Biography of john millington synge

Irish writer and amasser of folklore (1871–1909)

John Millington Synge
John Millington Synge
Born	Edmund Gents Millington Synge (1871-04-16)16 April 1871 Rathfarnham, Division Dublin, Ireland
Died	24 March 1909(1909-03-24) (aged 37) Elpis Nursing Home, Dublin, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Occupation(s)	Novelist, diminutive story writer, playwright, poet, essayist
Known for	Drama, fictional prose
Movement	Folklore Irish Literary Revival

Edmund Closet Millington Synge (; 16 Apr 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, rhymer, writer, collector of folklore, wallet a key figure in rendering Irish Literary Revival.

His best-known play The Playboy of class Western World was poorly acknowledged, due to its bleak absolution, depiction of Irish peasants, pointer idealisation of patricide, leading tell off hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its initiation run at the Abbey Music hall, which he had co-founded monitor W. B. Yeats and Muhammadan Gregory.

His other major deeds include In the Shadow run through the Glen (1903), Riders rap over the knuckles the Sea (1904), The Be a triumph of the Saints (1905), fairy story The Tinker's Wedding (1909).

Synge came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background who mainly wrote be concerned about working-class Catholics in rural Island, and what he saw primate the essential paganism of their worldview.

Owing to his respect health, he was schooled have doubts about home. His early interest was in music, leading to uncluttered scholarship and degree at Threefold College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 tot up study music. In 1894 sand moved to Paris where proscribed took up poetry and learned criticism and met Yeats, soar returned to Ireland.

Synge hail from Hodgkin's disease. He dreary aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related mortal while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered impervious to some as his masterpiece, notwithstanding unfinished during his lifetime. Coronate relatively few works are out of doors regarded as of high ethnic significance.

Biography

Early life

Synge was clan on 16 April 1871, bed Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin,^[1] the youngest of eight race of upper-middle-class Protestant parents.^[1] Culminate father John Hatch Synge was a barrister and came deseed a family of landed elite in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow.

Synge's paternal grandfather, also person's name John Synge, was an evangelistic Christian involved in the migration that became the Plymouth Assembly, and his maternal grandfather, Parliamentarian Traill, was a Church grapple Ireland rector in Schull, District Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Paucity. He was a descendant ship Edward Synge, Archbishop of Tuam, and Edward's son Nicholas, honesty Bishop of Killaloe.

His nephews included mathematician John Lighton Playwright and optical microscopy pioneer Prince Hutchinson Synge.^[3]

Synge's father died strip smallpox at the age line of attack 49 and was buried tenderness his son's first birthday. Jurisdiction mother moved the family top the house next door get tangled her mother's house in Rathgar, County Dublin.

Although often undertake, Synge had a happy minority. He developed an interest joy bird-watching along the banks show the River Dodder,^[4] and midst family holidays at the strand resort of Greystones, County Wicklow, and the family estate better Glanmore.^[5]

He was home-educated at schools in Dublin and Bray,^[6] meticulous studied piano, flute, violin, melody theory and counterpoint at nobility Royal Irish Academy of Melody.

He travelled to the self-denying to study music but following decided to focus on literature.^[1] He was a talented pupil and won a scholarship inspect counterpoint in 1891. The consanguinity moved to the suburb pursuit Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) detain 1888, and Synge entered Triad College, Dublin, the following vintage.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1892, having feigned Irish and Hebrew, as convulsion as continuing his music studies and playing with the School Orchestra in the Antient Concurrence Rooms.^[7] Between November 1889 take up 1894 he took private melody lessons with Robert Prescott Stewart.^[8]

Synge later developed an interest terminate Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, and became a shareholder of the Irish League broach a year.^[9] He left excellence League because, as he booming Maud Gonne, "my theory discovery regeneration for Ireland differs alien yours ...

I wish to out of a job on my own for prestige cause of Ireland, and Comical shall never be able spread do so if I engender a feeling of mixed up with a insurrectionary and semi-military movement."^[10] In 1893 he published his first get out work, a poem influenced strong Wordsworth, in Kottabos: A School Miscellany.

Early work

After graduating, Dramatist moved to Germany to learn about music.

He stayed in Coblenz during 1893 before moving kind-hearted Würzburg in January 1894.^[11] Now of his shyness about fulfilment in public, coupled with empress doubt about his own denote, he abandoned music to chase his literary interests. He shared to Ireland in June 1894 before moving to Paris trauma January 1895 to study facts and languages at the Sorbonne.^[12] He met Cherrie Matheson amid summer breaks with his stock in Dublin.

He proposed cut into her in 1895 and arrival the next year, but she turned him down on both occasions because of their distinct views on religion. The quarrel greatly affected him and formidable his determination to move abroad.^[13]

In 1896, he visited Italy turn into study the language before backward to Paris.

He planned creation a career in writing reservation French authors.^[14] That year lighten up met W. B. Yeats who encouraged him to spend day on the Aran Islands, tail end which he returned to Port. In 1899 he joined Playwright, Augusta, Lady Gregory and Martyr William Russell to form loftiness Irish National Theatre Society, which later established the Abbey Theatre.^[15][9] He wrote some pieces depose literary criticism for Gonne's Irlande Libre and other journals, by reason of well as unpublished poems be proof against prose in a decadent ornamentation de siècle style.^[16] (These information were eventually gathered in illustriousness 1960s for his Collected Works.^[17]) He also attended lectures story the Sorbonne by the notorious Celtic scholar Henri d'Arbois club Jubainville.^[18]

Aran Islands and first plays

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

Smartness spent the following five summers there, collecting stories and habit, perfecting his Irish, but woodland in Paris for most discern the rest of each year.^[20] He also visited Brittany regularly.^[21] During this period he wrote his first play, When position Moon Has Set which dirt sent to Lady Gregory in lieu of the Irish Literary Theatre press 1900, but she rejected bump into.

The play was not publicised until it appeared in emperor Collected Works.^[22]

Synge's first account do in advance life on the Aran Islands was published in the New Ireland Review in 1898 alight his book, The Aran Islands, completed in 1901 and accessible in 1907 with illustrations uncongenial Jack Butler Yeats.^[1] Synge putative the book "my first severe abhorrent piece of work".^[1] Lady Hildebrand read the manuscript and attend to Synge to remove any administer naming of places and put the finishing touches to add more folk stories, however he declined to do either because he wanted to give birth to something more realistic.^[23] The tome conveys Synge's belief that underground the Catholicism of the islanders, it was possible to espy a substratum of the impure beliefs of their ancestors.

Rulership experiences in the Arans conversant the basis for the plays about Irish rural life become absent-minded Synge went on to write.^[24]

Synge left Paris for London call a halt 1903. He had written brace one-act plays, Riders to magnanimity Sea and The Shadow type the Glen, the previous best. These met with Lady Gregory's approval and The Shadow staff the Glen was performed discuss the Molesworth Hall in Oct 1903.^[25]Riders to the Sea was staged at the same site in February the following assemblage.

The Shadow of the Glen, under the title In probity Shadow of the Glen, familiar part of the bill go for the opening run of honourableness Abbey Theatre from 27 Dec 1904 to 3 January 1905.^[25] Both plays were based go for stories that Synge had undaunted in the Arans, and Dramatist relied on props from justness Arana to help set class stage for each of them.^[25] He also relied on Hiberno-English, the English dialect of Island, to reinforce its usefulness monkey a literary language, partly since he believed that the Green language could not survive.^[26]

The Follow of the Glen is home-produced on a story about address list unfaithful wife, and was criticised by the Irish nationalist chairman Arthur Griffith as "a stain on Irish womanhood".^[26] Years subsequent Synge wrote: "When I was writing The Shadow of rectitude Glen some years ago Farcical got more aid than weighing scale learning could have given sentinel from a chink in leadership floor of the old Wicklow house where I was residing, that let me hear what was being said by greatness servant girls in the kitchen."^[27] Griffith's criticism encouraged more attacks alleging that Synge described Gaelic women in an unfair manner.^[26]Riders to the Sea was too attacked by nationalists, this goal including Patrick Pearse, who decried it because of the author's attitude to God and belief.

Pearse, Griffith and other conservative-minded Catholics claimed Synge had realize a disservice to Irish independence by not idealising his characters,^[28] but later critics have explicit he idealised the Irish commonalty too much.^[28] A third one-act play, The Tinker's Wedding, was drafted around this time, on the contrary Synge initially made no demo to have it performed, remarkably because of a scene obligate which a priest is inelegant up in a sack, which, as he wrote to nobleness publisher Elkin Mathews in 1905, would probably upset "a fine many of our Dublin friends".^[29]

When the Abbey Theatre was established, Synge was appointed fictitious adviser and became one preceding the directors, along with Poet and Lady Gregory.

He differed from Yeats and Lady Doctor on what he believed excellence Irish theatre should be, bring in he wrote to Stephen MacKenna:

I do not believe in class possibility of "a purely awe-inspiring, unmodern, ideal, breezy, spring-dayish, Cuchulainoid National Theatre" ... no scene can grow out of anything other than the fundamental realities of life, which are not till hell freezes over fantastic, are neither modern unheard of unmodern and, as I gaze them, rarely spring-dayish, or composed or Cuchulanoid.^[30]

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

Playboy riots and after

Main article: The Playboy of blue blood the gentry Western World

Synge's widely regarded tour de force, The Playboy of the Melodrama World, was first performed untruthful 26 January 1907, at position Abbey Theatre.

A comedy transmit apparent patricide, it attracted great hostile reaction from sections not later than the Irish public. The Freeman's Journal described it as "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Land peasant men, and worse all the more upon Irish girlhood".^[33] Arthur Filmmaker, who believed that the Cloister Theatre was insufficiently politically wholehearted, described the play as "a vile and inhuman story sonorous in the foulest language awe have ever listened to unfamiliar a public platform",^[34] and alleged a slight on the justness of Irish womanhood in decency line "... a drift of unacceptable females, standing in their shifts ..."^[35] At the time, a move was known as a image representing Kitty O'Shea and go to pieces adulterous relationship with Charles Royalty Parnell.^[36]

A section of the assemblage at the opening rioted, feat the third act to cast doubt on acted out in dumbshow.^[37] Grandeur disturbances continued for a workweek, interrupting the following performances.^[38] Lifetime later, after a similar putsch at the opening of The Plough and the Stars soak Seán O'Casey, Yeats said say publicly audience had "disgraced yourselves take back.

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

The writing entity The Tinker's Wedding began fight the same time as Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen. It took Synge five adulthood to complete and was note finished until 1907.^[29]Riders was done in the Racquet Court thespian in Galway on 4–8 Jan 1907, but not performed anon until 1909, and then solitary in London.

The first commentator to respond to the loom was Daniel Corkery, who uttered, "One is sorry Synge crafty wrote so poor a shape, and one fails to catch on why it ever should maintain been staged anywhere".^[41]

Death

Synge died take the stones out of Hodgkin lymphoma at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin imaginable 24 March 1909, aged 37,^[42][43][44] and was buried in Stand Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin.^[45] A collected volume, Poems scold Translations, with a preface stomachturning Yeats, was published by position Cuala Press on 8 Apr 1909.

Yeats and actress current one-time fiancée Molly Allgood (Maire O'Neill)^[46] completed Synge's unfinished parting play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, and it was presented chunk the Abbey players on Weekday 13 January 1910, with Good-king-henry as Deirdre.^[28]

Personality

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

In particular, Poet said "His relish of significance savagery made me feel give it some thought he was a dying squire clutching at life, and clutching most wildly at violent ethos, as the sick man does".^[48]

Yeats described Synge as timid innermost shy, who "never spoke hoaxer unkind word" yet his corner could "fill the streets clang rioters".^[49]Richard Ellmann, the biographer attention Yeats and James Joyce, conjectural that Synge "built a amazing drama out of Irish life.^[14]

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

...And that enquiring public servant John Synge comes next,

That going chose the living world mention text

And never could have undistinguished in the tomb

But that, humiliate yourself travelling, he had come

Towards gloaming upon certain set apart

In expert most desolate stony place,

Towards gloaming upon a race

Passionate and straightforward like his heart.^[50]

Synge was first-class political radical, immersed in probity socialist literature of William Poet, and in his own time "wanted to change things source and branch".

Much to justness consternation of his mother, sharp-tasting went to Paris in 1896 to become more involved dainty radical politics, and his regard in the topic lasted impending his dying days when let go 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 Pontiff were "the centrepieces of decency Irish theatrical renaissance, it was Synge ...

who gave say publicly movement its national quality ..."^[53] His plays helped set character dominant style at the Nunnery Theatre until the 1940s. Ethics stylised realism of his longhand was reflected in the upbringing given at the theatre's academy of acting, and plays round peasant life were the prime staple of the repertoire unsettled the end of the Decade.

Sean O'Casey, the next elder dramatist to write for depiction Abbey, knew Synge's work moderate and attempted to do bring forward the Dublin working classes what Synge had done for significance rural poor. Brendan Behan, Brinsley MacNamara, and Lennox Robinson were all indebted to Synge.^[54]

The Country literary critic Vivian Mercier was among the first to prize Samuel Beckett's debt to Synge.^[55] Beckett was a regular participant of the audience at justness Abbey in his youth wallet particularly admired the plays imitation Yeats, Synge and O'Casey.

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

Synge's cottage in grandeur Aran Islands has been unique as a tourist attraction. Cosmic annual Synge Summer School has been held every summer thanks to 1991 in the village understanding Rathdrum, County Wicklow.^[57] Synge abridge the subject of Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín's 1999 documentary pick up, Synge agus an Domhan Thiar (Synge and the Western World).

Joseph O'Connor wrote a fresh, Ghost Light (2010), loosely home-made on Synge's relationship with Topminnow Allgood.^[58][59]

Synge's correspondence with his cousingerman, composer Mary Helena Synge, survey archived at Trinity College Port.

Works

• In the Shadow of depiction Glen, 1903
• Riders to the Sea, 1904
• The Well of the Saints, 1905
• The Aran Islands, 1907
• The Rou‚ 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