John Millington Synge Research Papers (original) (raw)

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... more

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.

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... more

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.

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