Background
Synge was born in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, on 16 April 1871. He was the youngest son in a family of eight children. His parents were members of the Protestant upper middle class. His father, John Hatch Synge, who was a barrister, came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow. Synge's paternal grandfather, also named John Synge, was an evangelical Christian involved in the movement that became the Plymouth Brethren and his maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, had been a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Famine.
Education
Synge was educated privately at schools in Dublin and Bray, and later studied piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. After leaving college, he studied music, abandoned it, and tried critical writing.
Career
In 1898 he met W. B. Yeats in Paris and received from him the suggestion to study the Irish of the Aran Islands and to write about them. Synge's subsequent work was largely based on the knowledge of the Irish folk that he gained by following this advice. In 1907 he published The Aran Islands, a journal and sketches. Synge's first play, In the Shadow of the Glen, in one act, was produced in 1903 by the Irish National Theatre Society, headed by Yeats. Riders to the Sea followed in 1904, and The Well of the Saints, in three acts, in 1905. Synge became a director of the Abbey Theatre, along with Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904. In the Shadow of the Glen and The Well of the Saints had been somewhat criticized as irreverent or as misrepresenting the Irish. In 1907 Synge's The Playboy of the Western World was presented amid great disorder and Synge and his plays were thereafter for some years regarded with deep suspicion by many of the Irish; his The Tinker's Wedding, published in 1909, has never been performed by the Abbey company. Synge's last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, was unfinished when he died in Dublin on March 24, 1909, but in 1910 it was produced as he left it. Synge's great achievement lay in the writing of an unusually musical and poetic dialogue, which in the mouths of his peasant or folklore characters creates a compelling and deeply moving effect. His humor, though occasionally ironic and bitter, is marked and at times even becomes boisterous. Though his parts are difficult to act, especially by those not Irish, he has created highly individualized and memorable characters. The Playboy of the Western World was first presented at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on January 26, 1907. The play tells with ironic humor of a young man who, in a district where he is not known, boasts of having killed his father. He is greatly admired, especially by the women, but he loses his renown when his father follows him and both are obliged to leave the district. The first performance and all performances of the succeeding week were very disorderly, since the play was interpreted as anti-Irish; eventually, however, it was accepted by the Irish public. In the United States, in 1911 and 1912, performances of the play by the Abbey Players also encountered opposition and in Philadelphia the acting company was arrested, though the charges were later discharged. Riders to the Sea was first produced in Dublin on Feburary 25, 1904. The play derives from Synge's observation of the Aran Islanders and is written in a rhythmical prose, presumably imitative of peasant speech. It tells of Maurya, who has lost her husband, her father-in-law, and four sons at sea, and whose fear that her fifth son has been drowned is confirmed during the play. Maurya's last son, Bartley, over his mother's protest and without her blessing, attempts to cross to the mainland to sell his two horses, but one of them knocks him into the sea and he is drowned. Maurya accepts Bartley's death with a resignation strangely free of bitterness, while the neighbor women keen over his body. In performance the tragedy occupies less than half an hour. It is a classic of the Irish Renaissance.
Synge died at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin on 24 March 1909, aged 37, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin.
Views
Quotations:
"Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life. "
"When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servent girls in the kitchen. "
"In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest -- usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation -- and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside. "
"At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island. "
"I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, The gray and wintry sides of many glens, And did but half remember human words, In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens. "
Personality
John Masefield, who knew Synge, wrote that he "gave one from the first the impression of a strange personality". Masefield felt that Synge's view of life originated with his poor health. In particular, Masefield claimed that "His relish of the savagery made me feel that he was a dying man clutching at life, and clutching most wildly at violent life, as the sick man does".
