The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays (15 page)

CHRISTY (with horror in his voice). And it's yourself will send me off, to have a horny-fingered hangman hitching his bloody slip-knots at the butt of my ear.

MEN
(pulling rope).
Come on, will you?

 

 

CHRISTY (twisting his legs round the table). Cut the rope, Pegeen, and I'll quit the lot of you, and live from this out, like the madmen of Keel, eating muck and green weeds, on the faces of the cliffs.

PEGEEN. And leave us to hang, is it, for a saucy liar, the like of you? (
To
MEN) Take him on, out from this.

SHAWN. Pull a twist on his neck, and squeeze him so.

PHILLY. Twist yourself. Sure he cannot hurt you, if you keep your distance from his teeth alone.

SHAWN. I'm afeard of him. (To PEGEEN) Lift a lighted sod, will you, and scorch his leg.

PEGEEN (blowing the fire, with a bellows). Leave go now, young fellow, or I'll scorch your shins.

CHRISTY. You're blowing for to torture me. (His
voice rising and growing stronger.)
That's your kind, is it? Then let the lot of you be wary, for, if I've to face the gallows, I'll have a gay march down, I tell you, and shed the blood of some of you before I die.

SHAWN (in terror). Keep a good hold, Philly. Be wary, for the love of God. For I'm thinking he would liefest wreak his pains on me.

CHRISTY (almost gaily). If I do lay my hands on you, it's the way you'll be at the fall of night, hanging as a scarecrow for the fowls of hell. Ah, you'll have a gallous jaunt I'm saying, coaching out through Limbo with my father's ghost.

SHAWN (to PEGEEN). Make haste, will you? Oh, isn't he a holy terror, and isn't it true for Father Reilly, that all drink's a curse that has the lot of you so shaky and uncertain now?

CHRISTY. If I can wring a neck among you, I'll have a royal judgment looking on the trembling jury in the courts of law. And won't there be crying out in Mayo the day I'm stretched upon the rope with ladies in their silks and satins snivelling in their lacy kerchiefs, and they rhyming songs and ballads on the terror of my fate?
(He squirms round on the floor and
bites SHAWN‘
s
leg.)

SHAWN (shrieking). My leg's bit on me. He's the like of a mad dog, I'm thinking, the way that I will surely die.

CHRISTY (delighted with
himself
). You will then, the way you can shake out hell's flags of welcome for my coming in two weeks or three, for I'm thinking Satan hasn't many have killed their da in Kerry, and in Mayo too.

(OLD MAHON comes in behind on all fours and looks
on unnoticed.
)

 

MEN (
to
PEGEEN). Bring the sod, will you?

PEGEEN (coming over). God help him so. (Burns his
leg.)

CHRISTY (kicking and screaming). O, glory be to God!

 

JIMMY (
seeing old
MAHON). Will you look what's come in?

 

 

(They all drop CHRISTY and run
left
.)

 

CHRISTY (scrambling on his knees face to face with old MAHON). Are you coming to be killed a third time, or what ails you now?

MAHON. For what is it they have you tied?

CHRISTY. They're taking me to the peelers to have me hanged for slaying you.

MICHAEL
(apologetically).
It is the will of God that all should guard their little cabins from the treachery of law, and what would my daughter be doing if I was ruined or was hanged itself?

MAHON (grimly, loosening CHRISTY) It's little I care if you put a bag on her back, and went picking cockles till the hour of death; but my son and myself will be going our own way, and we'll have great times from this out telling stories of the villainy of Mayo, and the fools is here. (To CHRISTY, who is freed) Come on now.

CHRISTY. Go with you, is it? I will then, like a gallant captain with his heathen slave. Go on now and I'll see you from this day stewing my oatmeal and washing my spuds, for I'm master of all fights from now. (Pushing MAHON) Go on, I'm saying.

MAHON. Is it me?

CHRISTY. Not a word out of you. Go on from this.

MAHON (walking out and looking back at CHRISTY over
his shoulder).
Glory be to God!
(With a broad smile)
I am crazy again! (Goes.)

CHRISTY. Ten 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 judgment day.
(He goes out.)

MICHAEL. By the will of God, we'll have peace now for our drinks. Will you draw the porter, Pegeen?

SHAWN (going up to her). It's a miracle Father Reilly can wed us in the end of all, and we'll have none to trouble us when his vicious bite is healed.

PEGEEN
(hitting him a box on the ear).
Quit my sight.
(Putting her shawl over her head and breaking out into wild lamentations)
Oh my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World.

 

 

In 1893, Douglas Hyde, whose pen name in Irish was An Craoibhín Aoibhinn (the Pleasant Little Branch), published a groundbreaking volume of poems in Irish, with translations, known as
The Love Songs of Connacht.
This was a collection of Irish love songs from the province of Connacht in the West of Ireland, with translations into English that reflected the idiom, syntax, and grammar of Irish itself and the kind of English spoken by Irish country people, which was strongly influenced by the Irish language. Hyde's book was one of the most important instances of a cultural revolution taking place in Ireland at the time, which involved a return to origins, to the source of identity, to what was imagined as a simpler life, to indigenous traditions. This included a return to the Irish language, which, in the period from the Great Famine (1845-50) to the 1890s, had been associated with poverty, dereliction, and marginality.

W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge delighted in Hyde's
Love Songs,
Yeats acclaiming them as exemplifying “thrusts of power” that “go beyond the reach of conscious art.”
¹
They are arresting and full of intense and surprising images that undergo swift transitions—for example:

Yeats wrote of the paradisal quality of these songs, as they seemed to him, and of how he closed Hyde's book with sadness. And there was, in construction at that time, an idyll of the “western world,” of an Edenic place, beyond the Shannon or in the Irish countryside, where life was simpler, closer to nature, more authentic. The fact that we have now grown cynical about these allurements should not lead us to underestimate their (to some extent enduring) power.

This construction of “the west” (and of Irish rural life in general) was part of a nationalist impulse to restore Irish “dignity” (a word, by the way, to which Lady Gregory, with Yeats and Synge one of the first Directors of the Abbey, was greatly attached). So that a reevaluation of traditional Ireland was, in effect, an important part of a modernizing process by means of which Ireland could position herself as a sovereign state free from the centuries-old dominion of Britain. The idealization of Irish rural life therefore, while attractive symbolically, was also a major element in the forging of a mind-set ready to challenge British control. The imagination, in other words, had a political context that gave evocations of “the west” an extra charge all the more exciting for being a little obscured, more inferred than asserted openly.

In the Shadow of the Glen
(that was its original title; now it is frequently given the briefer, less satisfying, title
The Shadow of the Glen
) was first staged with Yeats's
The King's Threshold
at Molesworth Hall on 8 October 1903 by the Irish National Theatre Society. This was well before the Abbey, the name later given to the Irish National Theatre, opened its doors in Abbey Street in the old Mechanics Institute on 27 December 1904.

The Irish National Theatre Society had a Reading Committee, which included Yeats, of course, along with the poet-theosophist George Russell (“AE”), the brothers William and Frank Fay (who were actors in the Society), and Padraic Colum, the poet. In approving the play, Yeats either overruled the committee or acted unilaterally, for Hyde and Maud Gonne left the Society, in part because of their objections. Gonne was Yeats's beloved, whom he had adored for many years, and who had taken the lead part in Yeats's and Lady Gregory's powerful nationalist play,
Kathleen Ni Houlihan
, in 1902.

On the one hand, there were avid nationalists, in the tradition of the Fenian Brotherhood and ultimately the IRA, who were not going to be easy to conciliate; and on the other hand, there were the likes of Hyde, peaceful and constitutional nationalists but people easy to offend by an unflattering view of the Irish peasant. And unflattering of Irish rural values
In the Shadow
certainly was: Maud Gonne wrote in a letter, “from all I hear I think [the play] is horrid and I will have no responsibility for it—it was forced on the company by a trick”—the trickster being of course the person to whom this letter was addressed, Yeats himself.
³

Although
In the Shadow
may not be “horrid,” it is, in many ways, very shocking and perhaps even a bit horrifying if you were a militarily inclined republican or a modernizing nationalist in 1903. The people in this play are a million light-years from the idealized paradisal Gaelic pastoral entertained by Hyde and necessary for revolutionary propaganda. These people are narrow, greedy, deceitful, adulterous, violent, and drunken.

The play is set in County Wicklow in Glenmalure, which Synge knew well, the family summer residence at Tomriland being close by.
⁴
However, he heard the story on which the play is based during his first visit to the Aran Islands in 1898. A famous
seanchaí
or storyteller on Irishmaan called Pat Dirarie told Synge that, one night while traveling the roads, he came to a house where he found before him a young woman who had laid out the corpse of her husband. According to Dirane's story, what happened to him was not that different from what Synge depicts in the play. Synge's defense, therefore, against those who accused him of traducing the innate dignity of the indigenous (and Catholic) Irish was that the play only dramatized what he had heard on Irishmaan, a cradle of Gaelic civilization in the far west.

Synge conveys the actualities of Irish country life in vivid, sharp, and energetic speech, which he makes into a poetry of ferocious reality. In a preface he wrote for
The Playboy of the Western World,
he tells us that his writing of
In the Shadow
was given energy by a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house he was staying in at the time, through which he could hear the talk of the serving girls in the kitchen below. The house was Tomriland, the story out of Aran.

Far from extolling the virtues of rural life and of Irish country people Synge brings to this depiction of the adulteries latent in a Wicklow glen a grim and focused poetry in a language full of charged realization and sudden vituperations. The glen is very much in shadow—a shadow of repression, loneliness, and despair. This is how Nora, the young wife, describes her husband's death spasm to the Tramp, who arrives in the night:

The black comedy of this perfectly captures the precarious balance struck in Irish rural culture between grief, coldness, and a grim fascination with the specifics of illness and death. This was (and is) how Irish country people (and, I daresay, Uzbekistani or Sardinian country people) talk about the dying and the dead. There is no room for sentiment.

At the end of the play, after her husband, who has been feigning death to catch her out, shows her the door, the Tramp offers her the companionship of the roads, which is to say homelessness, cold, discomfort, but also change, adventure, freedom. The Tramp beautifully evokes the itinerant life:

They leave behind, in the shadow, the old man and her would-be suitor, who get into a bottle of whiskey for consolation to cure the “great drouth” (p. 25) that's on the two of them after all the excitement.

There was uproar at all of this—drinking, carrying on outside marriage, timorousness, and deceit, rendered all the more striking by Synge's relentless poetry of the sordid and bleak, counterbalanced only by the black comedy of the language, and the Tramp's envisioning of the “big thrushes” on the warm days and a life unconfined by staleness and rigor.

Arthur Griffith (1871-1922), founder and first president of Sinn Féin, was outraged by the play, and from this point onward, there was unremitting strife between the Irish National Theatre Society (later the Abbey) and Irish nationalist convictions, tensions that continue, to a greater or lesser extent, to this day more than a hundred years later.