John Millington Synge Research Papers (original) (raw)

Synge's 'Riders to the Sea' cannot be called a tragedy, for the conflict in the play is not between humans but between man and nature. The result of such a conflict is always destined to the victory of latter. Hence the outcome is... more

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- Drama, Tragedy (Philosophy), J.M. Synge, Tragedy
- by Şebnem Kaya
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- Epistemology, Testimony, Perception, Intuition

One-act play of John Millington Synge (1871-1909) Riders to the Sea (1904) is about the life in the Aran Islands, power of nature and death. While the life endowed with the sea determines the fate of Irish islanders, their dependence on the water surrounding the Aran Islands brings death, too. The sea both provides life and causes death in the play. However, agency of the sea is not just bound to this dualistic nature in Synge's work. The vision of the mother Maurya about the deaths of her two sons, Michael and Bartley, upon the sea evidences that agentic power of the water is not only affiliated with its ontological presence, but also its epistemological capacity which is about the narrative ability of matter. This paper sets out to scrutinise agency of the sea in Synge's Riders to the Sea in terms of material ecocriticism and new materialisms.

- by Kübra Vural Özbey
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- J.M. Synge, New Materialism, New Materialisms, John Millington Synge
- by Graham Price
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- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Irish Drama
- by Graham Price
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- William Butler Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Irish Literary Revival, John Millington Synge

In John Millington Synge’s dramas The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints (1905) and The Tinker’s Wedding (published 1907), peripatetic characters unconscious of ageing, sinfulness or ugliness live in a pre-lapsarian state that is disrupted by contact with the fallen realms of the Church and proprietorship. At the close of both, the by now tainted nomads reject any further dealings with the corrupting and implicitly entwined ideologies of capitalism and established religion and attempt to return to their original condition. The plays both centre on the loss of innocence of the wanderer foolish enough to initiate dealings with God’s representative and the earthly values that he is ultimately seen to uphold. In a reversal of the folkloric associations of the rambler from which the plot of The Tinker’s Wedding derives, worldliness is represented by the dogmatic churchmen and their nominally pious congregations, naivety and a genuine closeness to real divinity and pre-capitalist artlessness by the animistic peoples of the road. In short, despite their mythic echoes, both of these plays are deeply engaged with Revival-era debates on religious practices, economic transformation, and cultural difference and constitute significant responses by Synge to the wider cultural shifts of late nineteenth-century Ireland.

- by Mary Burke
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- Drama, Modern Drama, Irish Drama, Irish Theatre and Drama

Review of Mary Burke’s “Tinkers” by John L. Murphy in Estudios Irlandeses 6 (2011): 181-82.

- by Mary Burke
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- Ethnic Studies, William Butler Yeats, Romany Studies, Minority Studies
- by Şebnem Kaya
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- Psychology, Epistemology, Testimony, Perception
- by Graham Price
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- Irish Literature, James Joyce, Literary Theory, W.B. Yeats
- by Şebnem Kaya
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- Epistemology, Testimony, Perception, Intuition

A comparison of the disturbances that erupted in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin during the opening run of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 with the response to the 1913 premiere in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris of Igor Stravinsky’s avant-garde ballet and orchestral work, The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps). There are startling similarities between the audiences’ actions at the Abbey and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and only six years separate the two events. What is even more extraordinary, when one considers that the two disturbances have not been read side by side, is that a list of the factors that contributed to the Paris riot are remarkably similar to the socio-political context often provided by contemporary scholars in relation to the Dublin fracas. The riots that met Playboy of the Western World became one of the landmarks of Irish theatre history, and are usually interpreted in terms of competing definitions of a national theatre. However, by putting the 1907 Playboy riots in the context of the very similar response to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Synge’s work is placed in the context of a modernist understanding of primitivism and aesthetic shock. This prompts a new understanding of what became known as ‘peasant drama’ in the early Abbey theatre, seeing it not as a form of realism, but as a critique of previous dramatic forms.

In J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, anxieties brought about by Ireland's colonial modernity are given an especially powerful expression through an extensive recourse to animal imageries. This article proposes to read these imageries as indexes of (pre-) modernity, and as markers of the divide between rural and urban areas that modernity accentuated. It argues that the animal-like behaviour that Synge's play calls for may be considered as a form of resistance to a hegemonic and early twentieth century conception of modernity. Alongside the trained, performing, modern Irish body that emerged in the theatre of the early 1900s there survived vestiges of a radically different form of embodiment associated with, for example, rural performance traditions such as faction fighting or keening. It was these other expressions of corporeality - less easily legible and more beastly - which piqued Synge's interest and which, in Playboy, offer traces of an inexpungibl...

- by Hélène Lecossois
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- Irish Theatre, Culture and Modernity, John Millington Synge
- by Jonathan McCreedy
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- William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Joseph O'Connor

In J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, anxieties brought about by Ireland’s colonial modernity are given an especially powerful expression through an extensive recourse to animal imageries. This article proposes to read these imageries as indexes of (pre-) modernity, and as markers of the divide between rural and urban areas that modernity accentuated. It argues that the animal-like behaviour that Synge’s play calls for may be considered as a form of resistance to a hegemonic and early twentieth century conception of modernity. Alongside the trained, performing, modern Irish body that emerged in the theatre of the early 1900s there survived vestiges of a radically different form of embodiment associated with, for example, rural performance traditions such as faction fighting or keening. It was these other expressions of corporeality - less easily legible and more beastly - which piqued Synge’s interest and which, in Playboy, offer traces of an inexpungible and co-existin...

- by Hélène Lecossois
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- Irish Theatre, Culture and Modernity, John Millington Synge

Irish Revivalist playwright J. M. Synge has often been regarded as a realist. Yet what happens when his work is analysed through wider performance studies and situated alongside less familiar historical contexts? By addressing this question, Hélène Lecossois offers new and valuable perspectives on Synge's plays while at the same time engaging with the complexity of his treatment of a range of performance practises - from keening at rural funerals to the performance of "native villagers" in the entertainment section of International Exhibitions. What emerges from her study is a dramatist acutely aware of the ability of theatre in performance to counteract relentless forward-moving narratives of modernity. Through detailed, contextualized case studies, the book simultaneously makes meaningful contributions to performance studies and opens up theoretical questions of performance relating to the status of the object on stage, the body on stage, and theatrical time.

- by Hélène Lecossois
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- Irish Studies, Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Modernism
- by Robert Finnigan
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- Irish Studies, Travel Writing, Irish Literature, Nineteenth Century Studies

Why did Synge vehemently predict the disappearance of a language that he loved and could speak with no small fluency? Brian O Conchubhair’s ground-breaking Fin de Siècle na Gaelige (2009) situates the Gaelic Revival within the broad contexts of contemporaneous European intellectual, social, and literary trends. I show that Synge’s understanding of evolutionary theory (and particularly of Spencer’s misapplied phrase, “survival of the fittest”) suggested to him that a linguistic tradition rooted in “a small island placed between two countries which speak [English]” was not fit for survival. In writing of Irish, Synge deploys the vocabulary of early nineteenth-century linguistics, which depicted language as an organism that grows and decays. For an author forever affected by his initial traumatic encounter with Darwin, the understanding that Irish was a biological entity — and that as such it was subject to the laws of evolution — was potentially alarming. The implication of Synge’s use of horticultural vocabulary to discuss the contemporary linguistic status of Ireland (“blossom”, “decay”, “old roots”, “new growth”) is that the heightened Hiberno-English utilized in his plays is a vigorous hybrid resulting from the grafting of an Irish language shoot onto the stronger stock of English. In Darwinian terms, Hiberno-English is the “new and improved form” that inevitably replaces the outmoded “old forms” of enfeebled Irish and what Synge considered to be the inadequate English of a colonized people. The popular concept of the perfected nature of the hybrid plant underlines such references to Hiberno-English. In contemplating the future of Irish, Synge ultimately overcomes the nihilism that evolutionary theory had imparted in him during his youth; “pure” Irish might become extinct, but its rhythm and energy would survive in the literary Hiberno-English of Playboy of he Western World and its ilk.

Béaloideas 84 (2016): 84-103.

- by Deirdre Ní Chonghaile
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- History, Irish Studies, Folklore, Travel Writing

Irish University Review 46.2 (2016): 243–259.

- by Deirdre Ní Chonghaile
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- History, Folklore, Theatre Studies, Travel Writing

Bruna, Giulia. “John Millington Synge's Travel Journalism: Reporting from the Fringes of Revival Ireland.” Global Literary Journalism. Exploring the Journalistic Imagination. Eds. Richard Keeble, John Tulloch. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.... more

- by Giulia Bruna
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- Literary Journalism, Irish Studies, Travel Writing, Irish Literature
- by Deirdre Ní Chonghaile
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- Irish Studies, Modern Irish (Gaeilge), Gaeilge, filíocht na Gaeilge