DRAMA

Chapter - 18

Question- Write a biographical note on Synge.

Answer -

Synge lived only for 38 years from 1871 to 1909. His short creative life barely lasted 7-8 years during which he was able to write 6 plays besides an account of his visit to Aran Islands and some poems and translations. Two of his plays Riders to the Sea (1903) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907) - one a tragedy on the classical model, the other a dark comedy that provoked a week of riots in Dublin, are among the best plays in 20th century drama.

Synge was born on 16 April 1871 at Rathfarnham near Dublin where his father was a barrister and was christened Edmond John Millington Synge. A year later his father died leaving a widow to bring up five children. Synge was to cause much distress to his mother on several counts: his loss of religious faith and his becoming an agnostic, his passion for music-piano, violin and flute which he wanted to adopt as a profession, and his sympathy. for the oppressed tenants. This last interest found a full outlet when he visited the Islands on the advice of Yeats.

Synge's early education was mostly private until be entered the Trinity College, Dublin, in 1888 which was traditionally the fountain head of Anglo- Irish culture. It was here that he started learning Irish and Hebrew. He also read a great deal about Irish history and Irish antiquities.

In 1893, Synge went to Germany to study music systematically. But later his interest shifted from music to literature and like several young men of his time moved to Paris. In Paris he read widely in European authors and probably thought of becoming a literary journalist. He visited Italy also and learned Italian. During the summers he would return to Ireland where he pursued his interest in the Irish language and Irish antiquities.

It was in Paris in December 1896 that he met W.B. Yeats and later the young revolutionary Maud Gonne. He joined Maud's Irish league in January 1897 but resigned soon after in April saying that he had his own 'theory of regeneration for Ireland' and that he wished to work in his own way for Ireland and that he did not wish to get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement.

Synge had studied Gaelic La language spoken in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, which enabled him to master 'the pure but rapid and colloquial language of the Island'. He had spent his boy-hood in Wicklow and this had given him his basic understanding of the Irish peasantry. His protestant and landed ancestry and his later loss of faith sufficiently distanced him from the people around him so that he was able to view them at once with objectivity and ironic compassion. Synge visited the Islands four times in 1898, 1899, 1900 and 1901 which gave him the material for his plays in terms of incidents, characters and language. But while the visit to Aran was momentous, it did not transform. Synge instantaneously into a writer of genius. Several years were to elapse between his first visit to Aran in 1898 and his completing his first successful play in 1902. Moreover, all this while he was writing The Aran Islands which was the first book he wrote, though it was published in 1907. So while his transformation into a 'playwright' was astonishing it was not sudden. In this period of apprenticeship, Synge was obviously honing his skills in his use of the peasant dialect.

Synge was sickly as a boy and later suffered much because of his poor health. This possibly accentuated his morbidity which seems to have been a family characteristic and which is most evident in his poems. He had a malignant tumour - Lympathic Sarcoma - detected in his neck in 1897, which ultimately cost him his life.

The last love in his life was Molly Allgood, a Catholic shop girl turned actress who was fifteen years his junior and who played the role of Pegeen in The Playboy when it was first produced. In a letter to her, Synge refused to her as his wife but he died before they were married. The end came in Dublin on the morning of 24 March 1909. Yeast recorded: 'Synge is dead'.

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