The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays (17 page)

Yeats described Synge, very accurately, as “that enquiring man.”
¹⁰
He did not “celebrate” rural or ancient Ireland; he explored it, as would a psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist. The language he developed in his work is quite different from what Hyde and Lady Gregory achieved. While they used Gaelic forms in Hiberno-English syntax to bring life and vitality to their work, his became an instrument of keen incision into the body of his material. His language is poetic, yes, and wild and baroque at times, but he is always alert to how its forms convey the actuality of the situation. Toward the end of
The Playboy,
Christy turns on his da, this time in front of everyone. Old Mahon puts him down, trying to assert his old authority: “Shut your gullet and come on with me.” But Christy replies, shifting now into a new gear, “I'm going, but I'll stretch you first” (p. 119). That is the way people talk in fights. It is real, but it is also attentive to the reality of power and change in father-son relations. This is no local color: this is Vienna, Freud, the reality of violence in everyday life.

Synge's influence on Irish drama has been immense, in one way. His language seemed more picturesque than it was, and it has had many lesser, though not uninteresting, imitators: T. C. Murray, R. J. Ray, Rutherford Mayne, and down to Martin McDonogh in the late 1990s. But very few dramatists or artists face the challenges that Synge faced, brilliantly described by Yeats in the same stanza of the poem already quoted, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”: he “chose the living world for text.” Synge's drama is crammed with the life of his time, which makes it, like Ben Jonson‘s, timeless.

1
Robert Welch (ed.), W. B.
Yeats: Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth
(Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 93.

2
Douglas Hyde,
Love Songs of Connacht
(Irish University Press, Shannon, 1968; reprint of the 1893 edition published by T. Fisher Unwin, London), p. 43.

3
Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (eds.),
The Gonne-Yeats Letters: 1893-1938
(Hutchinson, London, 1992), p. 174.

4
W. J. McCormack,
Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge
(Weiden feld & Nicolson, London, 2000), p. 236, where the location is identified specifically as “a Glenmalure cottage, close to the Black Banks.”

5
See Mary C. King,
The Drama of J. M. Synge
(Fourth Estate, London, 1985), p. 63.

6
Robert Hogan and Michael J. O‘Neill (eds.),
Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre: A Selection from His Unpublished Journal
(Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1967), p. 35.

7
T. S. Eliot,
Selected Essays: 1917-1932
(Faber & Faber, London, 1932), p. 123.

8
R. F. Foster,
W. B. Yeats, A Life: Volume I: The Apprentice Mage
(Oxford University Press, New York, 1997), p. 360.

9
ibid.

10
W. B. Yeats, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,”
Collected Poems
(Macmillan, London, 1958), p. 149.