INTRODUCTION

Synge is the most highly esteemed playwright of the Irish literary

renaissance, the movement in which such literary figures as William Butler
Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory made their mark at the turn of the twentieth
century. Although he died just short of his thirty-eighth birthday and produced
a modest number of works, his writings have made an impact on audiences,
writers, and Irish culture.
Efforts have always been made by literary scholars and critics to read
the aesthetics of John Millington Synge's drama. However, little attention has
been paid to the naturalistic dimension of Synge's plays. This study, therefore,
investigates the naturalist aesthetics in Synge's dramaturgy. This is in an
attempt to show that individuals' attitudes in certain contexts are conditioned
by the forces of the environment they inhabit.
The study adopts the naturalist dramatic theory in order to account for
the intricate connection between human beings and nature. Also the study
engages aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis to unveil the psychological
implications of the actions and reactions of the individuals in Synge's plays.
For the purpose of critical analysis, two of Synge's plays are selected - Riders
to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World. The study maintains that
Synge's dramaturgy is influenced, in fact enriched by his close study of the
Irish peasantry in the Aran Island. Both texts selected for this study reveal that

Synge recreates and records the contemporary life of the Islanders in a

journalist and objective style.
The people's struggle for life in their Darwinian environment is
captured in different dramatic forms. While Riders to the Sea presents a tragic
vision of life, The Playboy of the Western World perfectly blends the comic
with the tragic to present a farcical vision of life. Life in both texts is
represented in journey motif. The journey of life in the closed system of the
Island presented in Riders to the Sea often results in death and loss, and the
journey of life in The Playboy of the Western World is coloured by
disappointment, loss, rage, violence, boredom, and failure. The pessimistic and
bleak realities of the people's life, in no small measure, affect their psyche and
dictate their deeds. This signifies that there is a symbiotic relationship between
person and place. Synge's dramaturgy is a stage where art and life in its wild
realities co-exist. It is a justifiable fact that such a co-existence maintains a
contractual relationship. While the Irish life feeds Synge's dramatic
imagination, he gives back to that life by aiming to reform it through his satiric
representations.
John Millington Synge (1871-1909), the writer and playwright,
epitomises the trend among artists and writers at the turn of the 20th century to
look to the west of Ireland for inspiration and for an 'authentically' Irish subject
matter. It was a trend that also saw the artist Paul Henry and his painter wife
Grace travel to Achill Island in 1909 and, some decades later, was part of the
attraction of his Mayo homeland for writer Ernie O'Malley. Both Paul Henry

and Ernie O'Malley were readers of JM Synge, as was the English novelist
Graham Greene before he travelled to Achill in 1947.
Irish literary Renaissance
Irish literary renaissance, flowering of Irish literary talent at the end of
the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century that was closely allied with a
strong political nationalism and a revival of interest in Irelands Gaelic literary
heritage. The renaissance was inspired by the nationalistic pride of the Gaelic
revival; by the retelling of ancient heroic legends in books such as the History
of Ireland (1880) by Standish OGrady and A Literary History of Ireland
(1899) by Douglas Hyde; and by the Gaelic League, which was formed in
1893 to revive the Irish language and culture. The early leaders of the
renaissance wrote rich and passionate verse, filled with the grandeur of
Irelands past and the music and mysticism of Gaelic poetry. They were mainly
members of the privileged class and were adept at English verse forms and
familiar with lyric poetry that extolled the simple dignity of the Irish peasant
and the natural beauty of Ireland.
The movement developed into a vigorous literary force centred on the
poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. Though he contributed to the
foundation of the Abbey Theatre, the first Irish national theatre, he wrote only
a few plays, which were beautiful but difficult to stage. His chief colleague
was Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, who took a leading part in the Abbeys
management and wrote many plays. The Irish Literary Theatre, established in
3

1898, also excelled in the production of peasant plays. The greatest dramatist
of the movement was John Millington Synge, who wrote plays of great beauty
and power in a stylized peasant dialect. Later, the theatre turned toward
realism, mostly rural realism. Lennox Robinson, best known for his political
play, The Lost Leader (1918), and his comedy, The Whiteheaded Boy (1916),
and T.C. Murray, author of The Briary Gap (1917), were among the early
realists. In reaction to peasant realism, Sean OCasey wrote three great dramas
of the Dublin slums: The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock
(1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926).
In poetry, in addition to Yeats, the mystic George Russell (pseudonym
AE) composed works of enduring interest. Notable among their younger
contemporaries were Padraic Colum, Austin Clarke, Seumas OSullivan
(James Sullivan Starkey), F.R. Higgins, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. The Irish
Republican movement had its poets in Patrick Henry Pearse, Thomas
MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett, all executed in 1916 for their part in the
Easter Rising.
The noteworthy prose fiction of the renaissance includes the historical
tales of Emily Lawless and Standish James OGrady and, somewhat at a
remove, the realist novels of George Moore. James Stephens also wrote stories
and poetry.

John Millington Synge

Synge is the most highly esteemed playwright of the Irish literary
renaissance, the movement in which such literary figures as William Butler
Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory made their mark at the turn of the twentieth
century. Although he died just short of his thirty-eighth birthday and produced
a modest number of works, his writings have made an impact on audiences,
writers, and Irish culture.
Born near Dublin on April 16, 1871, Synge was the youngest of five
children in an upper-class Protestant family. His father died the following year;
the four boys and one girl were raised by their deeply religious mother. Synge
attended private schools for four years, beginning at the age of ten, but ill
health prevented his regular attendance, and his mother hired a private tutor to
instruct him at home. At Trinity College, Dublin, he earned a pass degree in
December, 1892. His primary ambition was music, and because of his studies
of violin, theory, and composition, he won a scholarship from the Royal Irish
Academy of Music for advanced study in counterpoint. At this time Synge had
also begun to write poetry.
Synge's early religious skepticism and his unorthodox career aspirations
made life difficult for him in his mother's home, where he lived until 1893. In
that year he went to Germany to study music, but was dissuaded by his
nervousness about performing. In the summer of 1894 he moved to Paris to
study language and literature at the Sorbonne. He was writing poems and

literary criticism and supporting himself by giving English lessons. In the

autumn of 1895 he began studying Italian in Italy, and in December, 1896, he
returned to the Sorbonne. These years of travel and study were punctuated by
vacation visits to Ireland, during which he pursued Cherry Matheson, a young
woman from a devout Protestant family. The issue of religious skepticism
intruded once again, and Cherry refused Synge's marriage proposal in 1896.
On December 21, 1896, at the Hotel Corneille in Paris, Synge met poet
and dramatist William Yeats. During the meeting, Yeats recommended that
Synge leave Paris and move to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland.
In Yeats' own words, as set forth in his preface to The Well of the Saints, he
said, "'Give up Paris. ... Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one
of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.'"
Eventually Synge did so, with the best possible results. His first stay on the
Aran Islands occurred in the spring of 1898; it was repeated at intervals during
the next four years. He continued to winter in Paris, but the study of Irish life
and literature became central to his work. On the rocky, isolated islands, Synge
took photographs and notes. He listened to the speech of the islanders, a
musical, old-fashioned, Irish-flavored dialect of English. He conversed with
them in Irish and English, listened to stories, and learned the impact that the
sounds of words could have apart from their meaning.
The first fruit of Synge's Aran experience was The Aran Islands, written
in 1901 but unpublished for the next six years. The Irish writer and teacher

Daniel Corkery, in his Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, saw the Aran essays
as crucial to Synge's development. "[These papers] are valuable for their own
sake as descriptive of the consciousness of the people. They are perhaps more
valuable still for the insight they give us into Synge's own consciousness, his
fundamentally emotional nature." Corkery also commented, "Sometimes I
have the idea that the book on the Aran Islands will outlive all else that came
from Synge's pen." Elaborating on the themes of the isolation and simplicity of
the islanders' lives and the desolation of their landscape, Synge, according to
Robin Skelton's The Writings of J. M. Synge, uncovers the "heroic values" and
the "awareness of universal myth" with which the islanders enrich their lives.
Skelton also judged that Synge uses the islanders as raw material for the
creation of "images and values ... which point towards the importance of
reviving, and maintaining, a particular sensibility in order to make sense of the
predicament of humanity."