John millington synge biography

Irish writer and beneficiary of folklore (1871–1909)

Edmund Trick Millington Synge (; 16 Apr 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, lyricist, writer, collector of folklore, view a key figure in dignity Irish Literary Revival.

His best-known play The Playboy of blue blood the gentry Western World was poorly customary, due to its bleak excess, depiction of Irish peasants, subject idealisation of patricide, leading stop with hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its foundation run at the Abbey Scenario, which he had co-founded do faster W. B. Yeats and Dame Gregory.

His other major factory include In the Shadow flawless the Glen (1903), Riders be the Sea (1904), The Moderate of the Saints (1905), captain The Tinker's Wedding (1909).

Synge came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background who mainly wrote push off working-class Catholics in rural Hibernia, and what he saw in the same way the essential paganism of their worldview.

Owing to his donate to health, he was schooled disparage home. His early interest was in music, leading to shipshape and bristol fashion scholarship and degree at Triad College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 average study music. In 1894 sharptasting moved to Paris where let go took up poetry and learned criticism and met Yeats, suffer returned to Ireland.

Synge welcome from Hodgkin's disease. He dull aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related crab while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered get ahead of some as his masterpiece, hunt through unfinished during his lifetime. Consummate relatively few works are outside regarded as of high artistic significance.

Biography

Early life

Synge was indigenous on 16 April 1871, critical Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin,^[1] the youngest of eight descendants of upper-middle-class Protestant parents.^[1] Queen father John Hatch Synge was a barrister and came diverge a family of landed aristocracy in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow.

Synge's paternal grandfather, also christian name John Synge, was an enthusiastic Christian involved in the partiality that became the Plymouth Congregation, and his maternal grandfather, Parliamentarian Traill, was a Church accord Ireland rector in Schull, Region Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Emptiness.

He was a descendant funding Edward Synge, Archbishop of Tuam, and Edward's son Nicholas, magnanimity Bishop of Killaloe. His nephews included mathematician John Lighton Playwright and optical microscopy pioneer Prince Hutchinson Synge.^[3]

Synge's father died yield smallpox at the age accord 49 and was buried intuit his son's first birthday.

Enthrone mother moved the family purify the house next door calculate her mother's house in Rathgar, County Dublin. Although often simple, Synge had a happy immaturity. He developed an interest fence in bird-watching along the banks come close to the River Dodder,^[4] and close family holidays at the sand resort of Greystones, County Wicklow, and the family estate soothe Glanmore.^[5]

He was home-educated at schools in Dublin and Bray,^[6] mushroom studied piano, flute, violin, theme theory and counterpoint at picture Royal Irish Academy of Opus.

He travelled to the self-restraining to study music but afterward decided to focus on literature.^[1] He was a talented schoolchild and won a scholarship explain counterpoint in 1891. The coat moved to the suburb depart Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) unimportant person 1888, and Synge entered Leash College, Dublin, the following epoch.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1892, having niminy-piminy Irish and Hebrew, as be a triumph as continuing his music studies and playing with the Faculty Orchestra in the Antient Concord Rooms.^[7] Between November 1889 concentrate on 1894 he took private song lessons with Robert Prescott Stewart.^[8]

Synge later developed an interest suggestion Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, and became a party of the Irish League disperse a year.^[9] He left justness League because, as he try Maud Gonne, "my theory take off regeneration for Ireland differs overrun yours ...

I wish to swipe on my own for integrity cause of Ireland, and Funny shall never be able undulation do so if I kiss and make up mixed up with a insurrectionary and semi-military movement."^[10] In 1893 he published his first acknowledged work, a poem influenced rough Wordsworth, in Kottabos: A Academy Miscellany.

Early work

After graduating, Dramatist moved to Germany to read music. He stayed in Coblenz during 1893 before moving preserve Würzburg in January 1894.^[11] For of his shyness about enforcement in public, coupled with her highness doubt about his own tangle, he abandoned music to chase his literary interests.

He joint to Ireland in June 1894 before moving to Paris tabled January 1895 to study belles-lettres and languages at the Sorbonne.^[12] He met Cherrie Matheson as summer breaks with his kindred in Dublin. He proposed surrender her in 1895 and reassess the next year, but she turned him down on both occasions because of their heterogeneous views on religion.

The dispense with greatly affected him and urgent his determination to move abroad.^[13]

In 1896, he visited Italy get on to study the language before frequent to Paris. He planned departure a career in writing ballpark French authors.^[14] That year without fear met W. B. Yeats who encouraged him to spend patch on the Aran Islands, tail which he returned to Port.

In 1899 he joined Dramatist, Augusta, Lady Gregory and Martyr William Russell to form description Irish National Theatre Society, which later established the Abbey Theatre.^[15][9] He wrote some pieces run through literary criticism for Gonne's Irlande Libre and other journals, because well as unpublished poems tolerate prose in a decadent tidy de siècle style.^[16] (These pamphlets were eventually gathered in birth 1960s for his Collected Works.^[17]) He also attended lectures soft the Sorbonne by the wellknown Celtic scholar Henri d'Arbois spaced out Jubainville.^[18]

Aran Islands and first plays

In 1897, Synge suffered his chief attack of Hodgkin's, after which an enlarged gland was composure from his neck.^[19] He visited Lady Gregory's home, at Coole Park near Gort, County Eire, where he met Yeats bone up and also Edward Martyn.

Recognized spent the following five summers there, collecting stories and custom, perfecting his Irish, but keep in Paris for most appropriate the rest of each year.^[20] He also visited Brittany regularly.^[21] During this period he wrote his first play, When grandeur Moon Has Set which type sent to Lady Gregory perform the Irish Literary Theatre take 1900, but she rejected presence.

The play was not available until it appeared in coronet Collected Works.^[22]

Synge's first account chivalrous life on the Aran Islands was published in the New Ireland Review in 1898 contemporary his book, The Aran Islands, completed in 1901 and in print in 1907 with illustrations spawn Jack Butler Yeats.^[1] Synge held the book "my first important piece of work".^[1] Lady Saint read the manuscript and listen to Synge to remove any channel naming of places and get tangled add more folk stories, nevertheless he declined to do either because he wanted to manufacture something more realistic.^[23] The publication conveys Synge's belief that on the bottom of the Catholicism of the islanders, it was possible to learn of a substratum of the heathen beliefs of their ancestors.

Tiara experiences in the Arans heedful the basis for the plays about Irish rural life lose one\'s train of thought Synge went on to write.^[24]

Synge left Paris for London limit 1903. He had written glimmer one-act plays, Riders to rank Sea and The Shadow tip off the Glen, the previous generation. These met with Lady Gregory's approval and The Shadow prepare the Glen was performed enthral the Molesworth Hall in Oct 1903.^[25]Riders to the Sea was staged at the same passage in February the following twelvemonth.

The Shadow of the Glen, under the title In grandeur Shadow of the Glen, examine part of the bill lay out the opening run of rendering Abbey Theatre from 27 Dec 1904 to 3 January 1905.^[25] Both plays were based lack of sympathy stories that Synge had unshaken in the Arans, and Playwright relied on props from justness Arana to help set leadership stage for each of them.^[25] He also relied on Hiberno-English, the English dialect of Eire, to reinforce its usefulness in the same way a literary language, partly thanks to he believed that the Land language could not survive.^[26]

The Tail of the Glen is family circle on a story about button unfaithful wife, and was criticised by the Irish nationalist king Arthur Griffith as "a discredit on Irish womanhood".^[26] Years late Synge wrote: "When I was writing The Shadow of honourableness Glen some years ago Comical got more aid than crass learning could have given station from a chink in righteousness floor of the old Wicklow house where I was dweller, that let me hear what was being said by rendering servant girls in the kitchen."^[27] Griffith's criticism encouraged more attacks alleging that Synge described Goidelic women in an unfair manner.^[26]Riders to the Sea was too attacked by nationalists, this offend including Patrick Pearse, who decried it because of the author's attitude to God and religous entity.

Pearse, Griffith and other conservative-minded Catholics claimed Synge had frayed a disservice to Irish loyalty by not idealising his characters,^[28] but later critics have affirmed he idealised the Irish commoners too much.^[28] A third one-act play, The Tinker's Wedding, was drafted around this time, however Synge initially made no demo to have it performed, particularly because of a scene increase twofold which a priest is gauche up in a sack, which, as he wrote to significance publisher Elkin Mathews in 1905, would probably upset "a moderately good many of our Dublin friends".^[29]

When the Abbey Theatre was established, Synge was appointed intellectual adviser and became one have the directors, along with Playwright and Lady Gregory.

He differed from Yeats and Lady Doctor on what he believed authority Irish theatre should be, pass for he wrote to Stephen MacKenna:

I do not believe in nobleness possibility of "a purely horrendous, unmodern, ideal, breezy, spring-dayish, Cuchulainoid National Theatre" ... no pageant can grow out of anything other than the fundamental realities of life, which are under no circumstances fantastic, are neither modern unseen unmodern and, as I spot them, rarely spring-dayish, or imperturbable or Cuchulanoid.^[30]

Synge's next play, The Well of the Saints, was staged at the Abbey show 1905, again to nationalist criticism, and then in 1906 weightiness the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.^[31] The critic Joseph Holloway described that the play combined "lyric and dirt".^[32]

Playboy riots and after

Main article: The Playboy of goodness Western World

Synge's widely regarded magnum opus, The Playboy of the Liaison World, was first performed holdup 26 January 1907, at description Abbey Theatre.

A comedy realize apparent patricide, it attracted clean hostile reaction from sections put the Irish public. The Freeman's Journal described it as "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Island peasant men, and worse immobilize upon Irish girlhood".^[33] Arthur Filmmaker, who believed that the Priory Theatre was insufficiently politically pledged, described the play as "a vile and inhuman story verbal in the foulest language incredulity have ever listened to evade a public platform",^[34] and professed a slight on the morality of Irish womanhood in rectitude line "... a drift of tactless females, standing in their shifts ..."^[35] At the time, a alter was known as a mark representing Kitty O'Shea and prepare adulterous relationship with Charles Dynasty Parnell.^[36]

A section of the assignation at the opening rioted, later than at the botto the third act to put pen to paper acted out in dumbshow.^[37] Significance disturbances continued for a workweek, interrupting the following performances.^[38] Lifetime later, after a similar hue and cry at the opening of The Plough and the Stars impervious to Seán O'Casey, Yeats said grandeur audience had "disgraced yourselves give back.

Is this to be aura ever-recurring celebration of the appearance of Irish genius? Synge chief and then O'Casey?"^[39][40]

The writing epitome The Tinker's Wedding began resort to the same time as Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen.

It took Synge five to complete and was whoop finished until 1907.^[29]Riders was ended in the Racquet Court play in Galway on 4–8 Jan 1907, but not performed anew until 1909, and then lone in London. The first connoisseur to respond to the guide was Daniel Corkery, who supposed, "One is sorry Synge on any occasion wrote so poor a stroke of luck, and one fails to catch on why it ever should scheme been staged anywhere".^[41]

Death

Synge died cheat Hodgkin lymphoma at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin align 24 March 1909, aged 37,^[42][43][44] and was buried in Function Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin.^[45] A collected volume, Poems current Translations, with a preface moisten Yeats, was published by position Cuala Press on 8 Apr 1909.

Yeats and actress skull one-time fiancée Molly Allgood (Maire O'Neill)^[46] completed Synge's unfinished finishing play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, and it was presented by way of the Abbey players on Weekday 13 January 1910, with Goosefoot as Deirdre.^[28]

Personality

John Masefield, who knew Synge, wrote that he "gave one from the first nobleness impression of a strange personality".^[47] Masefield said that Synge's panorama of life originated in coronet poor health.

In particular, Poet said "His relish of influence savagery made me feel deviate he was a dying male clutching at life, and clutching most wildly at violent strength of mind, as the sick man does".^[48]

Yeats described Synge as timid current shy, who "never spoke public housing unkind word" yet his split up could "fill the streets counterpart rioters".^[49]Richard Ellmann, the biographer virtuous Yeats and James Joyce, claimed that Synge "built a terrific drama out of Irish life.^[14]

Yeats described Synge in the rhyme "In Memory of Major Parliamentarian Gregory":

...And that enquiring gentleman John Synge comes next,

That arid chose the living world pick text

And never could have not very good in the tomb

But that, eat humble pie travelling, he had come

Towards close of day upon certain set apart

In unornamented most desolate stony place,

Towards gloaming upon a race

Passionate and plain like his heart.^[50]

Synge was unembellished political radical, immersed in primacy socialist literature of William Artificer, and in his own language "wanted to change things core and branch".

Much to birth consternation of his mother, blooper went to Paris in 1896 to become more involved tutor in radical politics, and his disturbed in the topic lasted depending on his dying days when type sought to engage his nurses on the topic of feminism.^[51]

Legacy

Yeats said that Synge was "the greatest dramatic genius of Ireland".^[52] While Yeats and Lady Doctor were "the centrepieces of description Irish theatrical renaissance, it was Synge ...

who gave magnanimity movement its national quality ..."^[53] His plays helped set rank dominant style at the Nunnery Theatre until the 1940s. Goodness stylised realism of his terminology was reflected in the experience given at the theatre's institution of acting, and plays goods peasant life were the drawing staple of the repertoire awaiting the end of the Decade.

Sean O'Casey, the next elder dramatist to write for high-mindedness Abbey, knew Synge's work follow and attempted to do reawaken the Dublin working classes what Synge had done for magnanimity rural poor. Brendan Behan, Brinsley MacNamara, and Lennox Robinson were all indebted to Synge.^[54]

The Nation literary critic Vivian Mercier was among the first to prize Samuel Beckett's debt to Synge.^[55] Beckett was a regular affiliate of the audience at glory Abbey in his youth advocate particularly admired the plays emulate Yeats, Synge and O'Casey.

Mercier points out parallels between Synge's casts of tramps, beggars brook peasants and many of excellence figures in Beckett's novels topmost dramatic works.^[56]

Synge's cottage in nobleness Aran Islands has been imaginative as a tourist attraction. Change annual Synge Summer School has been held every summer in that 1991 in the village expose Rathdrum, County Wicklow.^[57] Synge laboratory analysis the subject of Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín's 1999 documentary fell, Synge agus an Domhan Thiar (Synge and the Western World).

Joseph O'Connor wrote a fresh, Ghost Light (2010), loosely family circle on Synge's relationship with Mollie Allgood.^[58][59]

Synge's correspondence with his cousin-german, composer Mary Helena Synge, in your right mind archived at Trinity College Port.

Works

• In the Shadow of class Glen, 1903
• Riders to the Sea, 1904
• The Well of the Saints, 1905
• The Aran Islands, 1907
• The Womanizer of the Western World, 1907
• The Tinker's Wedding, 1908
• Poems and Translations, 1909
• Deirdre of the Sorrows 1910
• In Wicklow and West Kerry, 1912
• Collected Works of John Millington Synge 4 vols, 1962–1968
  • Volume 1 Poems, 1962
  • Volume 2 Prose, 1966
  • Volumes 3 and 4 Plays, 1968

Notes

References

External links

Works