as the shepherd Patch Darcy, was the only thing that kept her from madness. Darcy himself had gone mad and died in the nearby bog. Michael Dara concretizes his marriage intentions when Dan Burke‟s corpse comes to life a second time. Enraged, he curses his wife and orders her to quit the house forever. The Tramp, who has grasped Nora‟s state of desperation due to her unimaginative, lonesome life, eloquently offers her his company in a new adventurous life out of doors.

21 hereafter referred to as „Shadow‟ 34

3.1.1. Source and Adaptation

The core-plot of the tale was suggested to Synge by the storyteller Pat Dirane in 1889 on the Aran Islands, who told him the old folk-tale22 in traditional seanchaí23 manner: “One day I was travelling on foot from Galway to Dublin, and…”, ending his tale with: “That is my story”(AI: 26-28). Pat Dirane showed little interest in the protagonists‟ emotions but was chiefly concerned to give as lively and exact an account of what he had experienced and seen as possible. Motives and values were not examined by the storyteller and the figures themselves remained time- and faceless: a husband, a wife and a lover. Pat Dirane‟s story presents at a “fairly primitive level a situation common to every generation” (Price 1961: 119). Synge‟s true achievement was to transmute this ancient folk story into modern dramatic art. Synge fundamentally changed the original tale with regard to its content. He transformed the onlooker into the hero of the story. Any direct allusion to adultery is omitted and to guide the audience‟s sympathy further towards Nora, he portrays Dan as a coarse and abusive man. Synge also added minor characters, local intensity and new themes, such as prearranged marriage, the fading of youth and beauty, and man‟s relationship to nature. He drastically changed the ending, which in the original is fatal for the young couple24. With his ambiguous and somewhat optimistic ending, Synge gave this primitive tale a sophisticated impact “converting folklore into literature before his audience‟s very eyes.” (Kiberd 1979: 169) In the unpublished essay „On Literature and Popular Poetry‟ (1897) Synge remarked that with the growth of folk studies “man began to realize that the song and story of primitive men were full of human and artistic suggestion, that the official arts were losing themselves in mere technical experiments while the peasant music and poetry were full of exquisitely delicate emotions.” (cited in O‟ Giolláin 2000: 112)

22 The tale belongs to common Irish folklore and version of it can, for example, also be found in Douglas Hyde‟s Love-Songs of Connacht (Story of the Roman Earl). 23 There were two types of storytellers in Ireland. The „seanchaí‟ traditionally narrated his story as if he himself had witnessed it whereas the „sgélaí‟ told long and intricate stories in the third person, filled with adventures and remote wonders. Synge kept this distinction, which he had first learned from Le Braz, in his mind while gathering folklore on the Aran Islands. Folk-tales narrated by such storytellers were also called „shanarchie tales‟. (Kiberd 1979: 157) 24 “The dead man hit him a blow with the stick so that the blood out of him leapt up and hit the gallery.” (AI: 28) 35

Synge used ancient folk customs and beliefs25 extensively in this play. Some of the old beliefs might be lost on uninitiated or modern theatrical audiences, however, many of those folk practices are powerfully dramatic in their own right and have a strong theatrical impact even for an audience unaware of the underlying traditions and concepts. It also must not be forgotten that Synge wrote Shadow with a specific audience in mind. The early Abbey audiences brought “to any play on a Gaelic theme an accumulation of ideas drawn from literature and folklore” (Kiberd 1979: 174).

3.1.2. Setting

Synge chose Wicklow as the ideal setting for his play. On the one hand, it was the county most associated with vagrants26, and, on the other hand, the influence of nature on the population was fairly intense there, as he was able to experience himself. In “The Vagrants of Wicklow” Synge observes: It need hardly be said that in all tramp life plaintive and tragic elements are common, even on the surface. Some are peculiar to Wicklow. In these hills the summer passes in a few weeks from a late spring, full of odour and colour, to an autumn that is premature and filled with the desolate splendour of decay; and it often happens that, in moments when one is most aware of this ceaseless fading of beauty, some incident of tramp life gives a local human intensity to the shadow of one‟s own mood. (CoW: 237)

The play‟s original title was In the Shadow of the Glen, which more openly alludes to the „shadow‟ as an all-encroaching force. In his essay “The Oppression of the Hills” (1898- 1902) Synge describes the physical and psychological features which shape life in Wicklow. The following passage served clearly as a stimulus for the mood and themes in Shadow. Among the cottages that are scattered through the hills of County Wicklow I have met with many people who show in a singular way the influence of a particular locality. These people live for the most part besides old roads and pathways where hardly one man passes in the day, and look out all year on unbroken barriers of heath. At every season heavy rains fall for often a week at a time, till the thatch drips with water stained to a dull chestnut and the floor in the cottage seems to be going back to the condition of the bogs near it. […] At such times the people crouch all night over a few sods of turf and the dogs howl in the lanes. […] This peculiar climate, acting on a population that is already lonely and dwindling, has caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness, from that of a man who is merely mournful to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, is common among these hills. (CoW: 241)

25 For a comprehensive analysis of the folklore content of Synge‟s works see “Synge‟s Use of Irish Folklore” by Seán Ó Súilleabháin in Harmon 1971: 18-34 26 “Some feature of County Wicklow, […] have made the district a favourite with the vagrants of Ireland.” (“The Vagrants of Wicklow”, CoW: 235) 36

The image of the „shadow‟, which refers to darkness and more specifically to the mountain mist, has an immediate influence on the lives of the characters. It suggests alternately boredom, loneliness, repetition, approaching madness, old age, or death27. The shadow itself is a principal agent in the play which dominates and conditions the people of the glen. It can generally be said that nature in Shadow is “at best, indifferent to man and his needs, potentially a dangerous and hostile enemy. For the shadow threatens man‟s reason.” (Nicholas Grene in Casey 1994: 84) In the play this is beautifully illustrated by Nora‟s: “hearing the winds crying, and you not knowing on what thing your mind would stay” (CoW: 7). The above quotation furthermore illustrates the Darwinian idea that life is a struggle for existence for men and beast alike.

3.1.3. Cognitive Dissonance

Weldon Thornton claims that part of Synge‟s aim was “to put his audience through an experience of a shock, of cognitive dissonance, similar to what he suffered upon reading Darwin, or to what he enjoyed on the Aran Islands.” (1979: 98) The fact that it is hard to place Shadow, or indeed any of Synge‟s dramatic pieces, into dramatic categories such as comedy, tragedy, or even tragicomedy supports this hypothesis. According to Thornton, the frustration of stereotypes and received assumptions is exactly the reason for the strong reaction of audience and critics to the play (cf. 1979: 98). Synge evoked traditional aesthetic stereotypes, for example a country cottage, but then shifted perspective and thus forced the audience to reassess their expectations. Most of the early 20th century audiences persisted in retaining them, which made the play a confusing and frustrating experience. The typical lovers‟ triangle of dissatisfied wife, jealous husband, and young rival is shattered by allowing the true natures and affinities of the protagonists to emerge. The original story offers a complete fulfilment of audience expectations, while Synge‟s version is radically different; it initially elicits the stereotype but then diverges drastically. The atmosphere in Shadow is created by the use of certain words or phrases that occur naturally in peasant dialogue. „Sheep‟ and „mountain ewes‟, for example, were commonly talked-about subjects in rural Ireland. By repeatedly using allusions to sheep in his dialogue,

27 Possibly even a reference to the biblical “valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23) 37

Synge manages to create the effect of a motif running through the play. However, he upsets the traditional literary association with sheep as pastoral or picturesque by associating them with old age and death, to heighten and intensify the desolate atmosphere of the glen. Dan Burke in particular is frequently associated with sick or dying sheep28. Mountain ewes are mainly used to denote virility and sexual prowess. Synge also deconstructs the values of family life. A cottage room, such as the kitchen where Shadow is set, was traditionally an emblem for a reassuring, familiar model of human life, limited, but comfortable. Such a room stands for normality, for ordinary harmonious family life. Yet Synge does not portray a happy family in a comfortable cottage; instead he shows a dysfunctional loveless and childless marriage with material subsistence being the only reason for the wife to remain.

3.2. The Portrayal of Irish Characters in Shadow

It is likely that Synge chose the folk story of the unfaithful wife for his first dramatic piece, so that, through this tale, he could deal with numerous themes that preoccupied him and that can be found throughout his entire canon, including the tension between material security and a free imaginative life, the figure of the tramp as independent and at one with nature, the loneliness of a life without deeper meaning, the transience of youth and beauty, and the power of language to colour, or shape reality. With the characters he draws in Shadow, Synge elaborates on these aspects and themes while painting a realist picture of rural Ireland. There are no traces of the stage Irishman of the past, even though minor characters are often more types than individuals. In Shadow there are three male characters and one female character present on stage. In addition, three offstage characters serve to illustrate the main protagonists‟ state of mind. Synge‟s playwriting coincided with a time “when the wild, passionate and masterful women of ancient Celts were being rediscovered” (Kiberd 1995: 178); thus his female protagonist, Nora Burke, is a passionate Celtic woman who embodies the true Irish spirit. Strong female characters can be found throughout Synge‟s works, women full of idealism, passion, and sexuality, possessing independent minds, but who are also aware of social conventions and their own mortality.

28 Dan is, for example, “the like of a dead sheep” (CoW: 4) 38

The men in Shadow have diverse roles. Dan Burke and Michael Dara seem to serve mainly as Nora‟s foils. They are stock figures that represent commonplace male materialism and the instinct of self-preservation. The offstage Patch Darcy serves as a romantic ideal, whereas the rooted to the soil Tramp offers Nora a very real means of escape from her dreary life.

3.2.1. Dan Burke and Michael Dara

A central device of the drama is the comic irony of the eavesdropper. After Dan‟s first resurrection, the audience enjoys superior awareness and knows that the old man, who is supposedly dead, is actually listening in to the communication going on around him. Synge adds to the comedy of the situation by having Dan Burke repeat parts of the overheard conversation once he has risen from his death-bed. He echoes, for example, the Tramp‟s attempt to keep his countenance: “A man that‟s dead can do no hurt” (CoW: 6), when he rises with an ironic: “Don‟t be afeard, stranger, a man that‟s dead can do no hurt” (CoW: 7). He later mocks Michael‟s speech about his funeral in the „Seven Churches‟ and their subsequent marriage, in order to show them how completely they have been caught out. Dan cannot hide his spite when he distorts Nora‟s dramatic lament on the passing of time and generations into an evidence of a swarm of lovers: “There‟ll be an end now of your fine times, and all the talk you have of young men and old men [...]” (CoW: 13) Dan Burke is doubtless the villain in Synge‟s tale, and much more unfavourably presented than in the original folk-tale. He is sour, stingy, possessive, and drinks too much. He only reveals his sham to the Tramp because he is “destroyed with the drouth29” (CoW: 7) and wants some whiskey while his wife is out of the house. Even though he makes him his accomplice, Dan dislikes the Tramp for his easy manner and his faculty of speech which he dismisses as „blathering‟. The shadows of the glen also have an influence on Dan. He broods on his suspicions about Nora‟s infidelity. “[I]t‟s always up on the hills he was, thinking thoughts in the dark mist.” (CoW: 4) Dan Burke is insensitive and unimaginative and has no empathy for or understanding of his wife‟s feelings: “It‟s a long time I‟m keeping that stick for I‟ve got a bad wife in the house.”(CoW: 8)

29 drouth - thirst 39

Even though he threatens to do so, Dan never actually uses physical violence against Nora. He either knows that this wouldn‟t impress her free spirit or he might even feel physically inferior to his much younger wife and be afraid of retaliation. Instead he effectively torments her psychologically by appealing to her fear of loneliness, fading beauty and old age. Dan is resentful of his wife‟s presumed infidelities but even more of the very fact of her youth. Walk out now, Nora Burke, and it‟s soon you‟ll be getting old with that life, I‟m telling you; it‟s soon your teeth‟ll be falling […] It‟s lonesome roads she‟ll be going and hiding herself away till the end will come, and they find her stretched like a dead sheep with the frost on her, or the big spiders maybe, and they putting their webs on her in the butt of a ditch. (CoW: 13)

The allusion to sheep heightens the morbid atmosphere of Dan‟s speech. He knows that his wife would be too proud to go to a poorhouse - “The like of her would never go there” (CoW: 13) - or appeal for help anywhere. In Dan‟s triumphant mind, her only alternative is desolation and death. Yet even in the light of this horrible prediction, Nora realizes that the outcome of her leaving will be more disastrous for Dan than for her, as she has been tending to his physical needs. Her reply to Dan is almost compassionate and charitable. “Yet, if it is itself, Daniel Burke, who can help it at all, and let you be getting up into your bed, and not getting your death with the wind blowing on you, and the rain with it, and you half in your skin.” (CoW: 13) Nora‟s last words before she leaves are more intense and bitter and reveal that Dan‟s future is ultimately bleaker than hers: “And what way will yourself live from this day, with none to care for you?” (CoW: 15)

As to Michael Dara, he is no independent force in the play, but rather like a second and younger Dan Burke, as their attitudes are alike. Michael is described as a “tall innocent young man” (CoW: 8) in the stage direction and can indeed be seen as a harmless accessory. He is an outsider, “a kind of farmer [that] has come up from the sea” (CoW: 6), and is thus much more of a „stranger‟ than the Tramp, whom he dislikes just as Dan does. Michael is jealous of Patch Darcy‟s skill with mountain ewes and Nora‟s obvious admiration of him, as his own skill with animals is poor: “Mountain ewes is a queer breed, Nora Burke, and I‟m not used to them at all.” (CoW: 9) Throughout the play a man‟s ability as a shepherd is linked to his virility or even ability as a lover. The Tramp amply mocks Michael‟s lack of aptitude: “I‟m thinking it‟s a poor herd does be running back and forward after a little handful of ewes, the way I seen yourself running this day, young fellow, and you 40

coming from the fair.” (CoW: 9) Michael is furious but has to concede his defeat. Nora first tries to console him: “There‟s no one can drive a mountain ewe but the men do be reared in the Glenmalure, I‟ve heard them say, [...] men the like of Patch Darcy, God spare his soul, who would walk through five hundred sheep and miss one of them, and he not reckoning them at all.” (CoW: 9-10) When reminded of Darcy, Nora begins to apprehend that the hopes for escape from her dull life that she has projected onto Michael won‟t stand the test of reality. Later, when Nora discloses her deepest thoughts and fears to Michael, he contents himself with counting her money and planning their future in conventional material terms. Nora, in becoming aware of his limitations, warns him that she is “a hard woman to please” (CoW: 10). Finally she asks: “Why should I marry you, Mike Dara? You‟ll be getting old and I‟ll be getting old” (CoW: 12). Nora realises that marrying Michael would mean continuing exactly the same life as with Dan, a life without imagination, without passion and without any deeper sense or meaning; a marriage based on material concern. Michael is a superstitious coward - “I do be afeard of the dead” (CoW: 9) - and completely fails to offer any protection to Nora. As soon as Dan‟s ghost seems to come back to life, he panics and pleads Nora to get him out “for the love of God” (CoW: 12). Later, when faced with an angry Dan, he is quick to cut his support for Nora and sheepishly suggests she should go to the “fine Union below in Rathdrum” (CoW: 13). Here he demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of Nora‟s character. Even Dan knows that Nora would never go there, as the union “is looked on with supreme horror by the peasants” (CoW: 249). Dan and Michael symbolize the narrow minded life of self-preservation and conformity. Their connection is reinforced by the ending of the play where the two share a drink in mutual understanding: “[May] you have a long life, and a quiet life, and good health with it.” (CoW: 15)

3.2.2. The Tramp and Patch Darcy

The Tramp falls into the category of the „natural aristocrat‟ that Synge30 describes in his romantic and somewhat primitivist essay “The Vagrants of Wicklow”:

30 Synge is known to have identified himself with vagrants and usually signed his love letters to Molly Allgood (who played Nora at the Abbey early in 1906 ) with “Your Old Tramp” (cf. Murray 1997: 76) 41

Wherever the labourer of a country has preserved his vitality, and begets an occasional temperament of distinction, a certain number of vagrants are to be looked for. In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest – usually a writer or an artist with no sense for speculation – and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside. In this life, however, there are many privileges. The tramp in Ireland is little troubled by the laws, and lives in out-of-door conditions that keep him in good-humour and fine bodily health. (CoW: 235) In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain wilderness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts also. (CoW: 240)

The Tramp is the binary opposite to Dan Burke. His close connection with nature is an indication of his vitality and fertility. He is appreciative of simple comforts, such as a dry place or a good drink and is quick to adapt himself to new situations. His is an active, perceptive existence and he is “sensitive to the moods of people and of the natural world, and susceptible to feelings, language and rhythms” (Price 1961: 121). The Tramp acts as the “focal sensibility of the play without ever straying from his role as a character within it”. (Skelton 1971: 58) He is always addressed by Nora and everyone else in the play as “stranger”. The audience never gets to know his name, which probably means that he should serve as a generic figure, a person at one with nature, a way of escape for Nora. Even though he is supposedly a “stranger”, the Tramp seems more at home in the surroundings of the glens than anyone else in the play. He knows the neighbourhood and the local gossip; apparently he was even the last one to hear Patch Darcy‟s voice before he died. He is familiar with the natural as well as the potentially supernatural world beyond the cottage. The Tramp is very observant and upon seeing the corpse remarks with suspicion: “It‟s a queer look is on him for a man that‟s dead.” (CoW: 3). Nora, however, dismisses his concerns by humorously claiming that Dan had always been “queer”. When the Tramp carefully lets on that “many a lone woman would be afeard of the like of me in the dark night” (CoW: 5), Nora counters with: “It‟s other things than the like of you, stranger, would make a person afeard.” (CoW: 5) The Tramp shudders upon this allusion to the supernatural world: “It is surely, God help us all” (CoW: 5). He has a very real fear of the supernatural. He was mortally afraid when he thought he heard voices in the fog: “I‟m destroyed surely” (CoW: 6); and superstitiously asks for a needle as protective talisman when left alone with the corpse, “Maybe if you‟d a piece of gray thread and a sharp needle – there‟s great safety in a needle” (CoW: 7). Synge remarked in The Aran Islands that “[i]ron is a common talisman 42

with barbarians” (AI: 36) after Pat Dirane advised him to “take a sharp needle [...] and stick it under the collar of your coat, and not one of them [the fairies] will be able to have power on you.” (AI: 36) With the Tramp, Synge uses another instance of popular folk superstition that he was about told on the Aran Islands. An old man told Synge that “none of those creatures [fairies] can stand before you and you saying the De Profundis.” (AI: 132) De Profundis is a penitential Psalm which is part of the office of the burial of the dead. The Tramp utters this prayer when left alone with Dan‟s corpse. The paradoxical nature of his religious belief is hinted at here. On the one hand, as a tramp, he is completely independent of state or church authority, on the other hand, he is the only character in Shadow who crosses himself repeatedly and repeats popular prayers. Possibly his fear of the supernatural is so immense that he uses all available means to protect himself, whether these be pagan, or orthodox. Here Synge highlights the arbitrariness of received ideas and the freedom of man to employ whatever suits his individual nature best. Another distinguishing feature of the Tramp is his eloquence. With his “fine talk” he slowly manages to convince Nora to leave with him. “We‟ll be going now, lady of the house; the rain is falling, but the air is kind, and maybe it‟ll be a grand morning, by the grace of God.” (CoW: 14) Nora‟s realism does not permit her any romantic idealism, instead, she fears disease and death. The Tramp manages to console her: “You‟ll not be getting your death with myself, lady of the house, and I knowing all the ways a man can put food in his mouth” (CoW: 14). He goes so far as to compare her married life in the glen to sitting on a wet ditch: “you‟ll not be sitting up on a wet ditch, the way you‟re after sitting in this place, making yourself old with looking on each day” (CoW: 14). He cleverly addresses her fear of growing old and dying sad and alone after an uneventful life. The Tramp is the only man in the play who understands and can truly relate to Nora‟s desires and fears. He knows he cannot provide a way of transcending time, mortality or even weather conditions, but he can offer a healthy mental attitude, a way of coping with them: “you‟ll be saying to yourself one time, „It‟s a grand evening by the grace of God,‟ and another time,‟ It‟s a wild night, God help us, but it‟ll pass surely.‟” (CoW: 14) The Tramp‟s powerfully dramatic final speech convinces Nora at last: Come along with me now, lady of the house, and it‟s not my blather you‟ll be hearing only, but you‟ll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you‟ll be hearing the

grouse, and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes31 when the days are warm, and it‟s not from the like of them you‟ll be hearing a talk of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you, and the light of your eyes, but 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. (CoW: 14)

Synge constructed this speech beautifully. The repetition of “you‟ll be hearing” gives it a clear structure and makes it extremely persuasive. Synge again employs the motif of sheep in connection with old age. The beauties of nature are sharply contrasted with the horrors of physical decay and madness which are associated with staying in the cottage and in conventional life. What the Tramp has to offer are natural delights, such as bird song, warm sunny days and an escape from a dreary repetitive life. The Tramp symbolizes the embrace of the native culture and an “outflowing life of movement, altruism and imagination” (W. A. Armstrong in Redmond 1979: 122). He offers Nora a life away from the influence of her husband, the church‟s control and hence “a life within the ideal culture free from foreign influences” (O‟Ceallaigh 2002: 11).

The offstage character Patch Darcy largely serves to further define the main characters‟ states of mind. For Nora and the Tramp he is a lost romantic ideal, while Dan and Michael jealously reject him. Patch Darcy was reared in the district and is a highly skilful shepherd. The Tramp enthusiastically praises him: “There was never a lamb from his own ewes he wouldn‟t know before it was marked, and he‟d run from this to the city of Dublin and never catch for his breath.” (CoW: 10) Nora clearly falls for his virility, which is proven by his aptitude with mountain ewes. However, even the idealised hero Patch Darcy could not bear the shadows of the glen for long and finally went mad and died in the mists. An episode in Synge‟s essay “The Oppression of the Hills” clearly served as a source for his death. A policeman tells Synge the story of a Wicklow man who went mad and died in the hills: “Then some excitement took him, and he threw off his clothes and ran away into the hills. There was a great rain that night [...] Then there was nothing known of him till last night when they found his body on the mountain, and it near eaten by the crows.” (CoW: 242) The fact that Nora‟s heroic ideal is lost forever heightens her desperation and presses her to leave the shadows.

31 With this passage, Synge appeals to the audience‟s knowledge of folk poetry, as it clearly echoes Raftery‟s poem “Killeaden, or County Majo” (trans. Douglas Hyde‟s 1899): There is a cuckoo and the thrush answering each| Other there,| The blackbird and the ceirseach (hen) hatching over| Against them,| The goldfinch, the wood- cock […] (cf. O‟Ceallaigh 2002: 10) 44

The continuous affectionate recalling of the dead shepherd by Nora and the Tramp, as well as numerous allusions to conventions and customs as formal wakes32, serve to turn Shadow into a mock-wake. One of the functions of a wake was to praise the deceased and honour his memory. In Shadow only harsh words can be found for Dan Burke, while Patch Darcy‟s virtues are recalled at length. “He was a great man surely, stranger; and isn‟t it a grand thing when you hear a living man saying a good word of a dead man, and he mad dying?” (CoW: 10) According to Kiberd, this question holds the “ultimate irony of this vastly inverted wake” (1979: 174). Synge was highly aware of traditional customs at Irish wakes, several of which can be detected in Shadow. Games of courtship were common at wakes and “marriages based on hard economic considerations” (Kiberd 1979: 172) were no exception. Furthermore, Nora‟s “acceptance of the tramp is wholly within the convention of the wake amusement known as „marrying‟, by which a girl was „married‟ to the first man who came into the house from outside.” (Kiberd 1979: 173) The Church generally opposed pagan wake customs, mainly because of the widespread drunkenness which traditionally occurred but also because of the unruly violence and improper courtship games. Another reason for this opposition was the pagan conception of death underlying such wakes.

3.2.3. Nora Burke

“The shattered ideals and thwarted aspirations of all humanity speak through her as she sits an inscrutably sad woman above the ruins of her world.” (Bourgeois 1968: 149) In her marriage, Nora Burke has found material stability but no satisfaction of her imaginative or emotional needs. Her dilemma, as the play unfolds, is the conflict between the lonely, restricted but fairly safe life with her husband, and an uncertain, potentially dangerous but emotionally fulfilling alternative. It is impossible for Nora to have both, and she is ultimately driven to take a decision. Nora‟s reasons for marrying Dan Burke are clearly outlined in the play. Hard economic realities of survival forced her to marry a much older man without awareness of the consequences. What way would I live if I didn‟t marry a man with a bit of a farm and cows on it, and sheep on the back hills? (CoW: 10)

32 For a detailed analysis of wake customs in Ireland see Kiberd 1979:169-175 45

I do be thinking in the long nights it was a big fool I was that time, Michael Dara; for what good is a bit of a farm with cows on it, and sheep on the back hills, when you do be sitting looking out from a door the like of that door, and seeing nothing but the mists rolling down the bog, and the mists again and they rolling up the bog33, and hearing nothing but the wind crying out in the bits of broken trees were left from the great storm, and the streams roaring with the rain. (CoW: 11)

Nora suffers due to the overwhelming desolation and dull repetitiveness of her surroundings. Nevertheless she is a strong and courageous woman, “never afeard of a beggar or bishop or any man [...] at all” (CoW: 5). She has a poetic soul and is “a grand woman to talk” (CoW: 8). Nora exhibits wit and does not hesitate to disclose her sexual frustration to a complete stranger like the Tramp: “Maybe cold would be no sign of death with the like of him, for he was always cold, every day since I knew him...and every night, stranger”(CoW: 4). She is highly alert and her instinct does not allow her to trust her husband even after his death, hence she asks the Tramp at her return: “There was no sign of himself?” (CoW: 9) However, she observes the black curse Dan put on her forbidding her to touch his body after his death. Nora is painfully aware of the transience of youth and beauty. “Isn‟t it a long while I am sitting here in the winter and the summer, and the fine spring, with the young growing behind me and the old passing.” (CoW: 11) Two offstage women, recalled in the play, Mary Brien and Peggy Cavanagh, serve to illustrate Nora‟s plight. The young Mary Brien with her “two children and another coming on her in three months or four” (CoW: 11) represents the “young growing behind”, reminding Nora of her own childlessness and the passing of time., whereas Peggy Cavanagh, who was once a celebrated ideal wife, is “now walking round on the roads, or sitting in a dirty old house, with no teeth in her mouth, and no sense” (CoW: 11). She stands for everything which terrifies Nora but which seems the only alternative to the monotonous career of a farmer‟s wife. Nora sees her life as caught between Mary‟s and Peggy‟s, with no way of escape. “We‟ll all be getting old, but it‟s a queer thing surely.” (CoW: 12) Nora Burke is a proud woman, who never pleads her husband to take her back, once ordered out of the house. Neither does she try to take refuge with Michael Dara, but rather reproaches the Tramp for this suggestion with a mercilessly realistic “What would he do with me now?” (CoW: 13) For Nora, the realization of the inevitability of growing old and finally dying becomes so powerful and comprehensive in its implications that there is nothing left for

33 This passage was parodied by Gerald MacNamara in his 1909 play The Mist That Does Be on the Bog 46

her other than to pity Dan Burke and exit with a shattering: “What is it you‟ll have now but a black life, Daniel Burke; and it‟s not long I‟m telling you, till you‟ll be lying again under that sheet, and you dead surely.” (CoW: 13) She finally leaves with the Tramp to embrace a new and adventurous life, which to her could not possibly be worse than the one she is now leaving behind for good. She is ready to confront the shadows with the Tramp‟s healthy mental attitude and instead of fighting nature, to become one with it: “I‟m thinking it‟s myself will be wheezing that time with lying down under the heavens when the night is cold; but you‟ve a fine bit of talk, stranger, and it‟s with yourself I‟ll go” (CoW: 14). Synge never meant for Shadows to be didactic, thus the audience does not find out what Nora‟s life as the Tramp‟s companion actually turns out to be. She disappears into an obscure future. Nora Burke embodies the true Celtic spirit and is ultimately is slave to no man. Free from all ties and burdens she exits the stage where the male society slips back to its familiar security.

3.3. Sex, Marriage, and Divorce

John B. Yeats writes in his momentous treatise “Ireland out of Dock”: “Mr. Synge has attacked our Irish institution, the loveless marriage, […] better be a young tramp‟s drudge, better be a target for everyone‟s scorn, better anything than the foulness of such a marriage.” (The United Irishman, 10 Oct.1903; cited in Jones 1994: 31) Arthur Griffith‟s34 response to this allegation clearly reflects the contemporary social consensus on female morality: “Men and women in Ireland marry lacking love, and live mostly in a dull level of amity. Sometimes they do not – sometimes the woman lives in bitterness – sometimes she dies of a broken heart – but she does not go away with the Tramp.” (The United Irishman, 17 Oct. 1903; cited in Jones 1994: 32) The defence of the reputation of Irish womanhood stands above actual social realities, as arranged marriages were indeed common practice throughout rural Ireland. However, the principles of monogamy and sexual fidelity, essential to preserve the fabric of society, had to be maintained at all costs. Synge‟s psychosexual realism, overtly dramatizing sexual frustration, opened the predetermined moral and discursive regulations of sexuality up to inspection and disruption.

34 Arthur Griffith (1872-1922) was an ardent nationalist, cofounder and editor of the weekly newspaper The United Irishman, as well as editor of several other political papers. He was further the founder of the political party Sinn Féin in 1905, vice president (1919), and finally president of the Irish Republic from 1922 until his death (cf. „Arthur Griffith‟, wikipedia.org). 47

Officially, sex was only permitted, or even deemed to exist, in the context of family planning. Especially in Irish peasant communities it was regarded as an evil force, leading to affliction and sin. With the articulation of sexual desire and aggressiveness, inside and outside the marital context, Synge was accused of importing European decadence and immorality onto the Irish stage and producing the potential for a social and sexual revolution. In a letter to MacKenna35, Synge marvels: “On the French stage the sex-element of life is given without other balancing elements; on the Irish stage the people you agree with want the other elements without sex. I restored the sex-element to its natural place, and the people were so surprised they saw the sex only.” (1904; CLI: 74) Synge might have intended to undercut the dominant sexual discourse, however, his main critique was directed at the deficiencies of loveless, prearranged marriages and impossibility of divorce, especially in rural Catholic societies. Pre-British law in Ireland even during the early Christian period “allowed for the legal dissolvement of marriage” and remarriage, on the grounds of “domestic violence, infertility/sterility, or failure of maintenance” (O‟Ceallaigh 2002: 8). The divorce laws of pagan Irish culture did by no means advocate adultery but recognized the freedom of women and men to change their minds. In England divorce was legalized by The British Parliament‟s Divorce Act of 1857. This law was not extended to Ireland, where separation remained illegal, although practised in certain cases. The lack of children, which was mainly blamed on the woman, was one of the more common reasons for separation in rural Ireland before the twentieth century (cf. O‟Ceallaigh 2002: 10). O‟Ceallaigh claims that it would have been “„un-Irish‟ for Nora not to leave her husband”. Her revolutionary choice was not to become the Tramp‟s common-law wife - even though her future relationship with the Tramp is not actually hinted at in the drama - but “her very choice to leave” (2002: 10). Synge‟s ties to the pagan are asserted when Nora triumphantly exits the stage. The call for resurrection and for the embrace of Ireland‟s true culture, free from detrimental foreign influence, was extremely nationalistic. The freedom that Nora ultimately gains was the freedom Synge envisioned for Ireland.

35 MacKenna was a close friend and confidant of Synge‟s 48

3.4. An Un-Irish Play? – Audience Reception of Shadow

Nicholas Grene notes that it seems extraordinary how the “representational version of an Irish country cottage visited by a real tramp off the roads” could trigger such heated debates over “the arranged marriage of convenience, the sexual morality of Irish women, and by extension the nature of the Irish national character” (1999: 74). Synge‟s sketch of the bitter realities of Irish rural life was hissed at on the opening night and resulted in a walk-out by prominent nationalists, such as Maud Gonne who consequently resigned from the Irish National Theatre Society (c.f. Grene 1999: 72). Disagreements commenced even before rehearsals and led to the secession of a several principal actors from the National Theatre36. The play produced raging controversies and was particularly fiercely discussed in the nationalist newspaper The United Irishman. Arthur Griffith labelled Shadow an un-Irish play: “[It] shows him [Synge] to be as utterly a stranger to Irish character as any Englishman who has yet dissected us for the enlightenment of his countrymen. […] The play has an Irish name but it is no more Irish than Decameron. It is staging a corrupt version of the old-world libel on womankind – the „Widow of Ephesos‟.”(The United Irishman, 17 Oct. 1903; cited in Jones 1994: 31) Synge‟s drama, however, bears no connection with “The Matron of Ephesos” which, according to Ó Súilleabháin even belongs to a completely different motif (cf. Seán Ó Súilleabháin in Harmon 1972: 19). Defending himself against Griffith‟s accusation, Synge pointed to the source of his play by sending him his notes on the old folk-tale narrated to him on the Aran Islands. Griffith deliberately neglected to acknowledge or print this. As discussed above, the actual source of Shadow is a profoundly Irish one. Bourgeois notes that similar plotlines can be found in older European works of fiction or drama like Molière‟s Le Malade Imaginaire (1673), Voltaire‟s Zadig (1747), Mirande and Géroule‟s Octave (1931), and that the overall theme is a re-telling of the ancient Oriental legend of „The Faithless Widow‟ (cf. 1968: 156). However, the similarities between those narratives primarily prove that elemental folk-tales are international. After the opening night Shadow was debated at length in all national papers. W.B. Yeats engaged in a spirited defence of the play in The United Irishman and argued for freedom of imagination and freedom of the theatre (cf. Jones 1994: 30-31). The Irish Times

36 However, Kiberd argues that this was largely due to Yeats‟ pulling James Cousins‟ Sold from the playbill substituting it with Shadow (1979: 237) 49

admitted to the “cleverness of the dialect” but found the play itself “distasteful” (The Irish Times, 9 Oct. 1903; cited in Jones 1994: 30). The Daily Express seems to have grasped the play more fully: Taken by itself the play was most agreeably fooling. It has qualities which mark it out as quite apart from, and in some sense beyond, the usual type of production at the National Theatre. There is a convincing ring of truth, not necessarily in the sense that the characters represented are typical of Irish life; but trust, as meaning that the actions and characters are quite possible in real life, consequently in Irish life. (9 Oct. 1903; cited in Jones 1994: 30)

It remains astonishing that during the whole dispute over the Irishness and possible sources of Shadow, Ibsen was never alluded to. Four months prior to the premiere of Synge‟s play, Ibsen‟s A Doll’s House37 had been staged in Dublin. The female protagonist of the drama is also called Nora and leaves her husband and familiar stability behind at the end of the play. Ibsen‟s realist play is about the need for the individual to achieve self-identity, regardless of gender. It wanted to show that a woman could define herself as a person not only as a man‟s wife, mother, daughter or widow. However, even the most ardent critics seemed to have noted the differences between the two plays. Shadow was non-didactic and revolutionary more in the area of culture than gender. It denounced the prohibition and non- acceptance of marital separation or divorce within a very Irish context.

3.4.1. Nationalist Reception of Shadow

In some cases, class outrage seemed to even exceed the moral outrage over the play. Neither Nora‟s suspected adultery with Patch Darcy, nor her entertaining the Tramp alone at a wake, nor her loveless, pre-arranged marriage, could exceed the public indignation over her „going off‟ with a tramp. With this ending, Synge betrayed the bourgeois ideology, which was essential to the Irish urban middle-class construction of the national idea. Many nationalist critics denied the mere possibility that an Irish woman might act thus, while other reviewers were more realistic, admitting that such a thing was indeed within the bounds of possibility but maintaining that it never should have been staged. O‟Ceallaigh argues that there is a “natural and nationalist need for Nora to free herself from Dan Burke, as if ending their marriage politically rebuked foreign law, England‟s and/or the Church‟s.”(2002: 12) Nora leaves with all of idealized rural Ireland before her.

37 For a detailed analysis of the similarities but also the differences between Shadow and A Doll’s House see Setterquist 1974: 16-26 50

In a Real Wicklow Glen, published in The United Irishman, was the nationalist riposte to Shadow and was most probably authored by Arthur Griffith38 himself. It showed the sense of morality expected from women and the way in which this morality fortified the social order. The married Norah of this playlet encounters her sweetheart of ten years ago, whom she couldn‟t marry for financial reasons and who since then has taken to drink. She urges him to stop drinking for her sake and he promises to do so if she kisses him. The virtuous Norah, enraged, refuses and never wants to see him again. The man is then consoled by an old woman who suggests that he should stop drinking and apply himself to making money, so that when Norah‟s old husband dies, he will be available and suitable for her. Such an endorsement of restraint and self-denial may well uphold a concept of morality that nationalists felt had to be expected of a nation trying to assert its essential sobriety and subsequent right to self-determination. While the piece refutes the supposedly immoral conclusion of Shadow, it remains striking that it does not dispute and even confirms the realism of Nora Burke‟s situation. Synge‟s Nora opts for self-determination while the nationalist Norah openly embraces the concept of the feminine evoked in imperialist discourse and therefore consolidates the very colonialism which Irish nationalists nominally opposed. The provocative power of Shadow was, that it demanded Irish audiences to recognize the social and sexual implications of the discourse of colonialism. “[T]he female as sexually submissive was a case of misrecognition as advantageous to the colonizers as it was to the bourgeoisie who constituted the nationalist bloc.” (David Cairns/Shaun Richards in Bramsbäck 1988 II: 40) Nora‟s drive to leave her home is no heroic self-abnegation but instead an attempt at self-fulfilment. Nationalists, for whom holy Ireland could only be portrayed by women with the morality of the Virgin, were shocked and disturbed by this idea. The play was considered as derogatory of the Irish as a people incapable of restraint, and thus unfit for self-government. However, what enraged nationalists most was that with Nora‟s fate Synge made explicit “the individual costs of the system of property succession upon which the material power of the supporters of radical Irish nationalism rested” (David Cairns/Shaun Richards in Bramsbäck 1988 II: 36). Except for his initial letter to Griffith, Synge hardly commented on the heated discussion his play had provoked. His attitude to the matter can best be summarized with an excerpt of a letter he wrote to MacKenna: “I think squeamishness is a disease and that Ireland

38 cf. David Cairns/Shaun Richards in Bramsbäck 1988 II: 39 51

will gain if Irish writers will deal manfully, directly and decently with the entire reality of life.” (1904, CL1: 74)

4. Riders to the Sea 4.1. The Play

Synge‟s second one-act play Riders to the Sea39 (1904) was written around the same time as Shadow and finished shortly after. The tragedy40 was published in Samhain in Oct. 1903 and first performed by the Irish National Theatre Society on 25th February 1904 at the Molesworth Hall. While Shadow deals with pastoral Ireland, Riders expresses the sombre poetry of island life. Even though Synge, as previously discussed, obtained the inspiration for all his plays on the Aran Islands, Riders is the only drama he actually set there. In Riders, Synge fuses a number of diverse personal experiences along with prevailing interests and attitudes of his life into a new whole and “sets forth the essence of Aran life [...] which is also Synge‟s image of Man‟s place in the universe” (Price 1961: 181). Riders is set also in a cottage kitchen, this time on an island, thus the room is equipped with typical items of fishermen‟s life, such as nets and oilskins. Maurya, a grieving old woman, has lost her husband, her father-in-law, and four sons to the sea and is uneasily awaiting news of the death of another son, who has been missing for nine days. Her two daughters, Cathleen and Nora, receive a bundle containing fragments of clothing that were washed ashore in Donegal, with the instruction to keep them secret from their mother while finding out if they belonged to their missing brother Michael. The girls quickly hide the unopened bundle when Maurya comes into the kitchen. Her youngest and only remaining son Bartley also arrives and prepares for a trip to the horse fair in Galway. The old woman desperately tries to dissuade him from this dangerous enterprise, dreading the stormy sea but Bartley ignores her entreaties and finally leaves without her blessing. Maurya‟s daughters then make her follow him to catch up with him by the spring well in order to give him bread for his journey and her blessing. While the old woman is gone they examine the bundle and Nora positively identifies a stocking as belonging to Michael because of its distinctive knitting pattern. Maurya returns with the bread still in her hand, looking

39 hereafter referred to as „Riders‟ 40 For a detailed discussion of the genre of Riders in criticism see Thornton 1979: 110-118. The drama will be treated as tragedy in the present study even though it challenges the Aristotelian definition of the genre. However, T.R. Henn maintains: “Perhaps it is the only complete one-act tragedy in any literature, for it requires no space to develop its characteristic momentum” (T.R. Henn in Bushrui 1972: 35) 53

haggard and forlorn. She first gives evasive answers to her daughter‟s anxious questions but finally reveals that she has had a vision. While praying at the well she saw Bartley riding past on the red mare, couldn‟t bless him and suddenly beheld Michael in beautiful new clothes riding on the grey pony behind him. Maurya knows that the vision is a portent and starts mourning. Cathleen then hands her the pieces of clothing that prove Michael‟s death and Maurya bitterly recalls all the drowned men in her family. Soon enough Bartley‟s dripping wet corpse is carried into the kitchen on a plank. He has been knocked off his horse into the sea by the grey pony. Bartley‟s body is then placed on the kitchen table among mourning women and praying men and Maurya sprinkles it with holy water. The old woman prays for God‟s mercy on his soul and the souls of all mankind. She finally accepts with relief that “the end is come” (CoW: 27) and there is nothing left for the sea to take from her.

4.1.1. Source and Adaptation

Synge‟s intimacy with the Aran Islands was an important factor in the genesis of Riders. He revealed to Pádraic Colum41 that the reason he wrote Riders was, “that he had personally begun to anticipate something of the sadness of old age and death42” (cited in Bourgeois 1968: 167). On Synge‟s second passage to the islands, the ocean was so stormy he had to fear for his life and actually imagined his death by drowning. John Synge was a very personal author and only wrote about themes that concerned him deeply. The life of the islanders fascinated and intrigued him and when the incident in the boat made him aware of the destructive force of the sea, the result was Riders. Various episodes he faithfully recorded in The Aran Islands contributed themes and motifs to the play. The core plot probably originated from the following occurrence: Now a man has been washed ashore in Donegal with one pampooty43 on him, and a striped shirt with a purse in one of the pockets, and a box of tobacco. For three days the people have been trying to fix his identity. [...] Later in the evening, when I was sitting in one of the cottages, the sister of the dead man [...] pieced together all she could remember about his clothes, and what his purse was like, and where he had got it, and the same for his tobacco box, and his stockings. In the end there seemed little doubt that it was her brother. „Ah!‟ she said, „it‟s Mike sure enough, and please God they‟ll give him a decent burial.‟

41 Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was a fellow Irish dramatist and member of the Irish National Dramatic Society. (cf. CLI: 70) 42 In 1901 his glands were troubling him greatly and a Russian doctor advised him to remove them (cf. Jones 1994: 11) 43 pampooties - traditional sandals made from cow skin wrapped around the foot 54

Then she began to keen slowly to herself. (AI: 88)

Just as in Riders, the name of the drowned man is Michael and his sister is the one identifying him by his personal items. Synge mentions in the same passage that since he had been there last, about a year ago, four men had been drowned. He had to witness the sea claiming victims among the Aran islanders on a regular basis. “The body of a young man who was drowned a few weeks ago came ashore this morning, and his friends have been busy all day making a coffin in the yard of the house where he lived.” (AI: 110) Synge further observed about the men of Aran: “I could not help feeling that I was talking with men who were under the judgement of death. I knew that every one of them would be drowned on the sea in a few years and battered naked on the rocks, or would die in his own cottage and be buried in another fearful scene.” (AI: 114) Synge was also greatly impressed with the power of maternal feeling on the Aran Islands. Women had to constantly worry about their sons and husbands out on the rough sea. Synge often came across women who were weeping and looking out over the sea in the hope of a sign of their missing loved ones. In The Aran Islands he remarks: The maternal feeling is so powerful on these islands that it gives a life of torment to the women. Their sons grow up to be banished as soon as they are of age, or to live in continual danger on the sea; their daughters go away also, or are worn out in their youth with bearing children that grow up to harass them in their own turn a little later.” (AI: 62)

In Riders, Synge allows the islanders to speak for themselves, thus the climactic last sentence of the play is an almost literal translation of an Irish letter which Martin McDonough wrote to him in 1902: “[I]t fell out that the wife of my brother Seaghan died, and she was buried the last Sunday of the month of December and look! that it is a sad story to tell, but if it is itself, we must be satisfied because no one can be living forever [...]” (trans. Kiberd 1979: 206) Some external sources may also have had an influence on Riders. At the time he was writing the play, Synge was re-reading M. Pierre Loti‟s novel Pêcheur d’Islande, which dealt with the lives of fishermen in Brittany and a certain parallelism concerning subject, atmosphere and situation can be detected (cf. Bourgeois 1968: 168). Loti can be seen as the external stimulus that “fostered and vitalized his [Synge‟s] own original Irish theme, and ultimately inclined him to its selection and treatment” (Bourgeois 1968: 169).

The mystic sense of doom that is felt in Riders might have originated in modern German „Schicksalsdrama‟ (cf. Bourgeois 1968: 163) which Synge without a doubt was familiar with. Further there are parallels to Maeterlinck‟s play Interior (1894), for example the theme of death and the conviction that man is ultimately powerless against the force of fate. There are also some similarities to Greek tragedy, such as the fact that the climactic action takes place offstage and the mourning women, which might be seen as a Greek „chorus‟. Examples of Greek, Christian and Celtic mythology can be found in abundance in the drama. Synge took the main events and motifs directly from daily life on the Aran Islands. During his stays there he had observed the islanders bake bread, replenish their hearth with turf, count stitches, make primitive halters for their horses, make kelp44, utter frequent blessings, etc. His gift of “impassioned contemplation” (Corkery 1966: 138) then enabled him to make use of such daily happenings in order to interpret the humanity of his characters. In the play, mundane activities are endowed with significance. For example, Cathleen throws down turf not for the hearth but to distract Maurya while she secretly hides the bundle of clothes in the turf loft. When Bartley makes his halter, the rope is actually intended for the very different purpose of lowering a coffin and Nora‟s stitching eventually becomes evidence of Michael‟s death. Synge minimizes external action in his drama to achieve the strong dramatic effect of “psychologizing or interiorizing of the drama.” (Bourgeois 1968: 164) On Aran, where people were utterly dependent on nature, artefacts possessed extreme significance. Synge wrote that “[e]very article on these islands has an almost personal character” (AI: 13). In Riders, ordinary domestic things acquire dramatic meaning and heighten the tragic emotion. The bread Cathleen bakes in the opening of the play is intended for Bartley, but in the end the builders of his coffin will eat it. The new coffin boards for Michael will be used to bury Bartley and the knife used to cut the string of the bundle is purchased from the man who told them about the seven-day walk from Connemara to Donegal. Objects that are interconnected with life seem to prophecy disaster, like the rope or the spinning wheel. Notably, things relating to the dead are brand new, for example the coffin boards, whereas the living must make do with old things, like the dead man‟s walking stick. Furthermore, many objects in the play are related to traditional and folk customs.

44 kelp - seaweed burnt to form soda ash 56

Synge‟s choice of title for the drama is noteworthy. „Riders to the Sea‟ is a poetic phrase and implies mystic content. The term „riders‟ further links the riders of horses and those of the curraghs45, in which men go down to the sea. In Norse and Homeric imagery „riders‟ were the fishermen of the islands (cf. T. R. Henn in Bushrui 1972: 33).

4.1.2. Setting

Synge sets the scene on “an island off the West of Ireland” (CoW: 17), most probably Inishmaan, where Synge spent most of his time on the Aran Islands. On stage is the typical sheltered interior of a cottage kitchen, while outside and offstage the rude island environment has to defer to indomitable natural forces. Synge had the impressive “ability to evoke, with great economy of means, a vivid impression of the proximity and power of the sea” (Setterquist 1974: 34). Already in the first few minutes of the play, the rough ocean is frequently mentioned by all protagonists. It is a foreboding of death and referred to as everything from “middling bad” to “making a great stir” and “a great roaring” (CoW: 17) in connection with the perilously rising wind. The characters never use adjectives to describe „the sea‟, neither personifications nor synonyms. Synge used this extremely effective device to highlight the malice of this immutable force of nature. The sea can be seen as an inhuman protagonist of the play. The islanders draw their sustenance from it as they need it for fishing and travelling. Yet it is also the source of death and destruction and as it takes the young before their time, it acquires a new hostile dimension. There is an atmosphere of inevitability as material necessities of life can only be gained through the sacrifice of men. “Men must risk their lives to keep all alive; the cost in human life and suffering merely to maintain the existence of the community is enormous.” (Price 1961: 190) The vision of nature behind the presentation of the sea in Riders is that there is neither an order behind it, nor the possibility of a benign controlling force. Skelton even argues that the sea is indeed the “„Almighty God‟ of the play, an older and more formidable spiritual power than that represented by the priest” (1971: 50). Throughout the play, the presence of the sea is felt even though it is neither visible nor audible for the audience. It can be argued that the presentation of the sea onstage would have exceeded the means of the early National Theatre Society. However, it is more likely that

45 curragh - traditional Irish boat 57

Synge was aware that the mere mention of the sea and its power over man would make an even stronger impression on the audience than if it were actually represented as part of the scenery. Synge brings his audience to view and apprehend the malignity of the sea “through the island consciousness” (Corkery 1966: 140). The temporal setting of Riders is also significant as it intensifies the atmosphere of death as well as elucidating the supernatural component. The play is set in November, as “the long nights after Samhain” (CoW: 26) are mentioned. An early draft is more exact and sets the play near St. Martin‟s feast (cf. CWIII: 244), which is celebrated on 11th November. Martinmas was the slaughtering season, a time of death. On 31st October Samhain is celebrated all over Ireland. This festival stands in-between Christianity and paganism and marks the beginning of the Celtic New Year. The Celts believed that on Samhain the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead were thinnest and the spirits of the departed could wander the earth (cf. McCoy 1995: 87). According to mythology, Samhain was “a time when the Crone Goddess46 would go into mourning for her lost son [...], leaving her people in temporary darkness.” (McCoy 1995: 87) Christianity later adopted the festival as All Saints‟ Day. For a thorough understanding of the drama, the implications of the setting in Riders are crucial.

4.1.3. “Tá sé imighte uaim”47 - The Keen

When Synge was on the Aran Islands, he attended two funerals. He was deeply fascinated by the “profound ecstasy of grief” (AI: 31) that the islanders expressed in their keen. The keen, or caoine, is the mourning or ceremonial wailing at a burial. The mourners sway their bodies and fall into an inarticulate chant that Bourgeois calls a “half-savage, half- musical melopœia” (1968: 165). Synge describes it as follows: This grief of the keen [...] seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas. They are usually silent, but in the presence of death all outward show of indifference or patience is forgotten, and they shriek with pitiable despair before the horror of the fate to which they are all doomed. (AI: 31)

46 The Crone Goddess represents an aspect of the Celtic Triple Goddess cf. McCoy 1995: 398 47 Trans.: “He‟s gone from me”; keen in Mc Cormack 2000: 249 58

Riders deals with fate and death, thus it is hardly surprising that Synge chose to incorporate the keen as a dramatic device into his play and show it onstage for the first time in theatre history. In the drama, Maurya repeatedly keens softly, first for Michael, then for Bartley and finally the island women keen for all mankind. The keen emphasizes the grave atmosphere of the play, and through staging it, Synge attempts to let the audience catch a glimpse of the inner consciousness of the islanders. Riders can be seen as a solemn requiem for a mortal man, but as all island men are riders to the sea it becomes a requiem for all humanity. The publisher George Roberts recalled that in the rehearsals for Riders, Synge took great pains to reproduce details correctly. The right colour and style of petticoats needed to be obtained, proper pampooties, a real spinning wheel, etc. because everything had a precise function in the play‟s dramatic structure. Synge insisted that the keen should be as close as possible to the original chant on the Aran Islands. After much research, Roberts managed to find an old woman in Galway, who was prepared to teach the keen to the actors. The woman was proud that her native customs were sought after in the city although she couldn‟t believe they really wanted to put “so terrible a thing” (Jones 1994: 20) on stage. Robert‟s anecdote continues with an account of the exact circumstances in which the old woman managed to reproduce the keen. They had to find a dark bedroom, candles were lit and Roberts himself had to act as a corpse, it was only then that “she got that full note of terror of the dead” (Jones 1994: 20).

4.2. The Portrayal of Irish Characters in Riders

Riders was Synge‟s attempt to fathom the native Irish consciousness. He worked with a theme that moved him so profoundly that it “left him freed of that tendency towards the overstatement, the flashy, towards bad taste, indeed, which the imaginative artist is always prone to” (Corkery 1966: 145). In Riders, Synge was less concerned with character development than with achieving a pervasive fatalistic mood. The characters largely represent human types, the mother, the son, and the daughter. Individual characterisation is often neglected and sketchy. Only Maurya moves beyond type in her astonishing transformation at the end of the drama. There is an arbitrary quality about the fate of the characters and no justification of their life or death is given in the play.

The drama‟s brevity, the restricted development of character, the confinement of movement within cottage kitchen, and the resistance to extended dialogue, all serve to emphasize what is occurring on stage. Synge equips each detail, speech and action, even the names of the characters, with far-reaching significance. The dialogues are aesthetically appropriate to the mood and the characters‟ actions are all conditioned by their natural environment. In Riders there are four main characters on stage and two offstage. Maurya and her daughters Cathleen and Nora represent the living, the women that are left behind to mourn the dead and to accept their fate. Michael and Bartley represent the doomed men of the islands who are devoured by the very thing that provides their subsistence. A young priest, who is frequently mentioned, yet never appears on stage, serves to introduce controversies, such as whether the clothes in the bundle belong to Michael or whether Bartley should leave for the mainland. He also stands in opposition to the traditional and pagan way of life on the islands.

4.2.1. Bartley

Bartley is the Irish form of Bartholomew, who was one of the twelve apostles. It is also a derivation of the name Parthalon, who at about 2,800 BC was the leader of the first people to occupy Ireland after the Biblical flood and, according to legend, brought agriculture to the land. Thus it is not traditionally an Irish name although commonly used, particularly in the west of Ireland48. Bartley is Maurya‟s youngest son, the only one left of six sons. His appearance is not described in the stage direction, except that he is “speaking sadly and quietly” (CoW: 18). Bartley feels the responsibility of being the only remaining man in the household. He wants to go to the Galway fair to get a good price for his horses in order to provide for his family. He fights a tense battle of wills with his mother which is not fought openly but in nuance and suggestion in order not to alarm his sisters. Maurya tries to break his resolve “to carry on the ageless tradition of their kind, of wresting a living from the sea.” (Price 1961: 182) but Bartley remains stubborn. A widespread folk belief holds that “one male member of each island family will be spared by God from drowning, in order to provide for the remaining women-folk.” (Kiberd 1979: 16) Bartley might have trusted that his mother would have no

48cf. „Bartley‟, www.babynamesofireland.com 60

need to worry as the island priest had said that “the Almighty God won‟t leave her destitute with no son living” (CoW: 24). It is remarkable how in this instance folk and Christian beliefs overlap. He gives some last instructions to his sisters about household and farm chores to be performed in his absence, which, he is convinced, is only temporary although the audience already feels that he is departing for ever. He orders Cathleen to sell the pig, but bargaining is a man‟s job on the islands and Maurya justly asks, “How would the like of her get a good price for a pig?” (CoW: 19). This already foreshadows how hard life will be for the family should the last son be killed. Bartley then commits the portentous action of using a burial rope to make a halter for his horse. Synge remarks in The Aran Islands that the islanders usually only use a simple halter to ride their horses and that the shipping and transport of horses is difficult and dangerous because of the fierce temperament of the Connemara ponies and the narrow piers and small hookers. (cf. AI: 34) Ironically, the horses that were supposed to bring subsistence to the family helped to kill its last breadwinner. The items Bartley picks up before leaving, a shirt, purse and tobacco, are exactly the same items found on the man washed up in Donegal in the episode Synge experienced on Aran. Although Bartley died drowning, strictly speaking, it was not the sea that killed him, but the grey pony and, according to his mother‟s supernatural vision, the spirit of his dead brother. His death comes as no surprise for the audience even though the reasons for it remain unclear.

4.2.2. Cathleen and Nora

Cathleen and Nora are the two „survivors‟ of the play who will carry on the tradition of island women to build families and worry and keen over their men. Their presence firmly roots the drama in reality as they are connected with the activities of daily life and a healthy, realistic attitude. At the beginning of the play the two girls are already under a large strain. Their anxiety is threefold: that Maurya might hear them and wake up, that their brother Michael is dead, and that Bartley will go to the sea in bad weather. Throughout the play they try to put on a brave face and not show their worries but the underlying tension shows in their

discomposure when for example the cottage door is blown open, or in sudden exaggerated outbursts, for example over the forgotten bread. The sisters are eager but at the same time reluctant to open the bundle that would prove Michael‟s death. The tension in the play intensifies when the knot on the bundle proves too tight to open. When there is no doubt about Michael‟s drowning, their immediate task is to prevent Maurya from knowing about it before Bartley‟s safe return. Neither of the girls seems to fully grasp their mother‟s transformation at the end of the play because they are still young and have to go through all the cycles of island life themselves in order to apprehend Maurya‟s final and complete acceptance of fate. Cathleen is a “girl of about twenty” (CoW: 17) and already the woman of the house, as her mother is old and broken by grief. In the opening scene of Riders Cathleen bakes bread and then sits at the spinning wheel. She represents the routines of survival on the islands. Her name derives from St. Catherine, who was revered for her courage and purity49. Cathleen has already lost her father, grandfather and four brothers, yet she tries to embody the pragmatic outlook of the islanders, who still hope that life is bearable or even enjoyable. She is an expert in evasions and even tells Nora exactly where to stand in the kitchen so that the light won‟t give away her tears. She seems rock-solid and her disconcertment only shows in tiny reactions such as her sudden stopping of the spinning wheel when Michael‟s name is mentioned. In the dispute about the sea journey, Catherine sides with Bartley because she believes that it is “the life of a young man to be going on the sea” (CoW: 20). Tension can frequently be felt between her and her mother. She loses patience with Maurya‟s constant lamentations and worries and finally snaps: “who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over?” (CoW: 20) She presses her mother to follow Bartley with the bread and upon her return ruthlessly pesters her with questions. Even though Cathleen‟s beliefs are firmly rooted in the realities of daily life, she naturally exhibits an awareness of common folk belief. She urges Maurya to give Bartley her blessing and not to be “sending him out with an unlucky word behind him, and a hard word in his ear” (CoW: 20) She also recognizes the full significance of Maurya‟s vision: “It‟s destroyed we are from this day” (CoW: 24). When Bartley is laid out on the table in the final part of the play and everybody is keening, Cathleen manages to remain largely matter-of-fact, finds out how Bartley met his death and arranges for his burial. There is no hint at a potential suitor for Cathleen, yet with

49 cf. „Cathleen‟, www.babynamesofireland.com 62

all men dead in her family she will be forced to marry in order to provide for herself and her remaining family.

Nora is Cathleen‟s younger sister. Her name comes from the Latin word for „honour‟ and is very popular in Ireland. In the play, Nora constitutes the main connection to the outside world and talks about the weather, the sea, the men at the pier and what she can see and hear through the door and window of the cottage. Nora is also the mouthpiece for the priest and faithfully conveys his messages. Maurya only ever addresses Nora by name, never Cathleen; she seems to be the favourite daughter. Her youth and innocence help to lighten the mood of the play. Her comparative inexperience of crisis leads her to pose the artless question: “what time would a man take, and he floating?” (CoW: 21), while Cathleen tries to open the bundle. In moments of intense stress and uncertainty she has recourse to diversion and distraction, which provides the audience with a short reprieve. Nora‟s main function in the drama is to identify Michael‟s stocking and thus confirm his death beyond doubt: “It‟s the second one of the third pair I knitted, and I put up three score stitches, and I dropped four of them.” (CoW: 22) With this instance Synge indicates that death is an integral part of island life, as on the Aran Islands - each family had different and distinctive knitting and stitching patterns, part of whose function was to aid identification of drowned men. The emphasis Synge “places on women as the discoverers and bearers of death recalls the fates in Greek mythology” (Aidan Arrowsmith in CoW: 22).

4.2.3. Maurya

Maurya is the dominant character in Riders. Her name is an Irish version of Mary, and the Christian „Mary of the Seven Sorrows‟ is a name perfectly suited to a mother who at the onset of the play has already lost seven family members. Additionally, in Greek mythology, Moirae were goddesses who controlled the fate of everyone from birth to death. They were three sisters: “the spinner, who spun the thread of a person's life, […] the apportioner, who decided how much time was to be allowed each person, and […] the inevitable, who cut the thread when you were supposed to die” („Moirae‟, www.pantheon.org).

Old Maurya is the true tragic protagonist of the play and faces the dilemma of all island women. Her once large family with six sons meant that there was a good chance of a certain level of prosperity but it also signified constant anxiety about their safety and the recurrent agony of losing them. At the beginning of the play she is ravaged by worry and has almost fully retreated into her own world of grief. Significantly, the drama starts with the question: “Where is she?” (CoW: 17), which can also be read metaphorically as to what her state of mind is. “Maurya is never at one with her community.” (W. A. Armstrong in Redmond 1985: 121); initially, she is at odds, grieving and querulous, and in final phase she thinks and feels on a higher level. The old mother has a strong presentiment that Bartley will be drowned if he attempts the crossing to Galway, and braces herself for the final struggle to keep her last son from harm. Maurya is aware that the horses need to be sold to alleviate their financial situation but she refuses to weigh human life on the same scales as commercial gain. Her attitude can be seen as a protest against the conditions of island life that compel men to risk their lives on a daily basis in order to gain bare subsistence. “If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?” (CoW: 19) Maurya‟s self respect and reserve hinder her from either begging or ordering her son not to go. She first tries to appeal to his sense of social propriety with: “It‟s a hard thing they‟ll be saying below if the body is washed up and there‟s no man in it to make the coffin” (CoW: 19). When this is of no avail she attempts to wring some reason why he should stay from his every word or gesture. Synge here employs the powerful device of using parallel sentence structures when Maurya repeats part of Bartley‟s words in their dispute. The ensuing verbal battle is peculiarly elevated and potent. When Bartley says: “It‟s hard set we‟ll be from this day with no one in it but one man to work” (CoW: 19), Maurya immediately retorts: “It‟s hard set we‟ll be surely the day you‟re drowned with the rest. What way will I live and the girls with me, and I an old woman looking for the grave?” (CoW: 20) She drops all reserve in a desperate last attempt to show Bartley the consequences of his leaving. Yet all her entreaties are in vain. “Isn‟t it a hard and cruel man won‟t hear a word from an old woman, and she holding him from the sea?” (CoW: 20) The distressed mother neglects to bless her son upon his departure and subsequently bursts out: “He‟s gone now, God spare us, and we‟ll not see him again. He‟s gone now. And when the black night is falling I‟ll have no son left me in the world.” (CoW: 20) With this 64

prediction a deep sense of the inevitability of death falls over the play. Maurya soon regrets the failure to bless her last remaining son and attempts to catch him by the spring well. She uses Michael‟s walking stick and plaintively remarks: “In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old.” (CoW: 21) This passage might also suggest that more young people would survive if they abandoned the foolish pride and false security of youth and heeded the wisdom of age. The vision at the spring well leaves Maurya with the certainty of doom: “My heart‟s broken from this day.” (CoW: 23) The old woman recounts that she saw “the grey pony, and there was Michael upon it – with fine clothes on him, and new shoes on his feet” (CoW: 24). Here the play acquires a supernatural dimension but nevertheless remains a faithful portrayal of island life. Synge experienced and reported on various instances of supernatural visions and beliefs50 that were firmly incorporated in the Aran islanders‟ daily lives. Maurya starts keening softly and recounts all the men she has lost along the way. When she describes the way her son Patch was drowned while Bartley was a baby on her knees, the incident repeats itself and Bartley is brought into the cottage in exactly the same manner. Maurya‟s narration in this case parallels the enactment on stage. Her confused, “Is it Patch, or Michael, or what is it at all?” (CoW: 25), shows that her imagination reduces multitude to unity. Life creates a full cycle and the concrete example of Bartley‟s body on stage is a symbolic representation of all the deaths on the islands and elsewhere. It is a scene of universal significance and illustrates the inescapability of fate. When Bartley‟s dead body is laid out on the table and the fragments of clothing prove Michael‟s death, Maurya finally moves beyond suffering and acquires a new kind of poise and calmness: “They‟re all gone now, and there isn‟t anything more the sea can do to me.” (CoW: 26) Having suffered pain and horror and agony, the old woman is now beyond the reach of any earthly sorrow. She ultimately finds comfort through total defeat and acquiescence. With her final prayer, Maurya manages to give the blessing to Bartley which she so painfully withheld earlier. “May the Almighty God have mercy on Bartley‟s soul, and on Michael‟s soul, and on the souls of Sheamus and Patch, and Stephen and Shawn [bending her

50 e.g. “When the horses were coming down the slip an old woman saw her son, that was drowned a while ago, riding on one of them. She didn‟t say what she was after seeing, and this man caught the horse [...] and after that he went out and was drowned.” (AI: 116-117) 65

head]; and may He have mercy on my soul, Nora, and on the soul of everyone is left living in the world.” (CoW: 27) This passage has an almost monological quality, except for the interjection of „Nora‟ at the end. With the insertion of the name of her daughter, the old mother symbolically passes on all responsibility and suffering to the next generation. In this passage, Maurya takes over the role of the absent priest, assumes his place at the primitive altar and conducts the requiem. Apart from blessings, her final speech holds no orthodox Christian promise of a life to come. She does not mention any awards or punishments that Bartley or Michael will to encounter in their next life. The worldview implied in Maurya‟s closing speech suggests a belief in an almighty God but not in the Christian afterlife. Synge notes in his essay “La Vieille Littérature Irlandaise” (1902): “Nothing in literature is as primitive as that common faith of the Greeks and Irish, faith in another world where the dead continue a life similar to their terrestrial existence, without the hope of being recompensed for their virtues or the fear of being punished for their misdeeds.” (trans. Kiberd 1979: 168) Synge further observes that in times of crisis, the islanders tend to revert to ancient beliefs and rituals. Casey maintains that Maurya becomes the traditional priestess of the pre- Celts and that only paganism can commune with nature, even if it is powerless to contradict what has been predetermined (cf. 1994: 95). The very last sentence of the play is its most powerful: “No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied.” (CoW: 27) The word „satisfied‟ undercuts the dominant mood of despair and plainly shows that human opposition to cosmic design is futile and resignation is all that is left to man. Price argues that Maurya represents humanity. She portrays humanity facing a hostile universe, and through her image Synge suggests that “life is essentially tragic and the final reality is death, and that through the acceptance of this fact, along with compassion for doomed humanity, charity and peace may come.” (1961: 91)

4.2.4. Offstage Characters

The two offstage characters, Michael and a priest, are indispensable for the dramatic effect of the play. Maurya‟s missing son Michael casts a shadow over the play from beginning to end and his name is mentioned as often as Bartley‟s throughout Riders. The origin of his name is Christian: Michael was the Prince of Archangels, “he who is like God” (David R.

Clark in Bushrui 1972: 43), who called the bodies to resurrection with his trumpet. Synge was doubtlessly also aware that in Normandy, or more precisely in Mont-Saint Michel, St. Michael is the patron saint of Mariners (cf. David R. Clark in Bushrui 1972: 44). The grief over Michael is part of the chain of events that leads to Bartley‟s death. He is one of the „riders to the sea‟ who was drowned but resumes his ride on the grey pony to claim his brother‟s life. There is a recurrence of absent dead characters in Synge‟s early plays. Patch Darcy in Shadow and Michael in Riders are figures that the audience never sees, yet that are present in dialogue and through the emotions of the protagonists.

The second offstage character is the priest. He is almost physically present in the play when Nora recites his every word in detail. In Riders, Synge paints the portrait of a place that incorporates two cultures, the ancient pagan and the new Christian and along with it, two visions of nature and the spiritual world. The priest represents Christianity and is appropriately referred to as „young‟. During his stay on the Aran Islands Synge was perplexed and fascinated by the complexity and elusiveness of the islanders‟ religious attitude. Christian belief was subsumed into their overall world view without conflict. In the play this is represented symbolically, for instance with the sprinkling of holy water over Bartley‟s sea- drenched corpse. The young priest is revered on the island and his opinions are esteemed by all protagonists, with the exception of Maurya, who can even be seen as his pagan substitute. The priest has no objection to Bartley‟s dangerous journey because he is convinced by his faith that the Almighty God won‟t leave the poor old woman destitute. Generally, the priest can be interpreted representing the existence of a reasonably benevolent God. This stands in stark contrast to the implacable power of the sea, which is the islanders‟ source, sustainer, and eventually destroyer. In this context, Bartley‟s drowning practically undercuts the world view expressed by the priest and Maurya proves right when she says: “It‟s little the like of him knows of the sea” (CoW: 24). However, Thornton argues that the old woman‟s declaration was “not in refutation of the religion he represents, but simply because her experience tells her that the sea is capable of great indifference or cruelty” (1979: 115). Maurya‟s tranquillity at end of the drama stems from exhaustion and resignation rather than from Christian acceptance, even though a biblical source, the Book of Revelation, conveys a similar attitude: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the 67

former things are passed away.” (Book of Revelation; cited in Bushrui 1972: 43) With the character of the priest in Riders, Synge did not intend to vindicate or undercut either a Christian or a pagan view of reality but to present the two world views and their coexistence faithfully.

4.3. Forebodings of Doom: Celtic Mythology in Riders

Synge was highly interested in Irish folk belief and its Celtic origins. He could expect an abundance of traditional knowledge from his audience; hence examining the play in the context of Celtic mythology enlarges its understanding considerably. Riders provides no justification of the protagonists‟ fate in terms of Christian mythology, but if pagan and folk customs are taken into account, a completely new picture arises. The drama “harkens back to antiquity and draws its strength from the mood of pagan fatalism that pervades the place” (Casey 1994: 89). The belief in the return of the dead was very strong in Ireland, especially around the time of Samhain. It was commonly believed that relatives, who had died abroad, would return in the guise of sea birds (cf. Seán Ó Súilleabháin in Harmon 1972: 25). In the light of pagan mythology, the terrible image that Michael had “no one to keen him but the black hags” (CoW: 22) suddenly becomes almost consoling. Birds were also associated with death transitions in Celtic mythology and generally animals were thought to provide bridges between this and the other world (cf. McCoy 1995: 21). It was further believed that a dead soul would return soon after death, in order to carry a living person close to him off into the kingdom of the dead (cf. Kiberd 1979: 164). If this mythological background is taken into account, Michael‟s supernatural appearance on a horse becomes more tangible. The Celts also believed in the immortality of the soul, which reduced the horror of death to a certain degree. The deceased simply switched places or worlds and continued virtually the same lives as before. Throughout Riders there are symbols of impending doom: the coffin boards, the tremendous force of the sea, the gust of wind that blows open the door, or the forgotten bread. In addition to these traditional symbols, various folk forebodings can be discerned. For instance, Maurya aimlessly rakes the fire until it is almost extinguished. In pagan mythology, fire symbolizes human life and consequently must not be allowed to die down. Cathleen

narrates that the pig with the black feet has been gnawing on the rope Bartley will use as a halter. Pigs were the eaters of corpses in Irish mythology (cf. Kiberd 1979: 165) and the colour black was a sign of death; furthermore the pig is intended for slaughter, thus all references link the pig with death.

4.3.1. Transgressing Folk Customs

It can be observed that, with the exception of Nora, all characters in Riders clearly violate folk customs. The breaking of taboos throughout the drama contributes naturally to the atmosphere of impending tragedy. The play is set close to St. Martin‟s feast, which entails a wealth of traditional customs. There was for example a rule forbidding bread-making and spinning during the festival, however, Cathleen kneads a cake and spins the wheel at the beginning of play. It was also customary for each family to sacrifice an animal to St. Martin, usually a pig. Maurya‟s family seem to have neglected this custom as the pig with the black feet is roaming freely about the house (cf. Kiberd 1979: 165). Further, in Celtic mythology there is the legend that the god of the sea, Manannan mac Lir, ordered that pigs were to be sacrificed to him to ward off evil and especially to protect against death by drowning (cf. Skelton 1971: 44). Bartley‟s death might be seen as a punishment for neglecting to fulfil this custom. In folk tradition it was considered unlucky to use a dead man‟s belongings, as the departed was believed to still own whatever property he once possessed and might be jealous of whoever took his possessions. Bartley is wearing his brother‟s new flannel shirt when Michael‟s spirit returns to carry him off. Maurya also uses one of Michael‟s possessions, the walking stick. In the light of this custom, Maurya‟s ritual of putting Michael‟s clothes on the table with Bartley and sprinkling them with holy water becomes even more poignant. The dead can now no longer return to claim anything. Blessings were crucial in folk belief, to prevent the evil eye or malicious tongue. Even compliments had to be rounded off by a precautionary “God bless you” (cf. Kiberd 1979: 163). It was considered dangerous not to return a blessing. Maurya twice tries to bless her

son but the words are choked in her throat51. A supernatural force prevents Maurya from protecting Bartley with her blessing. Even the arrival of the keening women at the end of the drama is a violation of customary belief. A dead body “should not be keened over for at least two hours after death lest the sleeping dogs of the Devil be roused along the path which the departed soul had to follow” (Seán Ó Suíllleabháin in Kiberd 1979: 167). Further transgressions of folk customs and beliefs can be found in Riders, however, the examples related above are the most striking ones.

4.4. “We need sunshine badly52” –Audience Reception of Riders

With Riders, Synge set out to write a drama without regard to generic categories or philosophical ideologies. His aim was an unsparing and truthful depiction of a typical episode in the lives of the Aran people, portraying not merely objects and events, but attitudes and responses, their world view and the very quality of their life. Synge intended to give his audience the opportunity to empathize with a way of life that eluded their ordinary perspectives. The initial audience for Riders in Dublin was small but enthusiastic. The play opens inconspicuously enough for the audience to accept it as a representation of everyday life. The characters were perceived as slightly backward but harmless island folk, deeply rooted in customs and traditions and posing no threat to the national character. Riders is “Synge‟s absolutely unquestioned and well-nigh flawless masterpiece, the one play by which the general body of his countrymen desire his memory to live.” (Bourgeois 1968: 171) Most contemporary critics nevertheless produced hostile reviews of the first production of the drama. However, it was not the supposed defamation of the Irish character that was criticised in Synge‟s second drama but the theme, which was considered “too dreadfully doleful to please the popular taste” (Irish Daily Independent and Nation, 26 Feb. 1904; cited in Jones 1994: 20). The Irish Times found the underlying idea of the play intriguing although the treatment repulsive. “The long exposure of the dead body before an audience may be realistic, but it is certainly not artistic.” (The Irish Times, 16 Feb. 1904; cited

51 In the collection of folktales by Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, there is an instance where a mother tried to bless her son, but her words are choked, “she wanted to say „God bless him‟, but it was like as if a hand took and held her throat, and choked her that she couldn‟t say the words” (2006: 106). 52 Arthur Griffith, The United Irishman, 5 March 1904; cited in Jones 1994: 21 70

in Jones 1994: 21). Arthur Griffith entitled this dramatic device condescendingly as a “cheap trick of the Transpontine dramatists”. However, he recognized the play‟s “tragic beauty [which] powerfully affected the audience.” (The United Irishman, 5 March 1904; cited in Jones 1994: 21) According to Bourgeois, the “somewhat melodramatic stage-effect” of bringing in Bartley‟s corpse on a plank “may be thought the one fault in the play” (1968: 166). Showing the traditional keen and a dead body on stage might have been too much realism for the early 20th century. The play‟s director F.G. Fay deemed Riders a masterpiece despite its sadness and believed that it came at the perfect time, a time “when people shirk facing the facts and sorrow of life and are always longing for the laugh that only hardens the heart”. (cited in Jones 1994: 21) The critic Ronald Peacock observed: “As a tragedy Riders to the Sea is without a doubt remarkable in the way it presents unpretentious heroism opposing Sea and Tempest that hang like Fate over men‟s lives. [...] It is elemental but also bare and excessively simple” (cited in Bushrui 1972: 46).

4.4.1. A Universal Piece of Art

The essential truth of the play has taken it around the world. When Riders was performed in Scotland, a painfully moved audience “afterwards protested that the play came too near the central terror of their lives” (Strong 1941: 32). Synge‟s drama was translated into countless languages and also successfully adapted into other media. As early as 1935 a 40- minute black and white independent film version of the play was filmed in Connemara with actors from the Abbey Theatre. Ralph Vaughan Williams turned Riders into an opera under the same title in 1938. In 1960 BBC Television filmed another version of the drama with the young Sir Sean Connery as Bartley. In 1987 Synge‟s one-act play was again turned into a movie, this time a 47-minute production in colour, adapted and directed by Ronan O‟Leary. Riders is known to have provided the inspiration for Robert Flaherty‟s renowned film Man of Aran (1934). This classic documentary is a work of poetic realism and shows the beauty of the islands‟ desolate landscape and the constant battle of the islanders with solitude, hardship and the sea. Flaherty maintained that “Synge taught him what to see” (Thornton 1979: 109) on the Aran Islands.

With his drama, Synge illustrates the predicament of the Aran islanders, but also those of all men subject to a tyranny of forces they cannot comprehend. An Arabic version of the play was broadcast in Syria in July 1963, shortly after the May 1963 Baathist revolution and a crushed coup d‟état. The Syrian audience immediately identified the sea that devours Maurya‟s sons with the preceding political strife as well as with the forces that vied for power. “The sea became a symbol of those powers that controlled man, leaving him helpless and impotent.” (Ghassan Maleh cited in Jones 1994: 25) Riders is probably the most imaginative, symbolic and passionate of all of Synge‟s plays, yet it is as true as any to the life he was seeking to express. Through total immersion in the matter he dealt with, Synge managed to create a piece of art that is at once local and universal in its appeal.

5. The Playboy of the Western World 5.1. The Play

Synge‟s longest and certainly most controversial play is the three-act drama The Playboy of the Western World53 (1907), published in 1907. After The Well of the Saints (1905) it was the second of his plays to be performed in the Abbey Theatre, making its debut on 26th January 1907. Playboy is set in a rough and untidy country public house in Mayo. In the first act, the publican Michael James and some neighbours are setting off to pass the night at a wake, when suddenly a „queer‟ miserable looking young man stumbles in. He arouses their curiosity by insinuating that the police are looking for him. Flattered by the newfound attention the stranger, Christy Mahon, gradually unfolds his tale and after much coaxing reveals he has killed his father with the blow of a loy. The listeners are amazed by his courage and savagery and he is made pot-boy of the public house. The villagers then gladly set off leaving the innkeeper‟s daughter Pegeen in the custody of this brave young man, believing that “herself will be safe this night, with a man killed his father holding danger from the door” (CoW: 79). Pegeen‟s jealous suitor Shawn consequently sends Widow Quin to spy on the pair, however, Pegeen quickly gets rid of her. Finally, Christy is left alone on stage, fascinated by the wonderful new situation he finds himself in, and soliloquizes, “I‟m thinking this night wasn‟t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by.” (CoW: 86) The second act opens with Christy “looking bright and cheerful” (CoW: 87), already feeling at home in the public house the next morning. The news of his arrival has spread quickly through the quiet rural community and some girls arrive, excited to hear his story. Widow Quin also returns and, encouraged by their admiration, Christy launches into an elaborate account of his - by now heroic - deed. Suddenly Pegeen enters, jealous and infuriated, and chases everyone out. First she bitterly rebukes Christy, but fondness wins her over and they finally reconcile. Shawn and Widow Quin return and send Pegeen on a false errand. Shawn then desperately tries to bribe Christy to leave, but the latter presumptuously takes everything Shawn offers and proceeds to chase him from the premises. A little later Christy‟s father, Old Mahon, wounded but very much alive, appears at the public house in search of him. Christy hides, terrified, while Widow Quin manages to send Old Mahon off on

53 hereafter referred to as „Playboy‟ 73

the wrong track. The widow then wants Christy‟s hand as her reward but instead he asks her for help to win Pegeen. The third act opens with the drunken villagers coming back from the wake and Christy winning at all local sports and proving himself the champion of the Western World. He is infatuated with Pegeen and courts her in an eloquent love scene. As soon as Michael James blesses their union, Old Mahon bursts back into the inn looking for shelter. Christy is publicly disgraced as a liar and deceiver and everyone including Pegeen turns against him. Despairing, he kills his father a second time, thereby expecting to regain his heroic status. However, the villagers, distraught by the crime they have just witnessed, resolve to hang him. Then Old Mahon, who was again only stunned by Christy‟s blow, returns once more. Finally father and son reconcile and triumphantly leave the perfidious villagers behind to settle back into boredom. Pegeen is left to lament her loss in her famous last line: “Oh my grief, I‟ve lost him surely. I‟ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World.” (CoW: 121)

5.1.1. Source and Adaptation

Several themes and devices from earlier plays reoccur in Playboy, such as arranged marriages, drunkenness at a wake, the power of language to create and shape reality, and the challenge of audience expectations. Apart from experiences on the Aran Islands, Synge recycled many passages from his essays and notebooks54 for dialogues and actions, such as the sporting events and fairs from “In West Kerry” (cf. CoW: 296). On the Aran Islands, an old man had told Synge about a Connaught man who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he was in passion, and then fled to this island and threw himself on the mercy of some of the natives with whom he was said to be related. [...] the police came and searched for him [...] In spite of a reward which was offered, the island was incorruptible, and after much trouble the man was safely shipped to America. (AI: 50)

„Incorruptible‟, in this case, meant the protection of a criminal from the law which indubitably prompted Synge to examine the ethical foundations of contemporary Irish society and their conception of the law. In The Aran Islands he remarks, The mere fact that it is impossible to get reliable evidence in the island – not because the people are dishonest, but because they think the claim of kinship more sacred than the claims of abstract truth – turns the whole system of sworn evidence into a demoralising farce, and it is

54 See Appendix B in CWII for a complete list of related passages in Synge‟s notebooks 74

easy to believe that law dealings on this false basis must lead to every sort of injustice. (AI: 51)

Another relevant case was known at Synge‟s time; the Lychehaun55 case. An attempted murder of a landowning woman took place, but the latter survived suffering terrible injuries. The criminal managed to conceal himself with the aid of Irish peasant women and finally to flee to America. In a draft of Playboy Synge had one of his minor characters mention the case (cf. Mikhail 1977: 36-37). He revised this later, probably to avoid overly obvious parallels with the actual case. Both of the original incidents are deplorable and tragic and would not naturally suggest themselves for comedy. Synge did not use the material to shock for shock‟s sake, but to present a complex drama, weaving together tragedy and comedy in his unique ironic style. In The Aran Islands, Synge observed that along with the spirituality of the country folk went a streak of brutality towards man and beast alike: “Although these people are kindly towards each other and to their children, they have no feeling for the sufferings of animals, and little sympathy for pain when the person who feels it is not in danger” (AI: 115). Synge unyieldingly exposes the truth about violence in Irish rural life in Playboy with numerous references to the villagers‟ sinister pleasure in cruelty to animals, such as a hanged dog wiggling for hours or the slitting of sows‟ windpipes. Playboy can be seen as a parody of Douglas Hyde‟s Casadh an tSugáin (1901), which celebrates the unity and moral strength of an ideal Irish rural community. In this play the arrival of a stranger in a village threatens the imminent marriage between Oona, a young woman of the parish, and Seamus. The community then works together to protect their society from the outsider. In the end, Seamus is able to affirm the values of the Irish Catholic utopia: “Isn‟t it a fine thing for a man to be listening to the storm outside, and himself quiet and easy beside the fire?” (CoW: XIX) In Playboy the arrival of an outsider is not feared, but craved for, and he is quickly turned into a hero. The community settling back into their comfortable, uneventful everyday life is seen as a step backwards instead of the desired status quo. Skelton argues that Playboy resembles a shanachie tale, which typically relates to several older and archetypal stories and legends. The drama has the same kind of richness of shanachie material and is “fitfully illuminated by archetypal echoes and allusions” (1971:

55 The Lychehaun case is also alluded to in Lady Gregory‟s Spreading the News (1904), where, through gossip, news of a supposed murder led to an arrest, even though no murder was ever committed. Synge was aware of this drama when he wrote Playboy. 75

123). In parts Synge borrows directly from Irish Love Poetry56. For example, Christy‟s passionate speech, “When you‟ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I‟d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden chair” (CoW: 110), clearly echoes an excerpt from the old Gaelic poem Una Bhán, “I‟d rather be ever kissing her on a couch | Than to be sitting in heaven in the Chair of the Trinity” (cited in Corkery 1966:198). Many of the most powerful speeches in the drama are built around the conflict between images from literary and oral traditions and Synge does not hesitate to mingle pagan mythology with resonances from the Bible, newspaper reports, and local gossip. Synge had originally intended to call his drama “The Murderer (A Farce)” (CWII: 295). However he soon abandoned this obvious and prosaic choice and settled for the more enigmatic „The Playboy of the Western World’, a phrase literally translated from Gaelic which foreshadows Christy‟s development and ultimately enhances the understanding of his character. The Irish term „búachaill barra’, literally “boy of the game,” is Hibernian slang and was originally used in the Irish game of hurling (cf. Bourgeois 1968: 193). The Gaelic term for „playboy‟ is half-humorous and half-poetical, very rich in meaning, and difficult to translate. It has three main denotations which are all applicable to Christy Mahon: „hoaxer‟, „champion‟, and one who has a „gamey heart‟ (cf. Trunninger 1976: 127). The folk-phrase „an domhain shiar‟ is the Gaelic equivalent of “The Western World” and describes the Atlantic seaboard of Ireland as opposed to the Dublin side, “The Eastern World” (cf. Bourgeois 1968: 194).

5.1.2. Setting

Originally Synge had intended the first act of Playboy to be set on a ploughed field, depicting the dialogue between Christy and his father and the supposed murder. He also planned Old Mahon‟s return in act three to occur at the doorstep of the chapel where Christy is to wed Pegeen (cf. Bourgeois 1968: 196-7). The fact that in the finished version all of the drama takes place in one cottage room is probably due to the limited means of the young Abbey Theatre. Lady Gregory acknowledged: “We all tried at that time to write for as little

56 For a more detailed analysis of borrowings from old Irish Love Poetry see Kiberd 1979:124 76

scene-shifting as might be, for economy of scenery and stage hands” (Lady Gregory in Bourgeois 1968: 197). Playboy is set “near a village, on a wild coast of Mayo” (CoW: 69) in Michael James Flaherty's public house on an autumn evening and the following day. The setting in the countryside and the stage design of a traditional cottage conforms to the formula of peasant drama favoured by nationalist audiences. Synge‟s intention was of course to challenge these expectations, so, even though public houses were typically wealthy places, he presented the interior of the shebeen57 as “very rough and untidy” (CoW: 69). Public houses were usually the centre of gossip and activity in remote rural communities. Synge depicts the villagers as apathetic and bored, with drinking bouts and the odd petty crime as their only diversion. The village girls complain that, “you‟d be ashamed in this place, going up winter and summer with nothing worth while [sic] to confess at all” (CoW: 88). With the remote Mayo village, Synge presents a soil and climate inclined to cause the welcome of vigour and imagination, as everyone is stifled by the bleakness of existence. Virtue equals boredom, while sin and crime constitute much-welcome action and excitement. In one of his letters to MacKenna, Synge remarked that the plot of Playboy, even if it did not have a basis in fact, was in its essence “probable, given the psychic state of the locality” (CL1: 333). This state is produced by the remoteness and lawlessness indicated in the drama. Synge writes in The Aran Islands: This impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the west. It seems partly due to the association between justice and the hated English jurisdiction, but more directly to the primitive feeling these people, who are never criminals yet always capable of crime, that a man will not do wrong unless he is under the influence of a passion which is as irresponsible as a storm on the sea. If a man has killed his father, and is already sick and broke with remorse, they can see no reason why he should be dragged away and killed by the law. (AI: 50)

However, in Playboy even the police have double standards, which is indicated by the fact that: “the peelers58 [sic] in this place is a decent, droughty59 poor fellow, wouldn‟t touch a cur dog and not give warning in the dead of the night” (CoW: 78)

57 A „shebeen‟ was originally the Anglo-Irish term for an illegal bar or club that sold alcohol without a license (cf. „shebeen‟, wikipedia.org). Here it most probably denotes the tattered state of the public house. 58 peeler – policeman 59 droughty – thirsty 77

5.1.3. Playboy as Satire of Celtic Heroic Circles – “A hero for the modern world60”

In 1904 Synge wrote that he didn‟t “believe in the possibility of „a purely fantastic, unmodern, ideal, spring-dayish, Cuchulanoid National Theatre‟ because no drama [...] can grow out of anything but the fundamental realities of life” (to MacKenna, CL1: 74). In Synge‟s time, Irish writers could roughly be classified as falling into two schools, one evoking the heroic past while the other envisioned the contemporary peasant as a kind of secular Gaelic mystic (cf. Kiberd 1979: 114). With Playboy Synge provides an ironic commentary on the evasions of both of these schools of writing. From his reading diaries it is known that Synge read widely and was highly fascinated by Celtic heroic mythology. However, instead of emulating saga, he investigated it and with Playboy created a semi-parody, exposing the contradictions inherent in the idea of heroism. Synge openly and unsentimentally confronts the paradox of the celebration of the savagery of ancient heroes with the simultaneous utter condemnation of contemporary violence. In Playboy the villagers indulge in Christy‟s tales of savagery, but as soon as violence erupts before their own eyes their true feelings emerge. They cannot bear the reality of myth. Violence must be committed in the past to qualify as heroic, current violence is at best a “sneaky kind of murder” (CoW: 84). The country people still delight in stories of a heroic past, however, saga has been scaled down. Those who once listened spellbound to heroic circles now delight in puny tales of someone who “knocked an eye from a peeler” (CoW: 70) and a once celebrated poet is jailed for the anything-but-heroic offence of maiming ewes. Synge depicts the villagers as fallen from the heroic past but allows outsiders such as Christy to preserve some of the glamour and lyricism of the epic heroes. Playboy distinctly evokes the action and excitement of the Cuchulain circle. The central theme of this heroic saga is glamorized combat and heroic violence, to which Synge took exception (cf. Kiberd 1979: 112). In ingenious two-way irony he mocks the littleness of contemporary peasants by evoking greatness of saga life while at the same time mocking the blind violence and ominous bearing of ancient heroic protagonists. A close analysis shows numerous parallels between Christy and Cuchulain. Both stand above their respective communities, the attitude of society towards them oscillates between

60 Fleming 1995:169 78

fear and admiration and both “go on to win a higher and lonelier kind of self-respect in the end” (Kiberd 1979: 115). Cuchulain triumphs when attired in King Conchubor‟s borrowed armature; he defeats the three sons of Nechtan and returns with their three heads as trophies. Similarly Christy wins at all local sports, wearing Sean Keogh‟s suit, and triumphantly returns with three trophies. Both heroes have a wise female tutor. The warrior-druidess Sgathach prepares Cuchulain for his tests as champion of Ulster in return for certain services, whereas Widow Quin enters Christy for the local sports and offers him assistance also asking certain services in return. The similarities even extend to the women the champions are wooing. Both Emer and Pegeen are characterized by their looks, their chastity, their voices and, curiously, their ability at needlework. Both women have another suitor, approved by their fathers, who retires from the contest upon hearing about the savage deeds of their heroic opponents. Christy‟s “great rages” (CoW: 80) echo Cuchulain‟s notorious battle-rage (cf. Kiberd 1979: 118). Cuchulain‟s rage was so horrific that the Ulsterman had to think of an unusual way of appeasing him before he returned home. Finally they sent thirty beautiful virgins naked from the fort to meet him and “his reverence for womanhood caused him to bow his head and the battle-rage left him” (Kiberd 1979: 118). The passage where Christy returns from the races, filled with battle-rage after his triumph, recalls this parade of chosen virgins. “[W]hat I‟d care if you brought me a drift61 of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the eastern world?” (CoW: 118) Ironically it was this modest remoulding of a great scene from national heroic myth that caused such mortal offence to self- proclaimed nationalists. There is of course no one-to-one correspondence between the narratives of Playboy and Cuchulain, but by using Christy to evoke this ancient warrior, Synge successfully probed the similarities and disparities between the Irish present and past. Kiberd sees Synge‟s drama not only as a satire on heroic mythology but “as a wholly new myth in itself – a creation within the tradition of a wholly new legend” (Kiberd 1979: 121). In Playboy Synge generously employs alliterative prose, which was traditionally used in heroic tales. For Synge, the status of the spoken word in drama is the same as in oral storytelling. He frequently uses alliterating synonyms in Playboy, for example “powers and potentates” (CoW: 80), “cot and cabin” (CoW: 80), “swaying and swiggling” (CoW: 93),

61 The phrase a “drift of chosen females” echoes the earlier “drift of heifers” (herd of cattle) (CoW: 114) used by Shawn when he warns Flaherty of losing his dowry. The allusion to cattle, also reinforced by Flaherty‟s speech about Pegeen „breeding‟ (cf. CoW: 115), was perceived as a degradation of women and angered audiences. For a detailed analysis of the implications of “drift of heifers” and “shift” see Patricia Kelly in Bramsbäck 1988: 45-46 79

closely related words such as “cup and cake” (CoW: 83), “dews of dawn” (CoW: 71), or even contrasting words such as „wakes or weddings‟(CoW: 70), “fasting or fed”(CoW: 89). He was aware that Irish speakers, for emphasis‟ sake, would for example “use two synonymous adjectives without conjunction, instead of one with an adverb, and these they almost invariably choose so that there shall be alliteration” (Standish H. O‟Grady in Kiberd 1979: 107). Synge exaggerates this alliterative style for a mock-heroic effect, especially in the scene where a village girl proposes a toast to Christy and Widow Quin with the words: “Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen makers, with the jobbing jockies, parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgements of the English law” (CoW: 91).

5.2. The Portrayal of Irish Characters in Playboy

Playboy is a manifesto of liberation. The main character‟s desire for liberation from paternalistic tyranny, provincialism and loneliness, advocates individual freedom from social repression and ultimately symbolizes Ireland‟s desire for national independence. Christy‟s personal awakening to freedom proposes national awakening to self government. With Playboy, Synge offers his audience a psychological and aesthetic challenge. He paints an unflattering portrait of a venal, fickle rural community whose failure is a failure in the quality of its imagination. Synge presents a community that is open to escapist romance but is quickly made evasive by concrete reality. They are fearful of the authority of priest and policeman and dastardly hide their cowardice in group action. Synge effectively questions communal reactions when the villagers abruptly turn against their erstwhile heroes with vengeful energy or callous indifference. One of the drama‟s most important characteristics is the concern with matters of language62. With Playboy Synge focuses on the philosophical implications of the power of language. Language acts as a mediator between actuality and potentiality, between reality and abstraction. Through language, Christy projects and actually brings into being one of his potential selves that had until then lain dormant. Some aspects of human personality “are better understood as a congeries of potentialities waiting to be evoked and realized by the imagination, through the medium of language” (Thornton 1979: 140). Throughout the drama,

62 For a list of Playboy quotes concerned with language see Price 1961: 176-77 80

the perceptions of the characters undergo extraordinary changes, amounting to a revolution. Synge reinforces the idea that “what we are to the world, and indeed to ourselves, depends in good part on how we are construed.” (Meisel 2007: 117) The voluminous play requires a large cast with a total of twelve speaking parts as well as “some peasants” (CoW: 68). All important characters of the play are onstage, except for the frequently mentioned priest, Father Reilly, who is again conspicuous by his absence. Synge cleverly uses minor characters to illuminate and express collective feeling of the community. Philly O‟Cullen and Jimmy Farrell, for example, reveal through their questions in act one, among other things, crude nationalism, the negative attitude towards landowners, the importance of the entertainment value of religion, and the general view of legality as an irrelevancy. In act three, the two serve as chorus and commentators of the offstage action, adding a touch of the grotesque to the play. The three village girls in act two paint a picture of the mores of the surrounding society. They represent the cult of hero appreciation, the romantic glorification of wildness and roguery and become Christy‟s quasi teenage fan club.

5.2.1. Christopher “Christy” Mahon

Christy Mahon is the only character in the drama that truly changes and grows. His metamorphosis from whining boy to self-confident playboy is the main basis of the play‟s development. Strictly speaking, Christy is an impostor, who arrives in a quiet rural community, pretending to be someone he is not and upsetting relationships and expectations. Impostors are indigenous to the inherited tradition of comedy, ever since Plautus‟ Miles Gloriosus. Their exposure and deflation is the outcome their impertinence usually demands. A final and definite deflation for Christy is thus well within the field of audience expectation and would underline the gap between romantic self-delusion and prosaic or sordid reality. However, Synge is not surprisingly far from employing such a staple of comedy and Playboy remains, as most of his plays, extremely hard to categorize. At the onset of the play, Christy Mahon is described as a “slight young man [...] looking famished with the cold” (CoW: 74), who comes into the local pub tired, frightened and dirty. Synge cleverly establishes Christy as “a downtrodden, inoffensive creature, in order that his eventual transformation may be the more marked and glorious” (Price 1961: 163). This terrified weakling suddenly and very unexpectedly evokes universal admiration, a reaction in

stark contrast to all normal expectations. The comic effect of this is heightened and actually licensed by the character‟s extreme timidity. Christy is bullied into the confession of his murder, a deed of which he is initially everything but proud of. He is surprised and delighted to be made pot-boy of the shebeen, a profession quite contrary to his future playboy status. The comedy is further reinforced by Christy being cast as Pegeen‟s protector on account of his murder. Ultimately, however, it is neither his act nor the illusion of it which in the course of the drama creates his new identity, but the adoration of the villagers who crave for a hero. They present to his imagination a projection of their desires, an ideal picture of himself, which he in turn strives to emulate. Christy eventually becomes this hero by successfully transforming himself from a cowardly farm boy into a courageous athlete, poetic lover, and strong-minded man. He is truly remade by “the power of a lie” (CoW: 117) and embodies “the real power of poetry and the imagination” (Meisel 2007: 120). Christy‟s growth is largely due to his infatuation with Pegeen. When the eligible young girl takes an interest in the modest hero, she awakens his desire to live up to his admired stature with the appropriate words and images. Christy begins to feel that he can change his world and himself by poetic self-projection. Pegeen initially dismisses the stranger as “a soft lad [who] wouldn‟t slit the windpipe of a screeching sow” (CoW: 76), however, upon learning of the murder he has committed, suddenly projects onto him a noble pedigree, artistry and excitement: “You should have had great people in your family, I‟m thinking, with the little, small feet you have, and you with a kind of quality name, the like of what you‟d find on the great powers and potentates of France and Spain. [...] I‟ve heard all times it‟s the poets are your like – fine fiery fellows with great rages when their temper‟s roused.” (CoW: 80) When she continues to call him “a fine, handsome young fellow with a noble brow” (CoW: 80), Christy finally bursts out “[with a flash of delighted surprise] Is it me?” (CoW: 80). He finds some difficulty in recognizing himself in Pegeen‟s image at first, but his instinct urges him not to question it, but to believe in it and confirm it. Pegeen‟s suggestion and her encouragement lead Christy to become “courageous, charming, lyrically adept, in short a true playboy...and general star” (Finney 1989:89). However, this transition is not smooth. Christy tries his utmost to grow worthy of Pegeen, yet he is so flattered to be for the first time the centre of attention that he vainly shows off to the village girls, and is not averse to Widow Quin‟s flirtations. In act two, when Pegeen jealously bursts in and withdraws her protection and inspiration, Christy fears that he might never make his heroic image real, which would lead to pain and disappointment 82

unexperienced previously. After their reconciliation, there is another great moment of temptation and decision for Christy in Widow Quin‟s proposal at the end of act two. He knows that the acceptance of her offer would be the safe course but it would involve the surrender of his imagination, since he would have to cut himself off from the main conscious source of his inspiration, Pegeen. He clearly voices this: “And what would I be doing if I left Pegeen?” (CoW: 102) He would no longer be able to believe in himself as a daring young hero, thus he refuses the widow and instinctively stays true to his dream, eager to prove to all that he is indeed a wonder. After his triumphs at games and sports, he daringly sets about to win over his beloved Pegeen. The love scene that follows shows that Christy‟s transformation is approaching completion. Christy is in full possession of his powers of eloquence, passion and tenderness playing for his “crowning prize” (CoW: 110). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we‟re astray in Erris, when Good Friday‟s by, drinking a sup from a well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the flowers of the earth. [...] Isn‟t there the light of seven heavens in your heart alone, the way you‟ll be an angel‟s lamp to me from this out, and I abroad in the darkness, spearing salmons in the Owen, or the Carrowmore? (CoW: 111)

Christy now actually possesses the qualities that Pegeen and villagers fancied they saw in him at first. There is a “confident energy in his rhythms and an assured exactness in his imagery that have not been marked in his speech before” (Price 1961: 170). The man who makes love with such ardour is a completely different person from the miserable recluse dominated by his father, also different from the crestfallen, then flattered fugitive of act one, and different even from the poser and braggart of act two. The play now seems to be moving towards the resolution of traditional romantic comedy, with a wedding of the popular hero ahead. Even encountering her father‟s dissent, Pegeen swears she will not renege on Christy, when suddenly tragedy strikes. Christy is convinced that Pegeen will take him back after he has actually committed the murder everyone assumed he had already. However he has to come to the painful realisation that he himself had confused dream and actuality by projecting onto Pegeen an image she could not live up to. Pegeen finally helps to make the transformation of his character complete by scorning him and thus breaking the last bond he had. Christy is utterly alone and it is significant that now his insecurities finally disappear for good.

The development of Christy throughout the drama is wave-like. Synge mirrors this in Christy‟s relationship with Pegeen and emphasises it by the growing vigour and imagination of Christy‟s successive elaborations of his murder story, the first account of which went simply: “I just riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull, and he went down at my feet like an empty sack, and never let a grunt or groan from him at all” (CoW: 77). As soon as he gets comfortable with his new image and confidently announces himself to be “a seemly fellow with great strength [...] and bravery” (CoW: 82), a simple knock at the door quickly reminds him of his utter “terror of the peelers and the walking dead” (CoW: 83). When he realizes how well the story of his murder is received, he starts elaborating it greatly. To the village girls he re-enacts his deed with great vigour: “He gave a drive with the scythe, and I gave a lep to the east. Then I turned around with my back to the north, and I hit a blow on the ridge of his skull, laid him stretched out, and he split to the knob of his gullet” (CoW: 91). However, even after this reassuring experience with the village girls, Pegeen easily manages to reduce him to a state of apologetic meekness. Later, with the new clothes he has claimed from Shawn, Christy‟s self-esteem is again highly increased and he feels almost invincible. Synge sets forth the fall from this height of pride with considerable skill. Christy is in the act of proclaiming himself a “gallant orphan cleft his father with one blow to the breeches belt” (CoW: 98), when suddenly he beholds Old Mahon outside the door. Within a minute Christy becomes even more terrified and desperate than Shawn a moment before. Christy‟s boastful flights and subsequent crash landings are all part of a deep-seated rhythm in the unfolding of his transformation. It conditions the audience‟s expectations without fixing them. “With every rise in self-assurance there comes a fall, with every blossoming of self-regard there comes a frost” (Meisel 2007: 116). Yet Christy bounces back stronger from every setback. He possesses sufficient self-reliance and self-respect to recover from the backlash of reality, and for example wins prizes after the terrifying appearance of his father, which should have reduced him to his old miserable self. In retrospect, through all his many ups and downs, with each swing wider than the last, Christy finally becomes the actual playboy, the illusion of himself. The last wave throws up a new man. When the villagers turn against him, Christy has already mastered his life. His own will has enabled him to do things he has never expected, such as winning at sports, defeating a rival for love, and striking his father. Confronted by the country people he finds true courage and does not revert to his former cowardly self. He fearlessly orders them: “Shut your yelling, for [...] you‟re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie” 84

(CoW: 117). The people of Mayo cannot rise to the hero they have created. The norms and restrictions valid and necessary in a society bound to communal survival render the realization of Christy‟s poetic projections impossible. Self-realisation as the highest goal remains impossible within the community and eventually involves social alienation. The villagers desire peace and security over poetry and courage. “This society has no room for Christy the artist, the wandering minstrel, for he is too brave and free-spirited” (Fleming 1995: 174). Departing, he ironically blesses “the fools of earth” (CoW: 117) for what they have enabled him to find in himself: “Then 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 Judgement Day.” (CoW: 121) In Playboy the shebeen can be seen as representing provincial Ireland and Christy‟s declaration as a repudiation of Pegeen and her Philistine prison. His departing words are triumphant. He announces not only his imminent liberation from the narrow-mindedness of communities such as this Mayo village but also that he will leave as “master of all fights from now” (CoW: 121). Father and son depart with newly defined roles and Christy‟s self-confidence and maturity come from the release from paternal domination. Synge hereby advocates filial emancipation, and in this case Ireland‟s emancipation from England. Ultimately, Christy is not his father‟s murderer but his father‟s master.

5.2.2. Margaret Flaherty – Pegeen Mike63

Playboy begins and ends with Pegeen. The play opens with the “wild looking but fine girl, of about twenty [...] dressed in the usual peasant dress” (CoW: 69), writing a list of items needed for her wedding. At the beginning of the drama, Pegeen seems a prototypical Irish

63 The audience learns that Pegeen‟s real name is Margaret Flaherty, when she signs her letter at the onset of the play. However, she is never called by her baptismal name, probably in order not to tie her with Christianity or the Church. Synge remarks in The Aran Islands on the use of names: “Though the names here are ordinary enough, they are used in a way that differs altogether from the modern system of surnames. When a child begins to wander about the island, the neighbours speak of it by its Christian name, followed by the Christian name of its father. If this is not enough to identify it, the father‟s epithet - whether it is a nickname or the name of his own father - is added. Sometimes when the father‟s name doesn‟t lend itself, the mother‟s Christian name is adopted as epithet for the children. An old woman near this cottage is called „Pegeen‟, her sons are „Patch Phegeen‟, „Seaghan Phegeen‟, etc.” (AI: 86) „Pegeen‟ might either be Margaret‟s nickname or the name of her absent mother and as it is a rather common name, her father‟s nickname „Mike‟ is added.

colleen, a stock figure in amateur playwriting. She is playfully teasing her suitor Shawn, a man she neither loves nor respects yet is prepared to marry at her father‟s demand. This already prepares the audience for her later conformist reaction to Christy‟s failure. In the course of the drama, Pegeen sets herself apart from the typical stage Irishwoman. Her deeper needs and feelings are awakened by Christy and she uses him to “further her search for identity, freedom, and romance” (Skelton 1971: 128). Pegeen proves a passionate, strong willed and imaginative woman. To Christy she characterizes herself as, “the fright of seven townlands for [her] biting tongue,” (CoW: 112) and shows her adventurous side: “myself, a girl, was tempted often to go sailing the seas till I‟d marry a Jew-man, with ten kegs of gold” (CoW: 111-12). The absence of a mother made Pegeen develop into an unusually independent woman, and she is in charge of the public house for the most part, as her father is oftentimes out or drunk. Her attitude towards Christy vacillates constantly between adulation and scorn, which reveals her desire to find out how much of a man she is dealing with, as well as her conflicting attitude towards male dominance. She is uncertain whether she wants to rule or be ruled by a man, which is also evident in the tension between her ties with her father and her rebellion against him. Pegeen‟s relationship with Christy equally alternates between identification and rejection. To Christy‟s hopeful declaration: “We‟re alike, so” (CoW: 81), she quickly retorts: “I never killed my father. I‟d be afeard to do that” (CoW: 81). Curiously, she proclaims the lack of courage as her only obstacle. Pegeen desires liberation from paternal domination and Christy seems to have already accomplished what she metaphorically would like to do. She proceeds to project onto him characteristics she would like to possess, and in the course of the play actually assumes some of them herself, for example eloquence and romance in the love scene, “I‟m thinking, there won‟t be our like in Mayo, for gallant lovers, from this hour, today” (CoW: 112), and the courage to choose her own husband. The struggle between her sense of duty to the patriarchal establishment and her desire for autonomy and equality finally lead to her definite rejection of Shawn‟s proposal. In refusing a proposal which was arranged by her father and approved by a papal dispensation, Pegeen symbolically rejects the paternal authoritarianism of the Church and the village community. One of Pegeen‟s main flaws is that she equates violence with courage. Significantly, she is the one who evokes Christy‟s admission of his murder. She proceeds throughout the play to build Christy up into a grand figure of heroic proportions, “a fine lad with the great savagery to destroy [his] da” (CoW: 94). She rejects Shawn because he is a “middling kind of 86

scarecrow, with no savagery or fine words in him at all” (CoW: 113) and she “wouldn‟t give a thraneen64 for a lad hadn‟t a mighty spirit in him and a gamey heart” (CoW: 95). Pegeen herself is flattered by the fact that she is “a fine hardy girl would knock the head of any two men in the place” (CoW: 72). She is quick to threaten Christy with violence when he is nothing more than an inconspicuous stranger: “Would you have me knock the head of you with the butt of the broom?” (CoW: 76) and remains the only one of the villagers to physically hurt him in the last act. Throughout the drama, Pegeen “treats any admission of weakness in Christy as a mere subterfuge to cloak some daring design” (Price 1961: 168) and overlooks all his lesser features in view of his parricide. It is not that she feels partiality towards parricides or assassins, but in a community where all the other men are cowards and simpletons, she finally finds savagery and romance in Christy. Ultimately, she desires the alliance with Christy because in her quest for courage and bravery, he is the only available candidate. Pegeen represents Ireland‟s desire for a national heroic figure. However, her idol falls shattered to pieces and in Christy‟s failure, Synge critiques the failure of 1907 nationalists, who were unable to distinguish between violence and true courage. Pegeen is the only character in the drama that is worse off at the end of the play. Christy marches off into a „romping lifetime‟ and the rest of the villagers will have great stories to tell, many of them at her expense. Pegeen will remain under her father‟s sway, which is illustrated by Michael James indifferently ordering: “Will you draw the porter, Pegeen?” (CoW: 121), immediately after Christy‟s departure. She will forever be stuck in her shebeen and is left without the vision of a happier life. All that remains for her is the choice between spinsterhood and a loveless arranged marriage. The hopelessness of her situation allows the audience to feel sympathy towards her even though she turned against Christy with such gratuitous cruelty before. Cathy Belton, an Irish actress who played Pegeen in 2004 wrote in her rehearsal diary: “I see her as having built a wall and that what happens in the play is that Christy gradually dismantles that wall...gradually the wall comes down and this amazing sparkling shining Pegeen emerges...given what eventually happens, the wall goes back up and she will never let it down again!” (cited in Drury 2004: 109) Pegeen‟s viciousness at the end is a reaction to having been duped publicly and to feeling vulnerable and exposed. The severity of her treatment of Christy at the play‟s end expresses her utter disappointment when she concludes that he is much less of a man than she thought.

64 thraneen - thread 87

She repudiates Christy: “I‟ll say, a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but what‟s a squabble in the back-yard, and the blow of a loy, have taught me that there‟s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed.” (CoW: 119) Her distinction is self-deceptive and beautifully ironic, given the fact that she obviously admired and wanted Christy as a result of his bloody deed. However, when Pegeen is presented with the full reality of his fiery and violent nature, she is unable to deal with it. She has neither the imagination nor the strength to leave the sterile way of life she knows. Through Christy‟s final emancipation and triumphant departure she realizes that Christy has actually grown into the man she originally imagined him to be and is worth having after all, which explains her final wild lamentation: “Oh my grief, I‟ve lost him surely. I‟ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World.” (CoW: 121) Ultimately she does not mourn the loss of Christy, but the loss of the playboy, of the liberation experienced by her identification with the parricide. Pegeen, the passionate disturbed woman, hungry for freedom and romance, comes closer to success than most of Synge‟s other female characters. Nevertheless, “her pride and the fundamental Puritanism of her temperament make it impossible for her to accept the consequences of her own dream” (Skelton 1971: 130). Pegeen represents Ireland as a country dreaming of independence but unable to face the consequences of the dream becoming reality.

5.2.3. Shawn “Shaneen” Keogh

Shawn Keogh is the antithesis of all that Christy represents. In the stage direction he is characterized as a “fat and fair young man” (CoW: 69), awkward, uneasy, and timid. He is reasonably wealthy, with his own farm and cattle, but he exhibits a total lack of intelligence, will of his own, or any agreeable character traits. Shawn is a cowardly, pathetic character that is universally mocked and disrespected. Synge subtly illustrates the general tone of contempt towards him by having Pegeen and the villagers call him „Shaneen‟. In Hiberno-English the diminutive „-een‟ is typically used to denote something insignificant, small or of little consequence. Shawn Keogh is “a striking example of the hopeless condition to which rural Ireland is being gradually reduced by emigration which, draining all the good elements away to foreign parts, acts as an inverted form of natural selection resulting in the survival of the unfittest” (Bourgeois 1968: 195).

In the first scene Shawn already shows his cowardice and total subservience to the will of the Church by refusing to protect his fiancé. His fears of upsetting the local priest, Father Reilly, are so overwhelming that he does not dare to spend the night alone in the house with Pegeen. Shawn is exceedingly prudish and pusillanimous, thus epitomizing the sexual conservatism of the Irish republic. He is so desperate to marry Pegeen that he does not ask for a dowry, instead making “good bargain” (CoW: 70) with her father, offering him cattle and gold in order to get her hand in marriage. He later tries to bribe Christy to leave by offering “half of a ticket to the Western States” (CoW: 95) and new clothes. He even bribes Widow Quin to aid him to get rid of Christy. It is significant that his bribery remains ineffective in all three cases. Shawn is not only dastardly but also treacherous in his desperation not to lose Pegeen: “I‟d inform against him [Christy] [...] If I wasn‟t so God-fearing, I‟d near have courage to come behind him and run a pike into his side” (CoW: 97). Widow Quin has no sympathy for his pains and expresses the general consensus: “It‟s true all girls are fond of courage and do hate the like of you.” (CoW: 96) Shawn‟s most peculiar trait is his obsession with the local priest. He has a maddening terror of Father Reilly and ritually invokes his name whenever possible. The priest seems to compensate for his lack of a father figure, as Shawn is an orphan. In the course of the play he comes to regret not having a father to kill: “Oh, it‟s a hard case to be an orphan and not have your father that you‟re used to, and you‟d easy kill and make yourself a hero in the sight of all” (CoW: 97). His fate of being doomed to remain eternally immature contrasts dramatically with Christy‟s claim. Shawn cannot assert himself against his biological father and he would never dream of revolting against the father figure of the priest. Shawn, in his fearful and supine attitude towards the Church and Father Reilly, represents the Irish bourgeoisie obediently succumbing to the paternal authoritarianism of the Catholic Church.

5.2.4. Widow Quin

Widow Quin is the antagonist of Pegeen. She arrives at the shebeen to lure Christy away under the pretence of being sent by the priest. Pegeen jealously sees her as a rival for Christy‟s affection, but the hostility between the two women existed long before the arrival of the playboy. Within the first few minutes of the play, Pegeen characterizes the widow as “the like of that murderer” (CoW: 71) and Widow Quin expresses her unfavourable view of

Pegeen by calling her derisively “a girl you‟d see itching and scratching, and she with the stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop” (CoW: 101). Quin also warns Christy early on: “there‟s right torment will await you here if you go romancing with her like” (CoW: 85). The widow is the most down-to-earth character of play and possesses a good deal of life experience as “a widow woman [who] has buried her children and destroyed her man” (CoW: 84). In contrast to Pegeen, she doesn‟t seek to escape the world in her imagination. Even though Widow Quin is as curious as everyone to see the new arrival and hungry for excitement and gossip, she immediately sees Christy for what he really is: “Well, aren‟t you a little smiling fellow? [...] it‟d soften my heart to see you sitting so simple with your cup and cake, and you fitter to be saying your catechism than slaying your da” (CoW: 83). However, she feels a connection to Christy, who as a result of his alleged murder belongs, like her, outside the tight social order: “I am your like, and it‟s for that I‟m taking a fancy to you” (CoW: 102). The widow has been living in isolation from the rural community ever since she accidentally murdered her husband by striking him with a rusty pike. He eventually died of blood-poisoning, which turned it into “a sneaky kind of murder did win small glory with the boys itself” (CoW: 84). The attitude of the villagers towards her is clearly voiced by Michael James: “every living Christian is a bona fide, saving one widow alone” (CoW: 74), and even more crudely by a village girl: “all dread her here” (CoW: 91). Her fate already prefigures the rejection Christy meets at end of play. Widow Quin observes the goings-on of the villagers with a mixture of detached amusement and mischievous opportunism. She is materialistic and unprincipled, which hardly wins her any sympathy. She has no scruples about swearing a false oath and in an attempt to strike a bargain, the widow first tries her luck with Shawn: “what would you give me if I did wed him and did save you so?” (CoW: 97), and when her scheme fails, seeks out Christy: “If I aid you, will you swear to give me a right of way I want, and a mountainy ram, and a load of dung at Michaelmas, the time that you‟ll be master here?” (CoW: 102). Like Shawn‟s bribery, ultimately none of the widow‟s dealings work out. As a hard-bitten, clear-sighted realist, Widow Quin does not count on the integrity of the hero like everyone else. Christy is fortunate that she is the one present at Old Mahon‟s reappearance as she is certainly the only character in the drama not to give him away immediately after the revelation of the truth. In all her dubious morality Widow Quin remains the only one to stay loyal and attached to Christy despite his imposture. She even tries to manage his escape at the end of the play but 90

unfortunately cannot help him as he is blinded by his love for Pegeen. The widow finally resigns with: “Well, if the worst come in the end of all, it‟ll be a great game to see there‟s none to pity him but a widow woman, the like of me” (CoW: 103) In Playboy, the widow is geographically and morally set apart from the village community. Through Widow Quin, Synge depicts a character that is not restricted by the authority of father or husband and can thus act freely and uninhibitedly. However, the cause of this liberation is unfortunate. The widow has, even though accidentally, committed a murder and the villagers‟ attitude towards her exemplifies the natural reaction of a community to such an incident. Her utter social exclusion turns the simultaneous hero-cult surrounding Christy into a farce.

5.2.5. Michael James Flaherty and Old Mahon

There are a number of parallels between the two fathers in the play. Michael James Flaherty is a “fat jovial publican” (CoW: 71) who is absent for most of the play and hopelessly drunk for the remainder of it, while Old Mahon is gruff and ill-tempered and known to often be “drinking for weeks” (CoW: 82). Both of them are part of a longstanding tradition in Irish literature, the alcoholic patriarch. Old Mahon and Flaherty live “each of them openly and unashamedly the life of the natural man. They care for nobody. They drink their fill and speak their fill.” (Corkery 1966: 195) Even though they both appear to be reasonably wealthy, there is no evidence of them carrying out any occupation. Pegeen apparently runs the public house for her father and Christy laments the hard and bitter life working for a father who is “raging all times” (CoW: 82). It can be assumed that Old Mahon as well as Flaherty was married at some point, however, there is no reference as to the fate of their respective wives. Perhaps their most controversial and fateful analogy is that both try to arrange mercenary marriages for their children. Old Flaherty has bargained for the large dowry of a “drift of heifers [...] and the golden ring” (CoW: 114) from Shawn Keogh but Pegeen later has the courage to revolt against her father‟s will in order to marry for love. Old Mahon‟s demand that Christy marry an ugly old widow, however, is fatal. Christy is well aware of his father‟s true motives: “He was letting on I was wanting a protector from the harshness of the world, and he without a thought the whole while but how he‟s have her hut to live in and her gold to drink.” (CoW: 90) Christy is further unsettled by another fact: “all know she did suckle me for

six weeks when I came into the world” (CoW: 90). This Oedipal situation, in addition to Christy‟s irritation by his father‟s constant ill-treatment, finally culminates in the attempted murder which is incidentally the origin of the drama. Michael James Flaherty, like the rest of the villagers, is initially highly impressed by Christy‟s murder and at Pegeen‟s suggestion does not hesitate to welcome him into his house and make him pot-boy of his shebeen. However, there are limits to his approval of Christy‟s character as he considers him a “frisky little rascal” and declares: “It‟ll be a poor thing for the household man where you go sniffing for a female wife” (CoW: 113). When Christy asks for Pegeen‟s hand, he is duly afraid to turn a man, known for murdering his father, into his son- in-law. Yet Flaherty equally fears to attract Christy‟s rage and as he ultimately admires his courage and savagery, he finally gives in: “I liefer face the grave untimely and I seeing a score of grandsons growing up little gallant swearers by the name of God, than go peopling my bedside with puny weeds the like of what you‟d breed, I‟m thinking, out of Shaneen Keogh. [...] A daring fellow is the jewel of the world” (CoW: 115). Flaherty represents the attitude of most rural communities, whose members cursorily rejoice in excess and savagery, yet when their security is threatened, quickly opt for domestic piety. Flaherty ends up with a pathetic anxiety to protect his home: “It is the will of God that all should guard their little cabins from the treachery of law” (CoW: 121). With the expulsion of the outsiders, settled society quickly restores its status quo: “By the will of God, we‟ll have peace now for our drinks.” (CoW: 121)

Old Mahon is “a man‟d be raging all times, the while he was waking, like a gaudy officer65 you‟d hear cursing and damning and swearing oaths.” (CoW: 82) At the onset of the drama, Christy provides a lengthy outside commentary on Old Mahon‟s unpleasant and violent character, which serves to make his eventual transformation more credible, as it is likely that he has inherited some of his father‟s traits. Initially, however, Christy lives in utter terror of Old Mahon who “never gave peace to any, saving when he he‟d get two months or three, or be locked in the asylums for battering peelers or assaulting men” (CoW: 82). Old Mahon is clearly depicted as a villain, which assures sympathy for Christy, as his savage father might have deserved his fate. When Old Mahon appears in act two, his self- commentary entirely confirms Christy‟s description: “and I a terrible and fearful case, the way

65 According to O‟Ceallaigh, Old Mahon represents British authority, because „gaudy officer‟ denotes a British army officer (cf. 2002: 36). His language is profane and vulgar, to reinforce his disagreeable character. 92

that there I was one time, screeching in a straightened waistcoat, with seven doctors writing out my sayings in a printed book.” (CoW: 109) Old Mahon‟s main function in this act is to draw the picture of Christy‟s character before he arrived at the Mayo village. On the one hand it becomes clear that there is little reason for attributing any heroic qualities to Christy when his father characterizes him “a dirty, stuttering lout” (CoW: 99), timid, weakly, incompetent, dreamy, and generally known as “the loony of Mahon‟s” (CoW: 108). On the other hand, there is already indication of an elemental kinship between the two, preparing for their eventual reversal of roles. Christy mentions his inclination towards nature early on and his father‟s description also presents him in terms of the hills, fields, or roads, and never of the house. Old Mahon never appears as a householder either and is consistently evoked in terms of the open air, roads, or taverns. The father is as vainglorious about his splintered skull as Christy about his blow: “amn‟t I a great wonder to think I‟ve traced him ten days with that rent in my crown” (CoW: 98). Old Mahon possesses his son‟s eloquence if not his lyricism. Like Christy, he delights in the retelling of his story: “I‟m after walking hundreds and long scores of miles, winning clean beds and the fill of my belly four times in the day, and I doing nothing but telling stories of that naked truth” (CoW: 105). The fundamental resemblances between father and son emphasize Christy‟s potential, “a dramatic as well as characterological possibility that was already there.” (Meisel 2007: 120). In the last scene, Christy commands his father to accompany him as his subordinate. Old Mahon‟s: “Is it me?” (CoW: 121) echoes Christy‟s declaration in the first act and likewise marks the beginning of a new situation. Mahon‟s surprise is mingled with delight as he is pleased that his son is a true Mahon after all. He resigns his authority and rejoices in a future of bravado and adventure: “my son and myself will be going on our own way, and we‟ll have great times from this out telling stories of the villainy of Mayo, and the fools is here” (CoW: 121). “The freebooters take to their proper element, the road and the timid people of Mayo take to their drinks, their hopes, their lamentations.” (Augustine Martin in Bushrui 1972: 71) At the end of the drama, all roles are clarified and all relations well defined.

5.3. Paganism versus Christianity

Synge was highly meticulous in the design of his plays and left nothing to chance. Already in Riders he notably endowed his characters‟ names with profound significance for the drama. In Playboy again it is certainly no coincidence that „Pegeen‟ and „pagan‟ are almost homophones, furthermore, the analogy between Christy and Christ or Christianity is evident. Doubtless, the two main characters in Playboy are designed to represent the conflict between Paganism and Christianity in Ireland. For Synge, the Irish peasant was a “latter-day Pagan, on whose old-time heathendom the Christian faith has been artificially and superficially grafted” (Bourgeois 1968: 90). The issue of religious faith and denomination had preoccupied Synge from his early childhood on and it is therefore not surprising that he incorporated this theme in his dramatic masterpiece. Pegeen represents pagan and pre-colonized Ireland. She is depicted as wild, courageous and independent. Her language is largely devoid of religious epithets and, unlike that of the other characters, submits to no authority (cf. O‟Ceallaigh 2002: 34). Due to her mostly absent father she is the patron of the public house, which in turn is the central meeting point of the entire community. All polarities in the play involve Pegeen, which again serves to emphasise the central position of paganism. Pegeen‟s emphatic rejection of Shawn‟s concept of religion becomes clear within the first few minutes of the play: “Stop tormenting me with Father Reilly” (CoW: 71). The priest himself remains absent during the entire drama. Pegeen‟s early and late dominant centrality enables her to challenge the paternalistic order of the Church and the British influence on Ireland. Christy can be seen as representing Jesus Christ66 and the myth of Christianity. He is stylized as the hero and saviour of the rural community devoid of courage, virtue, or values. Pegeen is taken in by Christy‟s false promises of freedom and while supporting him simultaneously starts losing her dominant position in society. A marriage between Pegeen and Christy would represent the union between pagan and Christian Ireland, however, this position would rob the autonomy of the pagan culture. The fact that Christy was labouring under false assumptions suggests that Christianity was the false choice for pure Ireland. Ultimately the union between paganism and Christianity is avoided when it becomes clear

66 Skelton suggests that the plot of Playboy constitutes an analogy to the ministry and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, with parallel structures and themes such as Epiphany, Good Samaritan, hanging and crucifixion, and Pegeen as Judas (cf. Skelton 1971: 119-121). 94

that Christy‟s status in the play is based on a lie. His failure to live up to his heroic myth represents “Synge‟s view of Christianity‟s failure in Ireland in that its influence has violated native traditions while delivering neither independence nor a modern Ireland” (O‟Ceallaigh 2002: 37). Upon close analysis, Christy seems to be rather a parody of Christ than a reflection of the latter. He is betrayed by those who crowned him champion, but he nevertheless exits triumphantly, leaving the villagers to wallow in their unsatisfactory existences. Yet his triumph can be questioned, as Christy and Old Mahon return to their own miserable existence merely with reversed roles. According to O‟Ceallaigh, Synge is less concerned with triumph than with its opposite (cf. 2002: 26). He portrays native Ireland at the play‟s end as trapped within its colonized state, devoid of any hope.

5.4. “Irish humour is dead, MacKenna, and I‟ve got influenza”67 – Audience Reception of Playboy

5.4.1. The Playboy Riots

Synge‟s highly anticipated play premiered on Saturday 26th January to a well-filled Abbey Theatre. After the second act, Lady Gregory sent a telegram to Yeats, who was lecturing in Scotland at the time: “Play great success” (Yeats 1985: 311), however soon afterwards another telegram had to be sent: “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift” (Yeats 1985: 311). Many members of the first audience came with a prepared mind, ready to take offence at the slightest provocation. The word „shift‟, which describes a female undergarment, was most likely a catalyst for the playgoers‟ general but indeterminate unease which was caused by a number of factors in the play. Due to the ambiguity of the main characters and the complexity of their psychology, the audience was largely unable to decide which attitude to take on towards the central character or the play itself. They were unsure whether Christy Mahon was presented as a typical peasant or a humorous exaggerated figure, a hero or a buffoon. There was general confusion as to the genre of the play. While Playboy is a realistic and sociologically accurate depiction of peasant realities, it contains strong elements of humorous or satirical symbolism and allegory.

67 Letter to MacKenna CL1 :330 95

The audience‟s frustration finally culminated in the infamous Playboy riots68. The protests reflected religious and nationalistic sentiment in a difficult and troubled political period. “As the Irish had for so long been ridiculed, they were sensitive to criticism, however just, and reacted more violently to it than other people.” (Trunninger 1976: 116) The storyline of a hero relying on bragging and the credulity of his audience before he is almost hanged by the very same people, forgetting their former alliance, was a downright provocation for nationalists, as the recent rise and fall of Charles Stewart Parnell69 still rested heavily on the conscience of many. The riots began at the second performance of the drama on Monday. About forty young men in the front seats of the pit stamped, shouted, and blew trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. The play was inaudible and the actors were forced to perform a dumb show (cf. Yeats 1985: 311). Despite ongoing protests, Synge and Lady Gregory continued to have Playboy performed at the Abbey Theatre for the entire week, as originally planned. “It was a definite fight for the freedom from mob censorship.” (Lady Gregory 1972: 69) Yeats, in an attempt to contain the uproar, offered a platform for formal debate: “We have put this play before you to be heard and to be judged, as every play should be heard and judged. Every man has a right to hear it and condemn it if he pleases, but no man has a right to interfere with another man hearing the play and judging for himself.” (The Daily Express, 30 Jan. 1907; cited in Jones 1994: 61). Newspaper reviews added to the public indignation over the portrayal of Irish national character in Synge‟s play. The Evening Mail referred to the drama as “absurd and un-Irish” (cited in Jones 1994: 58) while The Freeman’s Journal called it an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood. The blood boils with indignation as one recalls the incidents, expressions, ideas of this squalid, offensive production, incongruously styled a comedy in three acts. [...] The worst specimen of stage Irishman of the past is a refined, acceptable fellow compared with that imagined by Mr. Synge. And as for his women, it is not possible, even if it were desirable, to class them. (cited in Kilroy 1971: 7-9)

While the coarse language of the drama was unanimously criticised, some reviewers, however, recognized Synge‟s literary genius. The Daily Express, for example, reviewed Playboy comprehensively and favourably:

68 For a detailed chronology of the Playboy Riots see Kilroy 1971 69 Parnell (1846-1891) was an important Irish nationalist political leader and a Home Rule MP in the parliament of UK and Ireland. He was later disgraced for having an affair with a married woman, rapidly lost support, and died soon after (cf. „Charles Stewart Parnell‟, wikipedia.org). 96

The characters in the play are drawn from the people of the west of Ireland, and their language and methods of expression are as simple, unadorned, and direct as those of one type which they purport to present. [...] The incident already referred to – the howl set up at the objectionable phrase given to Christy to speak – spoiled everyone‟s chance of appreciating the finish of what is, on the whole, a clever piece of writing, cleverly acted and appropriately staged. (28 Jan. 1907; cited in Jones 1994: 58)

As previously discussed, the Playboy Riots were not the first time Synge experienced adverse reaction to one of his plays. The Abbey stage manager W.G. Fay recalls Synge complaining that in The Well of the Saints “offence has been taken where no offence had been intended. Very well then, he said to me bitterly one night, the next play I write I will make sure will annoy them.” (W. G. Fay in Mikhail 1977: 48) Synge could not forgive the crass ignorance and malevolence with which his first play had been received and the reception of Playboy only confirmed his distaste for bourgeois Catholic nationalists. In a letter to MacKenna he expresses his views rather frankly: “[T]he scurrility, and ignorance and treachery of some of the attacks upon me have rather disgusted me with the middle class Irish Catholic. As you know I have the wildest admiration for the Irish Peasants, and for Irish men of known or unknown genius [...] but between the two there‟s an ungodly ruck of fat-faced, sweaty-headed swine.” (CL1: 330) Synge did not join the public debate about Playboy and left the defence of his play largely to Yeats. He merely wrote a letter to the editor of The Irish Times in a feeble attempt to dispel the controversy about the genre of his drama: The Playboy of the Western World is not a play with „a purpose‟ in the modern sense of the words, but although parts of it are, or are meant to be, extravagant comedy, still a great deal more that is behind it, is perfectly serious when looked at in a certain light. That is often the case, I think, with comedy, and no one is quite sure today whether Shylock and Alceste should be played seriously or not. There are, it may be hinted, several sides to The Playboy.” (31 Jan. 1907; cited in Jones 1994: 63-64)

In his letter Synge also likens Playboy to Don Quixote. Don Quixote is, like Christy, a fantasist and an outsider, who was used by Cervantes to comment on the vices and absurdities of the society of his time. Even though he would not admit it, the riots affected Synge deeply. He suffered a severe attack of influenza and due to his Hodgkin‟s disease he never fully recovered his health until his death in 1909. After the premiere of Playboy he confided in his fiancé Molly Allgood: “I feel like old Maurya today, „It‟s four fine plays I have, though it was a hard birth I had with every one of them and they coming to the world.‟ It is better any day to have the row we had last night, than to have your play fizzling out in half-hearted applause. Now we‟ll be talked about. We‟re an event in the history of the Irish stage.” (CLI: 285)

5.4.2. Nationalism and Synge‟s Stage Irishmen

When the well-intentioned attempt at a cultivated debate proved futile and riots continued, Yeats finally felt impelled to call in the Dublin Metropolitan Police to have the play heard. W.G. Fay recalls: “Thus we were able once more to speak the lines, but our reputation as an Irish national institution was ruined. Not content with libelling the saintly Irish people, we had actually called in the tyrant Saxon myrmidons to silence their righteous indignation.” (W.G. Fay in Jones 1994: 61) The Dublin Metropolitan Police was generally seen as an instrument of British oppression and bringing them into the theatre gave nationalists a powerful weapon of propaganda against the Abbey. While Playboy celebrates the liberation of an oppressed victim from domination and tyranny, for nationalist audiences it was yet another defamatory depiction of the irresponsible, violent, backward Irish Catholic peasant. Synge represented the rural west as ideal Ireland. However, the new urban middle class did not approve of Ireland‟s representation as an overwhelmingly rural or peasant society. They did not want to be reminded of rural poverty and Synge had confronted them once again with the unpleasant realities of contemporary life. “Without losing sight of the conditions of peasant life, [...] Synge aestheticized the problem of oppression, advocating reincorporation of the past into the present through art, and thus saving a remnant of Ireland‟s cultural heritage.” (Fleming 1995: 41) Anglo-Irish writers, like John Synge, who wished to identify with and write about native Ireland had a very wide chasm to cross. They were facing a ravine of suspicion and mistrust due to the Land Question70, which was seen by the urban population of the late 19th century as mainly a struggle between wealthy Anglo-Irish landowners and poor Catholic peasants. The main reason why Irish audiences greeted Playboy with such anger and indignation was because they saw in Synge an Anglo-Irishman exploiting denigrating English stereotypes of Ireland. The popular image of the roaring, drinking stage Irishman propagated by English touring companies had offended Irish national pride for decades. The staging of apparently viler caricatures, immoral, feckless drunken men and immodest, lecherous women, presented by a company that purported to be an Irish National Theatre, inevitably had to

70 The so-called „Land War‟ was a period of agrarian agitation in rural Ireland in the 1870s to 90s whose main aim was the bettering of the position of tenant farmers and a redistribution of land to tenants from landlords, especially absentee landlords (cf. „Land War‟, wikipedia.org). 98

provoke riots. W.G. Fay realized that politics were blinding the Irish to dramatic art: “The characters were as fine and diverting a set of scallywags as one could invent for one story, but it was years too soon for our audiences to appreciate them as dramatic creations.” (W. G. Fay in Jones 1994: 57) The impact of the Playboy Riots was ultimately quite contrary to nationalist intentions. The riots proved an unnecessary capitulation to British adversaries, who would find further justification for their claim that the Irish were indeed a lawless and violent people. Through their rioting and violent disorder, the protestors had perpetuated the very myth they aspired to dispel. Thus, instead of “exposing the false image of the „stage Irishman‟, the agitators had acted like so many Paddies before them, with drunkenness and rioting.” (Kiberd 1979: 252) Arthur Griffith deserves credit for publishing an unusually perceptive article on the Playboy Riots by an unknown author in his nationalist Sinn Fein: The majority of the playgoers “objected” to the piece, thought it a libel on Irish character, unfit for the stage and so forth, yet in place of walking out of the theatre and leaving the players to amuse empty benches, they persisted in booming the play, the theatre and themselves in a manner which was not particularly consonant with the dignity of a people aspiring to nationhood. (P.M.E.K., cited in O‟Ceallaigh 2002: 41-42)

Contrary to the reaction in Ireland, Playboy was an immediate success in London and Synge became a literary lion overnight. “It is easy with the advantage of hindsight to conclude that „the Playboy riots‟ were providential, and „made‟ the Abbey Theatre.” (Fitz-Simon 1983: 156) When the drama was revived in 1909, it was warmly received by most audiences, yet critics remained largely hostile. In 1911 the Abbey Theatre, under Lady Gregory71, toured America with Playboy on the playbill. The company toured major cities on the East Coast and regularly met with protests by Irish immigrants. In Philadelphia the whole crew was arrested for trying to perform an immoral, indecent play, which only added to the drama‟s notoriety. Since these early troubled productions, Playboy has become a part of the Irish classical repertoire. Time has eroded the shock value of the plot, and it is the rich poetic imagery and musical language of Synge‟s Irish peasants that remain the play‟s chief attractions.

71 For a first-hand account of the challenges of the American tour see Lady Gregory 1972: 97-135 99

6. Conclusion

The early 20th century marked a decisive shift in the dramatic portrayal of Irish characters. The antiquated ludicrous and blundering stage Irishman no longer complied with contemporary political and social realities and was therefore fundamentally reshaped by writers of the Irish Literary Revival in an attempt to create a new sense of nationality. Revivalists reacted to centralized industrialism, commercialism, and materialism by drawing heavily on native tradition and myth. They idealized the Irish peasant for his ancient cultural heritage, connection to nature and presumed spiritual superiority, and thereby fabricated new primitivist stage Irish characters. John Millington Synge, in his firm belief that theatre should have a universal appeal, refused to adhere to either stock notion, presenting instead the rich and diverse realities of Irish peasant life. On his journeys to the Aran Islands, Synge encountered traditional Irish lifestyle and was immediately captivated by the a-dogmatism with which the islanders moved between pagan and orthodox worldviews, as well as the powerful influence of nature on their daily lives. From his experiences on the islands Synge drew numerous plotlines, incorporating incidents and folktales. In his dramatic plots he employed folk customs and traditions such as wakes and the keen and emphasised the peasant‟s connection to nature and paganism. Recurrent themes in his work are the conflict between traditional and modern lifestyles, the passing of time, and investigations of relationships between parent and offspring, man and nature, and lovers. In his insistence in realism, Synge took great pains to produce semantically loaded authentic settings, costumes, and props. He successfully employed the Anglo- Irish idiom in his dramatic pieces, making distinctive and masterly use of its rhythm and cadence. Synge intended his plays to be a unified picture incorporating the whole of Irish peasant reality in theme, setting, and language. John Synge‟s drama was limited in that he wrote chiefly of the peasant of the west of Ireland. His dramatic characters are tenants, peasant farmers, fishermen, self-employed working people, tinkers, tramps, and priests. His unique power consisted in his ability to synthesize and to create in one figure both, an individual Irish state and a universal character true to human nature in general. Synge‟s peasant characters are vibrant, spirited, imaginative and sometimes savage. Several stage Irish traits can be detected in Synge‟s dramatic characters, however, he 100

endowed those traits with new significance. Imagination and eloquence are no longer humorous attributes of a blundering buffoon but distinctive personal features. Synge replaced the stage Irish brogue with the poetic Anglo-Irish idiom, used with creativity, wit, and irony. His characters often employ „poetry talk‟ against oppression, greed, and conformity. Religious terms and epithets can still be found in Synge‟s work, however, they are chiefly used out of habit and devoid of meaning. Religion is subjected to criticism and the importance of native traditions is emphasized. Naïve credulity can be detected in several characters, however, this trait is employed as an imaginative way to escape the monotony of everyday life. Alcoholic patriarchs no longer serve as comic relief but are portrayed in a negative way, epitomizing the issue of intoxication as a means of escaping the dreary realities of rural life. With his famous playboy, Synge refashioned the inherited type of braggart and shaughraun in order to give him new life and meaning. Even though he is imaginative and eloquent, Synge‟s playboy is not a conscious rogue, but an innocent cast into an intricate situation. His determination to escape from loneliness and paternal domination drives him to accomplish things he never expected. The violent collision with settled society results in his rejection of it, however, he ultimately fails in overcoming his coarse, bullying father by turning into a new version of him. Authoritarian figures as well as those who defer to them are treated with little respect in Synge‟s dramatic canon. Representatives of the Church are mostly offstage and are casually dismissed by the main characters. Those dependent on the clergy are portrayed as immature and emasculated. Father figures are generally presented as inadequate, while jealous, possessive men trying to control their women fail and end up lonely and dejected. Synge endorses the discourse of liberation, demonstrating that self-confidence and maturity come from release from paternal, religious, as well as social and political domination. John Synge‟s sympathies lie with underdogs, tinkers, outcasts, and tramps. Their close connection with nature and their poetic souls compensate for possible shortcomings and elevate them above characters that represent conventional social values. Moreover, in each of Synge‟s plays a central character is exiled or set apart from his community, some voluntarily but most of them forced to do so. Synge contends that self-realisation remains impossible within the restricted norms of a community and eventually involves social alienation. Throughout Synge‟s works powerfully drawn female characters can be found who assert themselves in unorthodox ways, defying custom and norms. Independent and rebellious women resist male authority and refuse to be victims of society‟s life-denying codes. Synge‟s 101

female characters are passionate Celtic women, hungry for freedom and romance, full of idealism, passion, and sexuality. Furthermore, they have a powerful maternal feeling and are aware of the passing of time and the inevitability of death. They are for the most part more clearly defined than their male counterparts and treated with a sympathetic complexity that frequently determines the mood and theme of the drama. However, they are no saintly icons of womanhood and often remain trapped within repressive social or economic practices. The stock objection to Synge‟s dramatic characters was that he created figures as untrue to Irish life as the stage Irishman of the past, equally unfitted for political self- government and possibly even more slanderous of the national character. The present thesis attempted to demonstrate that John Synge‟s Irish characters are firmly based on his first-hand experiences of Irish peasant realities. He defined his peasant characters with a profound insight into human nature, compassion and wit, refusing to adhere to received stereotypes. Synge sought to create characters who would express the native Irish consciousness. He advocated liberation from paternalistic and political tyranny and provincialism and prefigured a transformation of the Irish national spirit. “He poured all his love of the greenness of Ireland into his literary and dramatic incantation with its sadness and tenderness and its sorrow over the cruelty of man.” (Brooks Atkinson in Jones 1994: 88-89) Synge‟s unique controversial peasant plays defined the Abbey style for decades. The Playboy riots were providential and account for the popularity and possibly even the existence and continuity of the Abbey Theatre. Many authors have since attempted to imitate Synge‟s complex style with varying degrees of success. Sean O‟Casey (1880-1964), who employed a similar ferocity and lyricism in his dramatic speech, might be mentioned as a worthy successor. He attempted to create a suitable drama for the Dublin working classes in the manner of Synge‟s achievements for the rural population. His mature drama The Plough and the Stars (1926) sparked controversies similar to those of Playboy amongst Abbey audiences. Other prominent Irish dramatists who acknowledge their indebtedness to John Millington Synge include Brendan Behan, Paul Vincent Carroll, Brinsley MacNamara, and Lennox Robinson (cf. David H. Greene in Casey 1994: 26). In 2005 Druid Synge, an Irish theatre company, presented a staging of Synge‟s entire dramatic canon in one day. The project was received with enthusiastic reviews, proving the contemporary relevance of Synge‟s universal masterpieces. An annual Synge Summer School, providing lectures and seminars on the dramatist, was established in 1990 by the Synge scholar Professor Nicholas Grene and remains extremely popular. 2009 marked the 102

centenary of John Millington Synge‟s death, yet his legacy lives on in his plays, which are revived time and again at the Abbey Theatre as well as worldwide.

103

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