John Millington Synge was a writer and playwright who lived a very short and influential life. He only had four to five years of solid professional output for which he is mainly remembered. His style, and the few works that he did produce, were the product of, and were greatly influenced by, his childhood and his wanderings as a young man around the European continent.
John Millington Synge was born in Rathfarnham, Ireland, on 16 April, 1871. He was the son of John Hatch Synge, and Kathleen Traill. They were married on January 18, 1856. (Bourgeois 1-2) J.M. Synge's father was a lawyer, or rather a barrister at law, who specialized in landed properties. Synge's father did not play a large role in his life because he died in 1872 of smallpox, when John was only a year old.(Skelton 7-9) Synge was left without a father and was raised solely by his mother, Mrs. Kathleen Synge. Mrs. Synge's family line was Protestant, and therefore she was a strict Protestant who taught her children, in a very harsh and straight forward manner, the doctrines of religion, including heaven and hell. She taught John, at a very young age, about the idea of hell, which had a very disturbing effect on him.
I was painfully timid and while very young the idea of Hell took a fearful hold on me. One night I thought I was irretrievably damned and cried myself to sleep in vain yet terrified efforts to form a conception of eternal pain. In the morning I renewed my lamentations and my mother was sent for. She comforted me with the assurance that the Holy Ghost was convicting me of sin and thus preparing me for ultimate salvation.(Skelton 9-10)
He was, at a very young age, introduced into the brutal and unquestioning seriousness of devout Protestantism, which would alter his life later on.
As a child he was very sickly, being bothered by asthma, and did not interact much with other children as a normal child would have. He only erratically attended formal school for four years: at Mr. Herrick's Classical and English School in Dublin, and in Bray, a seaside resort south of Dublin. The rest of his education was through a home tutor, who came to see him three times a week. He also spent his summers isolated from most other children at his families summer home, in Greystones.(Skelton 10) It is through this isolation that much of Synge's character is defined. His hobbies were very solitary, and took him off into the natural world quite a bit.
as a lad, Synge was strangely reserved and even unboyish to a certain extent: he shunned rather than desired companionship; he would hardly take part in the games of his age, and much preferred open-air exercise and solitary rambles in his beloved Dublin mountains to indoor life.(Bourgeois 7)
Through his interest in the natural world, he joined the Dublin Naturalist's Field Club, and became very well versed in botany and zoology.(Bourgeois 8) It was through this interest that he read a book of Darwin's, describing evolution and natural selection. The ideas of evolution and science completely went against all of his Protestant upbringing. He began to investigate the doctrines of Christianity to try to determine what course of action he should take.
Soon afterwards I turned my attention to works of Christian evidence, reading them at first with pleasure, soon with doubt, and at last in some cases with derisionBy the time I was sixteen or seventeen I had renounced ChristianityThe story is easily told, but it was a terrible experience. By it I laid a chasm between myself and my kindred and friends. Till I was twenty-three I never met or at least knew a man or woman who shared my opinions.(Skelton 18)
This was a way that he quietly isolated himself from others. He was "ever and always a sad and lonely man. It was by solitude that he asserted his personality in the gentle unromantic manner that always was his."(Bourgeois 7-8)
Synge's interest's went from the natural world to music, which he studied quite a bit. His favorite instrument was the violin, which he studied under Sir Robert Prescott Stewart at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin.(Bourgeois 10) In March of 1888, he was accepted into Trinity college, where he studied until December, 1892. He graduated from Trinity college with a B. A., winning prizes in Irish and Hebrew languages.(Bourgeois 11)
John left Ireland in 1893, and went to Germany in order to study music.(Gerstenberger 11) This began the Continental wanderings that would later influence his work. "The desire for self expression was already strong in him, but he sought his medium in France, in Germany, and in Italy."(Bickley 10) It was in Germany that he first began to try to express himself through words. His first attempts were poems, and some brief sketches for plays. These attempts were mainly reflections of his experiences and confusions about his early love affairs. In 1894, he gave up his study of music and turned himself towards literature. Music, however, would always be a hobby of his throughout his life.(Skelton, Writings 11)
In 1895, Synge left Germany and went to Paris, seeking some sort of inspiration for his work. He lived there until 1902, when he left Paris for Dublin. It was while he was in Paris that he met and was advised by W.B. Yeats. (Gerstenberger 15) Yeats found Synge in December of 1897. At that time, Synge was living very poorly and was making no headway as a writer or a critic. Yeats describes the poems that Synge showed him as "merely poor examples of the morbidities of the time,` images reflected from mirror to mirror.`"(Bickley 11) Yeats then gives Synge advice that would later prove to be the turning point for Synge's literary career:
Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons 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.(Gerstenberger 15)
In 1898, he made his first of five visits to the Aran Islands.(Gerstenberger 12) The islands are located at the entrance to Galway Bay, on the west coast of Ireland. Synge went there and live with the peasants, learning their language and their lifestyle. It is from this first tour of the islands that Synge writes The Aran Islands. The Aran Islands is a group of sketches of his observations from his time on the islands. He also picked up ideas and plots beginnings for such later plays as The Playboy of the Western World, In the Shadow of the Glen, and Riders to the Sea.(Skelton 50) Through this first visit to the islands, and these initial observations, he began to discover his own abilities as a writer.(Bickley 13)
After his visit to Aran, he began to form some of his own political ideas about Ireland and her fate. "Having studied both Gaelic and Irish antiquities he was ready to join, as he did join, the nationalist movementhe had become once more keenly interested in Celtic culture."(Skelton, Writings 13) Synge was, however, not an ardent political activist. He described himself as "an ardent Home Ruler and Nationalist," but his friends described him as "the only Irishman I have ever met who cared nothing for the political issue."(Bourgeois 87) The disparity comes through in Synge's view of the life of the Irishman, and how it is affected by politics.
The gist of the matter lies in the fact that, even in this last series of articles wherein Synge professes to deal with contemporary social problems-and this mainly, if not solely, for the sake of his English reader-he remains more profoundly interested in the Ireland of the past Below the primitiveness of the Irish countryman of to-day, he finds the old-world civilization of the ancient Gael. Moderness to him means un-Irishness.(Bourgeois 89-90)
Synge uses the old common Irish man as the focal point of his work. "The whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and a view that are rich and genial and humorous.` He(Synge) did not think that these people would mind being laughed at without malice."(Bickley 21) In his travels around Ireland, he found "a peasantry which was perfect for drama as he had come to believe it should be written."(Bickley 24) There were many who did not like the way that Synge derided the common Irish man in his works. Upon their initial release, many of his plays met with opposition.
Synge wrote a total of six plays, of which he left one incomplete, and two others very short. The plays followed a chronological order. The first were two one-act plays, In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea; one two-act play, The Tinker's Wedding; and three three-act plays, The Well of the Saints, The Playboy of the Western World, and Deirdre of the Sorrows. (Bourgeois 144) His first play produced on stage was In the Shadow of the Glen. (Bickley 19) This first play of his, produced in Dublin in 1903 (Gerstenberger 12), met with hostility during it's first production because Nationalists found the play to be offending due to the way in which it depicted the loose morals of a young Irish woman.(Bickley 32) The second of the two one act plays, Riders to the Sea, was first performed on 25 February, 1904, in Molesworth Hall in Dublin. This second play of his also was criticized by Irish Nationalists.(Skelton Writings 41)
Riders to the Sea has, like many works of art, suffered somewhat from its popularity and from the activities of those critics who, faced with anything relating to the Irish peasantry, turn immediately into pseudo-sociologists, philologists, and Irish patriotsGreat drama escapes its locale and its time.(Skelton 42)
The one two act play that Synge wrote was The Tinker's Wedding. This play was the first play that Synge wrote, however it was never produced until after his death. It was first played at His Majesty's Theatre in London in 1909.(Gerstenberger 12) The Well of the Saints was written between the winter of 1903, and the spring of 1904. It was first produced in the Abbey Theatre on 4 February, 1905. Synge was not completely happy with the play at the time of its production and reworked after it had been performed. Synge realized that the speech had to be perfect in his plays in order for them to work and to have meaning.(Skelton, Writings 92) The Playboy of the Western World was the most controversial of his plays, and met with the most opposition. It was produced on 26 January 1907, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The language was so strong, and the way in which the Irish peasants were portrayed angered that crowd so much, that there was a riot after its first production. Synge himself said afterwards that he meant the play to be "a comedy, an extravaganza, made to amuseI never bother whether my plots are typically Irish or not; but my methods are typical."(Skelton, Writings 115) The last of the three act plays is Deirdre of the Sorrows. The play was left partially un-revised, and was printed and performed after Synge's death. It was produced in the Abbey Theatre on 13 January, 1910.(Skelton, Writings 132) The interesting point about his last play was the change in the language that is used in it. In all of his former plays, he used the foul, straight forward language of the peasants, while in this last play, the language is described as "something quiet and stately and restrained."(Skelton, Writings 133)
John Millington Synge died in a private hospital in Dublin at 5:30 A.M. on March 24, 1909.(Skelton 130)
His physical life thus came to an early end. His artistic life, on the other hand-its creative phase at least-was late in beginning. Some four or five years of not exceptionally prolific work were the sum of it.(Bickley 9)
Synge had a very short successful professional career. His work during the few short years that he had was derivative of his early development as a child, and a young man wandering about the continent.
Bickley, Francis. J.M. Synge and the Irish Dramatic Movement. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968.
Bourgeois, Maurice. John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre. London: Constable and Company, 1913.