Introduction
Two telegrams convey the whole story of the opening night of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, on January 26, 1907. Both were sent to author William Butler Yeats by Lady Augusta Gregory, who had helped him establish the Irish National Theatre four years earlier. At the close of the first act she wrote: “Play a great success.” Two acts later, she sent a second: “Play broke up in disorder at the word ‘shift.’”
Sydney Brooks, writing in the London-based magazine Atlantic Weekly on Feb. 2, 1907, had this description of the situation: “Dublin during the past week has been convulsed with a glorious row. It has all arisen from the production at the Abbey Theatre of a play by Mr. J. M. Synge called ‘The Playboy of the Western World.’ The Abbey Theatre has for its manager Mr. W.B. Yeats. To any one who is acquainted with Mr. Yeats’ work in prose and verse no more need be said. He will understand that the Abbey Theatre exists to produce plays that would not otherwise appear on the boards at all, to produce them by Irishmen both as actors and as authors, and to see to it that they deal only with Irish subjects. In other words, the Abbey Theatre is intended to be the home of a really national drama and to give expression on the stage to that new spirit of nationality which is thrilling Irish life.”
The Irish at the beginning of the 20th century took their theatre seriously. During the previous century a growing sense of national pride had brought about the formation of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League, and other initiatives created to revive and promote Irish culture and language. The formation of these organizations was, in large measure a result of events of the 19th century, including the potato famine and the struggles around Home Rule. The cultural revival, in turn, then had an impact on the growing nationalist movement throughout the next several decades.
John Millington Synge
John Millington Synge was born on April 16, 1871, in the Dublin suburb of Newton Little. After his father died a year later, his three brothers and one sister were raised by their devoutly religious (Protestant) mother. Synge suffered from poor health during his youth, which eventually prompted his mother to have him tutored at home. He studied music theory and Irish history at Trinity College in Dublin, when he was seventeen and completed a bachelor’s degree in 1892. He began to write poetry during his years at Trinity and at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he did graduate work in music theory.
Synge left Ireland in 1893 to study music, but his stage fright caused him to reconsider his career choice. A year later he began language and literature studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. During his time there, he met William Butler Yeats, who was an important influence for the rest of his life. Yeats inspired Synge to go to the Aran Islands, off the western coast of Ireland, to live there as one of the people themselves. For four years, Synge studied Irish life on the islands, where he took photographs and careful notes on their speech and life style.
In 1901, he turned his notes into a collection of essays, The Aran Islands, and wrote his first play, When the Moon Has Set. Two plays followed, but his mature style was not apparent until later that year when he wrote: Riders to the Sea, In the Shadow of the Glen, and The Tinker’s Wedding. In 1903, In the Shadow of the Glen was the first play shown by the Irish National Theatre Society, run by Yeats and Lady Gregory.
His next play was The Playboy of the Western World, and while writing it, Synge became ill with Hodgkin’s disease, which delayed the play’s opening. Its controversial reception is one of the most famous events in literary history. However, by the later part of the twentieth century, it came to be recognized as Synge’s masterpiece.
Synge drafted Dierdre of the Sorrows during hospital stays as he battled his increasingly debilitating illness. He died on March 24, 1909 in Dublin, without having had time to revise it.
Setting and plot summary
The Playboy of the Western World is set on the “wild coast of Mayo,” a wild, infertile area along the northwest coast of Ireland. Synge made a tour through this “district of the greatest poverty … a waste of turf and bog,” in 1905, while traveling for the Manchester Guardian with artist-illustrator Jack B. Yeats. However, his depiction of the people and their manner of speech is drawn from his experiences on the Aran Islands. In fact one source for the plot of Playboy comes from a story that Synge heard while in the islands, about a man who killed his father with a spade and threw himself on the mercy of the natives. They hid him from the police, in spite of an offered reward, and eventually the man escaped to America.
The play opens in a country shebeen or pub. Pegeen Mike is engaged to Shawn Keogh a rich farmer, but she is not in love with him. Pegeen’s father Michael James owns the pub, and spends his time going to wakes and getting drunk. A young man arrives one evening as Michael James and his two pals Jimmy Farrell and Philly Cullen are about to go off to a wake. This young man calls himself Christy Mahon and claims that he has killed his father. Everyone including Pegeen are fascinated and admire Christy for this deed, which they see as heroic.
The men set off for the wake leaving Pegeen with Christy. The widow Quinn a local woman who is supposed to have murdered her husband arrives and tries to get Christy to stay the night in her hut. Pegeen has taken control of Christy at this point in the story and refuses to let him go.
The following morning some local girls arrive to visit Christy and bring him presents. Christy is a hero in the eyes of the villagers and they beg him to participate in their local games. In the meantime Old Mahon, who is Christy’s father and has not actually been slain, arrives and meets the widow Quinn. Old Mahon has suffered a blow on his head from being hit by Christy and wishes to punish him. He tells the widow about Christy and describes him as a weak character, “a dirty stuttering lout who would get drunk on the smell of a pint.”
When Christy meets his father towards the conclusion of the play he gives him another blow on the head and it truly looks as if he is dead. No longer considering him a hero, the villagers, including Pegeen, decide to capture him and bring him to prison. Pegeen disowns him for being a liar. Old Mahon recovers, however, and he and Christy leave the shebeen mocking the villagers, saying that they are unable to accept reality when it lands on their own door. The play concludes with Pegeen lamenting the loss of the ‘only playboy of the western world.’ She is left with her loveless alliance to Shawn Keogh.
The language of the play
The language of the play is an extremely important element and reflects Synge’s interest in Irish. He is using the dialect of the people in Aran in a highly exaggerated manner. Part of the effect has to do with the way in which Gaelic translates into English, that is, some of the original syntax is retained. As a dramatist, Synge has pulled off the improbably trick of seeming to write in two languages at the same time. To quote Tim Robinson in his introduction to The Aran Islands: “the elegiac rhythms of Synge’s dialogue are those inherent in the English of native Irish speakers, an English the grammar of which has been metamorphosed by the pressure of Irish, and the works of which have therefore been galvanized into new life by syntactic shock.” An example given is that there is no word for “yes” in Irish. Instead one repeats the verb of a question: “Is it Bartley that is there? It is.” This feature involves repetition and rhythm when imitated in English. Also prevalent in Irish, and thus in translation, are little tags and pieties that prolong a sentence or question: “It is, surely, God rest his soul.”
Synge’s dialogue in Irish dialect is musical and flamboyant. He was known to listen at doors and take down quaint phrases wherever he went. He declares in the preface to the play that all the words and idioms he uses he actually heard. This may be true, but the language is exaggerated, almost too Irish. It matches the extravagance of the story and everything else about the play; it is full of fantastical and overwrought “strings of gab” that he has overheard and crammed together. The characters bless and curse each other too well. And it is unlikely that the real Irish country folk would use words such as “retribution” and “potentate.” But, Synge is not at all interested in strict realism in the theatre.
The riots and Irish nationalism
The rioters at the play were largely Catholic nationalists, protesting against a play which they saw as a slur on their national identity. These objections were made on religious, moral and patriotic grounds. Playboy was seen to condone patricide and present what the people believed to be Synge’s depiction of a peasantry besotted, deluded and self-indulgent. The Irish were accustomed to being sneered at by their Anglo-Irish rulers, and Synge was, in fact, part of that group, an Irish Home Ruler who was also a sharp critic of nationalism, a writer from an evangelical Protestant background, who was criticized both for idealizing the peasantry and for libeling them. Synge was also “on the cusp of modernism” in his approach to playwriting. This was a growing international movement in art and literature tending away from strict realism in drama. While Synge adopted many of the characteristics of realism in his plays, he also enriched them with poetic and ironic elements. As a result, the plays are a complex mixture of traditional forms presented in innovative ways. The Playboy is not to be taken at face value, but is an “extravaganza” of the fact and fantasy that Synge found in the lives and language of the Aran islanders. As he sat in the auditorium of the Abbey Theatre, while the place was raging and the people shook their fists at him, Synge was overheard to say, “We shall have to establish a Society for the Preservation of Irish Humor.”
Meaning of “playboy”
The word “playboy” had a different meaning in 1907 than it has today. Although as far back as 1620, it refers to selfish pleasure seeker who may even consort with the devil, in the late nineteenth century the word began also to mean a “hoaxer, humbugger or mystificator, or one who does sham things or full of the play spirit.” The term also relates to the traditional Irish game of hurling, which was regaining popularity at the time. The Irish slang buachaill báire means literally, “boy of the game.” Báire is both the game of hurling and a goal scored therein. So the “playboy” is a hurling player or goal-scorer and, by extension, a young man who plays games with those around him and scores points off of them.
THEMES AND QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Social convention and rebellion
It is interesting to note that although there are a few independent characters in the play (specifically Pegeen and the Widow Quinn), most act according to social convention. Shawn Keogh is the most conservative of the community – he is reluctant to marry his cousin without the “dispensation,” or sanction from the Catholic Church. He even refuses to be alone with her for fear of disapproval. What other examples of conservative behavior are there in this community? How does this contrast with the admiration the people feel for Christy, who has committed a rebellious act. And, finally, how do the themes of convention and rebellion play out at the end of the third act?
Hero worship
In this community the idea of heroes and heroism is truly ambiguous and ironic. Pegeen’s heroes are dangerous and violent men who are set against the background of “Holy Ireland:” “Marcus Quinn got six months for maiming ewes, and he a great warrant to tell stories of Holy Ireland.” Great talkers are synonymous with bravery and heroism in this community. By the end of Act I, Christy becomes fully conscious of his heroic status and his new self flourishes after this. It is through the power of eloquent and exaggerated language that the community makes a hero of Christy Mahon. This community is starved for heroism and so they encourage him and develop within him the illusion that he really is the hero he thinks himself to be. The central fact throughout this play is that Christy is convincing himself and the community that he is truly the hero of all he says he has done. Bravery of talk is an adequate substitute for brave deeds in this somewhat sterile community. At the conclusion Christy has emancipated himself from all forms of dominance and achieved true heroism and freedom.
What happens to the admiration of the villagers and why? Is Christy truly a hero?
Religion
It has been suggested that Christy Mahon is a messianic figure, and a strong case can be made for this theory. His name is similar to “Christ,” he is the son of “Mahon” (sounds like “man”). Like Jesus, when Christy confronts the true significance of his “message,” those who have followed him and praised him prepare to have him executed.
What do you think of this idea?
It has also been suggested that Christy’s story evokes that of one of the important Irish mythical heroes, Cuchulain. This was a warrior renowned for his athleticism and pleasant speech. As in the previous reference, Christy can be seen to be a parody – a mock-hero, for he is not really athletic or genuinely sweet of speech.
What can you find out about Cuchulain of Miurthemne? How do ideas about heroism in Irish mythology relate to Synge’s work? What role does mythology play in the life of the Aran Islanders?
Additional questions for study
In further consideration of the conflict between convention and rebellion, how does the play reflect the political situation in Ireland at the time?
Have there been other riots in theatres because of objections to a theatrical or musical performance?
What is the history of the Irish National Theatre?
The Playboy of the Western World is now regarded as Synge’s masterpiece and is performed annually by the Abbey Theatre. Why do you think that is the case?
