I

CHAPTER ONE :
!

THE IRISH DRAMATIC

MOVEMENT

l
 THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMMENT

‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’ began in the last decade of the

19the century and reached its flowering stage during the first decade
of the 20th century. The Irish Dramatic Movement was actually the
’Irish literary Renaissance, especially the Dramatic Renaissance. We
call it the Dramatic Renaissance and not the dramatic revival because
until late in the 19the century, Ireland did not have its own indigenous
theatre or any tradition of dramatic writing. It was only from the time
when the Irish literary Society was established, that its pioneers
thought it necessary to have an Irish stage where plays dealing with
irish material and written and staged by Irish writers and actors were
to be performed. This became a part of their general National
Movement for independence.

At the beginning of the 20th century a group of young

enthusiastic patriots led by W.B.Yeats. Lady Gregory. George Moore.
George Russell,Edward Martyn and Maude Gonne Started a
movement for reviving Irish drama. They believed that great drama
was not possible without great poetry, but they opposed to the type
; of drama which held in the field in England at this time. This drama
, was inspired by Ibsen and was chiefly practised by Shaw and
Glasworthy. There was no poetry and no imagination in it and it was
concerned with the discussion of social, political, religious and
economic problems.
 The pioneers of this movement believed that the language of
drama must be poetic. It may be prose or poetry but it should be
rich and imaginative. They wanted to draw their material from the
stories of pre-Christians heroic age, the legends of Gaelic Civilization
and the lives of the common people of modern times. The dialects
spoken by Irish peasants, workers, fishermen and tenement dwellers
had a natural poetic rhythm and could form an excellent medium for
Irish poetic drama.

The most notable name in this respect is W.B. Yeats, the leader
of the movement, who, in theory as well as practice, accorded the
aesthetic element in drama the very highest importance:
All art is the disengaging of a
soul from place and history, its
suspension in a beautiful or
terrible light to await the Judgement,
though it must be, seeing that
its days, were a last Day, judged
already.1

In addition to this concern for the aesthetic approach, we should

mention the marked absence of prochialism in the approach of Yeats,
Lady Gregory, Russell and Martyn, all pioneers of the ’Irish Dramatic
Movement’ with their strong grounding culture, social as well as
artistic, they were in all respects well- equipped and competent to
give the Irish drama what is particularly needed: strong nationalism
nevertheless modified by cosmopolitanism.

While exploring the various opinions regarding the Irish

movement, one does get caught into the web of confusion as to who
was the actual founder of this literary society. Was it an offshoot of
the Gaelic leagues or did it consciously begin as the precursor of the

1. TWENTIETH CENTURY View Series: The Playboy of the Western World, p.3.
 23

Abbey Theatre? Dems Gwynn gives the credit to Edward Martyn

and Figgis consider A.E. (George Russell) to be the real leader.
Similarly, another Irish critic, Colum claims the leadership of Lord
Dunsany for the movement and some critics enhance the role played
by Donglas thyde.

W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory are, ofcourse, the most popular
choice but two things must be clearly understood after examing the
various phases of the growth of the entire Irish movement from the
inception of Gaelic league to the establishment of Irish Theatre. The !
credit for such a powerful and widespread movement cannot be given ;
to just one or two individuals. All these writers, A.E., Edward Martyn., |
Lord Dunsany, Hyde, Yeats and Lady Gregory were the undisputed j
Headers and belonged to the Inner circle but many more writers i

contributed in the popularisation of the movement. (

The process of this ‘Irish Movement’ had begun sincerly in the

1880’s, with a revival in the ancient Gaelic language and literature.

The reasons for this revival are not very clear but they were
almost certainly palitical rather than literary. Freedom was in the air
aand it was a century of revolution, political bodies, like the Fenians
(founded in America in the sixties) were pressing for Home' Rule and
this led to some heart- searching among literary and other leaders:
if we are proposing to rule our own country wed better know a littke
I more about ourselves! In 1891,W.B. yeats and founded the Irish
i

; Literary in London and the National Literary society in Dublin in 1892.

S This was followed by the yaclic League in 1893 (founded by du.
 24

Douges Hyde, president of the yaclic League and other yaclic

scholass) and in January 1899 the Irish Literary theeatre was founded,
when Irish liferary souety was established in London in 1895, W.S.
yeats defined its aim:
These societies had given,as I intended,
opportumity to a new generation of critics
and writers to denounce the propagandist
verse and prose that had gone by the
name of Irish literature, and to
substitute for it certain neglected writers.2

In the interval between 1892 and 1899 Yeats had discussed

with many people the possibilities of finding a small theatre in London
or Dublin. During this contact with Little Theatres, W.B.Yeats had
found it queer that the age with all its education and respect for
literature had no modern poetic drama. So, in a final and fruitful
meeting with Lady Gregory in1898, the idea of a Separate Irish
Theatre flashed in the mind of the poet- dramatist. Lady Gregory has
set the authentic details in her diary.
I was in London in 1898, and
I find written: Yeats and Sir
Alfred Lyall to tea. Yeats stayed
on He is very full of play-writing
.... He, with the aid of Miss
Flourence Farr, an actress who thinks
more of a romantic that of a playing
play, is keen about taking a Little
Theatre somewhere in the suburbs
, to produce romantic drama, his
own plays, Edward Martyn’s, one i I
of Bridgis; and he is trying to j i
t
tir up Standish O' Grady and \
j Fiona Macleod to write some.
' He thinks there will be a reaction
| after the realism of Ibsen, and
| romance will have its Turn.3
Later Lady Gragory alos wrote in Our
Irish Theatre about this casual meeting.
I said it was a pity we

2. THE LETTERS, ed. Allan Wade, p.406

3. ROBINSON, LENNOX: The Irish Thetre, p.12.
 25

had no Irish theatre where

such plays could be given.
Mr. Yeats said that had
always been a dream of his,
but he had of late thought it
an impossible one, it could not
at first pay its way, and there
was no money to be found for
such a thing in Ireland. We
went on talking about it, and
things seem to grow possible as
we talked, and before the end
, of the afternoon we had made
our plans. We would then take
a Dublin theatre and give a
Performance of Mr. Martyn’s The
Heatherfield and one of Mr.
Yeats own play, The Countess
Catheleen4
But the course of planning and producing the plays did not run
as smoothly as the above account may suggest. There were teething
troubles and in adequate finances. The main obstacles was the
hostility from the critics, clergy and, paradoxically enough, from Irish
nationalists and a vocal section of the society. A pamphlet entitled
Souls for Gold vehemently attacked Yeats’ Countess Cathleen on
grounds of what the writer of the pamphlet considered blasphemy
and pseudo-Celticism. As a result of the controversy, Yeats not only
revised certain portion of the play, but also agreed to submit it to the
verdict of two clergymen, ‘Father Finlay’ and ‘Father Barry’, who gave
their judgement in favour of the play. Opposition also came from the
three Dublin theatres and Gaelic society founded by Dr. Hydes. Later
Lady Gregory, Yeats and A.E. all gave their support to the Fays’
isociety and joined it, and the original Irish Literary “heatre ended.
!The performances of the Fays’ Society were planned for April at ’St.
Teresa’s Hall’ in Clarendon Street. The society was re-born as the

4. GREGORY, AUGUSTA LADY: Our Irish Theatre p.153.

 26

Irish National Dramatic Company’ which almost immediately

afterwards known as the Irish National Theatre Society, with the idea
of attracting public subscriptions, of guaranteeing public performances
of genuinely Irish plays of which they (i.e. Yeats) approved and of
ultimately acquiring their own theatre Lady Gregory also offered the
first guarantee of 25, and this ‘Irish Literary Theatre' was thus
established in May, 1899 about which the following comments of
W.B.Yeats are noteworthy.
Why should we thrust our works
which we have written with imaginative
sincerity and filled with spiritual
desire, before tnose quite excellent
people who think that Rossetti’s
women are “guys", that Rodin’s
women are “ugly” and that Ibsen
is “immoral", and who only want
to be left at peace to enjoy the
works so many clever young men
have made specially to suit them ?
We must make a theatre for ourselves
and our friends, and for a few simple
people who understand from sheer
simplicity what we understand from
scholarship and thought.5

i The Irish National Society, playing under Lady Gregory’s Patent

at the Abbey Theatre, became the National Theatre Society Limited
in 1903. A year later Miss.A.E.Horniman, a rich English woman who
sympatnized with Yeats’ high artistic ideals, offered to provide the
society with a theatre, and thus this Irish National Theatre was
transformed into the Abbey Theatre in 1904.

The policy of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, as formulated by Yeats

and his collaborators and approved by Miss Horniman, was to produce
Celtic and Irish plays written with the object of expressing the deeper

5. YEATS, W.B. Essays (1924), p.211

 27

thoughts and emotions of Ireland and surpassing dividing political

opinions. Yeats himself had very decided views on the function of
the drama. He advertised the occasion very pompously though many
of his co-pioneers including Lady Gregory did not agree with such a
boastful advertisement. But nothing could deter W.B.Yeats, who
defined the aims of the Abbey Theatre as follows:-
The Irish Literary Theatre will
attempt to do in Dublin something
of what has been done in Paris and
London; and if it has even a small
welcome, it will produce somewhere
, about the festival of Beltaine, at
the beginning of every spring, a
play founded upon an Irish
subject. The play will differ from
those produced by men of letters
in London and Paris, because
times have changed and because
the intellect of Ireland is romantic
and spiritual rather than scientific
and analytical, but they will have
as little of commercial ambition,6

One of the merits of this theatre was that it gave the unfledged
playwright an opportunity to try his wings. Its reward was sometimes
the discovery of genius. What the little Theatre in Province town,
Massachusetts, did twenty years later for the American dramatists
Eugene O’ Neill, the Abbey Theatre did for John Millington Synge,
the outstanding playwright of the Irish Dramatic Movement. .
Yeats met Synge, a young man of twenty eight in Paris in
1898, earning a meagre living as a journalist and trying to write. He
persuaded him to leave the decadent atmosphere of the French
}

Bohemians and to seek inspiration among the unspoilt fisher folk of

the Aran Isles. He said:

6. YEATS, W.B.: Plays and Controversies (1925), P.16.

I
 28

Give up Paris, you will never

create anything by reading
Racine, and Arthur Symons will
always be a better critic of
French literature. Go to the
Aran islands. Live there as if
you were one of the. people
themselves, express a life that
has never found expression.7

Thus, Yeats transferred he interest of Synge to the primitive

world of rough and hardy Irish Peasants by sending him to the Aran
islands. There Synge studied life, not the conventional life of cities,
but’ "the eternal life of man spent under sun and rain and in rude
physical effort, scarce changed since the beginning’. He watched the
tragedy of the grim, fatalistic batle with the cold,grey, hungry sea,
and the little sordid comedies of circumscribed, monotonous
existences. He saw at first hand human nature at its best and at its
worst; its spirituality and its animal savagery. And, like George Borrow
among the gypsies, he imbibed the apt, short-worded, picturesque
. idioms of the native speech.

Synge appeared on the Irish stage like a response to the saying

of Ruskin, that what the literary world needs is a man who can see
clearly and write) what he sees. He was the most gifted dramatist of
1 5

the ‘Irish Dramatic Movement’, but the body of his dramatic work is
i
small. In a short span of seven years of dramatic career, he produced
six plays sometimes grouped as comedies- THE SHADOW OF THE
GLEN, THE TINKER’S WEDDING, THE WELL OF THE SAINTS and
THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD; and sometimes
tragedies-RIDERS TO THE SEA and DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS.

Though, Synge was a product of the Abbey Theatre, he

occupies distinct place in western dramatic literature as a whole. The
span of his life was short and his dramatic outputs scanty but his

7. YEATS, W.B. : Essays and Introductions (1961), p.299.

 29

contribution to drama was very significant. Comparing Synge with his

fellow dramatists, Prof, Una Ellis is Fermor observed:
All the other playwrights of
the movement seem, in last
analysis to have been either
dramatists in whom the instinct
for dramatic expression sometimes
brought with it the poetry of
diction, imagery or cadence, or
poets who turned for a time
to the dramatic form, returning,
sooner or later, again to other
forms. But it is hard to imagine
this separation in Synge; poetic
and dramatic expression in him
are one and simultaneous, as
they appear to have been with
Shakespeare and with Webster,
in whom the presence of a high
degree of the other, whether
the form were prose of verse,
the matter comedy or tregedy.8

Synge’s contribution differed both from Yeats’ proposed ideals

and from the general trend of the new movement. To Yeats one
function of the theatre was to make the nation conscious of the
heritage in history and myth; to provide a point round which the
popular imagination night first awaken, and then concentrate its power;
and at the last to unify itself for a nationalist effort by the imagery
liberated in the drama. This plays were to be popular, not in the
middle- class sense, but as representing das Volk and Gaelic culture,
together with an epic national past. And thus they might serve, with
this spiritual awakening, definite political ends; at the end of his life
he was to ask. of the 1916 Easter Rising.
i
; ...Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?

8. ELLIS-FERMOR, UNA : The Irish Dramatic Movement, p.163

 30

In contrast, Synge’s work is non-political, detached, ironic;

concerned with this excited yet dispassionate exploration of the world
of the western peasantry, and of an imagination that was still “fiery
magnificent, and tender”. By 1909 the flame of his own life, and
perhaps that of the first phase of the Abbey, had guttered and burnt
An idealistic Nationalist Movement had become entangled with politics
and religion. Miss Horniman withdrew her support in consequence o?
the decision to open the theatre on the day of king Edward’s funeral.
Edward Martyn withdrew his because of his religious conscience. The
controversy over The Playboy, a sequel to other censorship troubles,
'exacerbated an already sensitive nationalism, which Shaw’s John
Bull’s Other Island, and its Preface had done little to molify.

Synge’s response to the dramatic material at hand was

instinctive and temperamental and not guided by any dogma, unlike
Yeats, he looked at dramatic material as deriving from the observable
realities of life rather than from myth and he states this unambignously:
I do not believe in the
possibility of a purely fatalistic
unmodren ideal, breezy,
springlandish Cuchulaincid National
Theatre We had the Shadowy
Waters on the stage last week,
and it was the distresing
failure the mind can imagine-
a half-empty room with
growling men and tittering
females.9

I Synge lived physically and emotionally with the people of Aran

t

I Islands. He was initially shocked to observe the hard conditions of

life in Aran Islands, which are actually a group of three islands named,
Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer located in the Atlantic to the west

9. SKELTON AND CLARK; Irish Renaissance p. 67

 31

of Galway, this experiences of and impressions about Aran Islands

are found in two prose works. The Aran Islands and In Wicklow,
West Kerry and Connemara. These prose works give details of the
raw- materials which he has transformed into effective plays. Some
statements can be quoted here which reflect the hard but adventurous
and stoic live of peasants and fishermen of Aran Islands, Synge writes:
They live in a world of grey,
where there are wild rains and
mists every’ week in the year
and their warm chimney corners,
filled with children and young
girls, grow into the consciousness
of each family in a way it
is not easy to unerstand in
more civilized places.10

Again he writes:
As they talked to me and gave
me a little poteen and a
little bread when they thought
I was hungry, I could not
help feeling that I was
talking with men who were
under a judgement of death.
I knew that every one of
them would be drowned in
the sea in a few years and
battered naked on the rocks,
or would die in his own
cottage and be buried with
another fearful scene in the
graveyard I had come from.*11

Robert Skelton, quoting extensively from Syngis

antobiographical notes, proves how the various incidents and stories
heard in Aran Islands were used as raw materials by the dramatist
;for different plays. He says:
He found the wildness and
humour of islanders astonishing

10. THE ARAN ISLANDS, P. 58

11. IBID, P. 141
 32

and enchanting, and wrote

with sympathy of the contempt
in which they held the law...
This impulse to protect the criminal’, he wrote, ‘is universal
in the west, It is partly due
to the association between justice
and the hated English jurisdiction,
but more to the primitive feelings
of these people, who are
never criminals yet always
capable, of crime, that a man
wilt not do wrong unless he is
under the influence of a passion
which is as irresponsible as a
storm on the sea. If a man has
killed his father, and is already
sick and broken with remorse,
they can see no reason why he
should be dragged away and
killed by the law'. In this
stay he found the germ of
The Playboy of the western world,
as in a story of Pat Diranc's
he found the plot for In The
Shadow of the Glen, and in
several events the basis for
Riders to the Sea. 12

Similarly, the iegend of the holy well (curing the blindness o:

■a boy) situated on Inishmore and famous as the Church of the fou'
Beautiful Persons provided him with the foundation for the plot of The
Well of the Saints. Then, Synge started translating the story o:
Deirdre from Gaelic to English in 1901 which inspired him initially in
i
composing Deirdre of the Sorrows. Perhaps, only The Tinker’s
i

Wedding is not based on Synge’s Aran experience but the plot hero
is also Irish in nature. i

Synge was proud of his Irishness and all his writings and his
life show his abiding interest in ordinary folk. The people in his writings
•were the familiar faces he had seen on the islands. But Synge was

12. op. Cit, pp. 49-50.

 33

not interested in the representation of the life of all types of people,

nor all the facets of their life. Yeats remarks :
He loves all that has edge,
all that is salt in the mouth,
all that is rough to the hand
all that heightens the emotions
by contest, all that stings into
life the sense to tragedy ...
1 The food of the spiritual minded
is sweet, an 'Indian scripture
says, but passionates love bitter
food.13
This choice of the peasantry of the Aran Islands as the fulcrum
and very substance of his plays are perhaps due to his awareness
of the Ibsen cult which had such a strong and wide-sweep over
England and the Continent and his desire to show the right track for
poetic drama to grow once again in the present century. Then he
had its own tenets to test and his own ideas to experiment with. This
points of view are mostly contained in the prefaces to some of his
plays.

Synge’s disapproval of the Ibsen type of drama is stated in

his prefaces to the Tinker’s Wedding and The Playboy of the
Western World.

He is certainly in favour of the element of seriousness in drams

which does not necessarily mean the handling of serious social
problems. And there is no doubt that problem plays have either a
didactic purpose or a didactic note. Synge disapproved of both and
strongly upheld aesthetic pleasure as the function of drama’. His
(Preface to The Tinker’s Wedding, written in 1907, is a convenient
document of a part of Synge’s attitude to the drama, and some of
his intentions ;

13. YEATS, W.B. : Essays and Introductions, (1961), p.28

 34

The drama is made serious

- in the French sense of
the word - not by the degree
in which it is taken up with
problems that are serious in
themselves, but by the degree
in which it gives the nourish­
ment not very easy to define,
on which our imaginations live.
We should not go to the theatre
as we go to chemist's or a dram­
shop. but as we go to a dinner,
where the food we need is taken
with pleasure and excilement.
This was nearly always so
in Spain and England and
France when drama was at
its richest - the infancy and
decay of the drama tend to
be didactic- bui in these
days the playhouse is too
often stocked with the drugs
of many seedy problems, or
with the absinthe or vermonth
of the last musical comedy.14

After expressing his dissatisfaction with the treatment of

problems in plays and didactic function of drama, Synge outlines that
function of drama, which in his view is fundamental to all imaginative
literature :
The drama, like symphony, does
not teach or prove anything.
Analysis with their problems, and
teachers with their systems, are
soon as old fashioned as the
pharmacopoeia of Galen- look
at Ibsen and the Germans-
but the best plays of Ben
Jonson and Moliere can no
more go out of fashion than

the blackberries on the hedges.

Of the things which
nourish the imagination, humour
is one of the most needful and

14. SYNGE, J.M. : Preface to the Tinker’s Wedding.

 35

it is dangerous to.limit or destroy

it Baudelaire calls laughter
The greatest sign of the Satanic
element in man; and where a
country loses its humour, as
some towns in Ireland are doing,
there will be morbidity of mind,
as Baudelaire's mind was morbid.
In the greater part
of Ireland, however, the whole people,
from the tinkers to the clergy,
have still a life, and view of
, life, that are rich and genial
and humorous, I do not think
that these country people, who
have so much humour themselves,
will mind being laughed at
without malice, as the people in
every country have been laughed
at in their own comedies.15

Synge was fully justified in omitting the Catholic religious part

of Irish life if it did not suit him temperamentally or was not relevent
to his artistic needs. He was also not interested in social or societal
polemics, nor was he concerned with the political and economic
aspects of the general nationalists movement, of which the dramatic
movement was an inseparable part. Yeats has aptly observed :
Synge seemed, by nature unfitted
to think a political thought. ;
and with the exception of one
sentence, spoken when I first
met him in Paris, that implied
some sort of nationalist conviction,
I cannot remember that he spoke
of politics or showed any interest
in men in the mass, or any
subject that is studied through
abstractions and statistics. Often
for months together he and I
and Lady Gregory would see no

one outside the Abbey Theatre

!

and that life, lived as it were

in a ship at sea, suited

15. Ibid.
 36

him, for unlike those whose

habit of mind fits them to
judge of men in the mass, he
was wise in judging individual
men, and as wise in dealing
with them as the faint energies
of ill-health would permit; but
of their political thoughts he long
understood nothing.16

Synge’s tempermental idiosyncrasies as made him incapable

of handling political themes or writing problem-plays. But Michael
MacLiammoir summarised this point in his lecture on Problem Plays
at Abbey Theatre Festival in 1938 :
Every Irish play that I know
is what I would call a problem
play, that Irish life has a
startling propensity to produce
problems from nowhere as a
conjurer produces rabbits out of
a hot, that the Irish people are
possiblys the most problematic
creature in Europe or even, it
may be. out of it and that Ireland
is one long unending problem
whose solution may conceivably be
lying in the womb of time.
It has certainly not been sighted yet
in spite of a host of forerunners
as brilliant and courageous and
convinced as the forerunners of
any great birth or rebirth in the
world. For centuries our very
existence, like that of the Jews,
was a questioned and undecided
problem ecept in the minds of a
few of our own people whose
Sanity was immediately regarded by
the bulk of the community as
highly problematic; our religion
is a problem, our language is a
problem, our drinking laws, our
divorce laws, our manufactures,
grazing lands and farmers, bacon
and boots, censorship of books,
films and public momuments...

16. YEATS, W.B.: Essays and Introductions p.24.

 37

As for our weather, the flame

in which we live or attempt
to live our lives it is a problem
so hopeless that we seem to have
given it up as a bad job, and
merely discuss it much as
other. Europeans discuss the
condition of a dying relative,
continuosly and compassionately
with frequent thanks to our
God that it’s not even worse
than it /s.17

At the same time they produced in him a mordant mood which

is invariably to be seen under the broad humour and wild joys in his
plays. This mood and a corresponding brutality which we find in his
plays were the outcome of the type of life he found on the Aran
Islands. The people of Aran, their life, and the whole fabric of their
being had a great fascination for the sensitive mind of Synge.

Besides humour and a distinctive view of life. Synge found in

these people an imagination which was fiery, yet living and rich. Where
the imagination is living and rich, language, as a natural corollary
becomes living and rich as well. Synge asserts (
i
I am glad to acknowledge how
much I owe to the folk imagination
of these fine people. Anyone who has
lived in real intimacy with the
Irish peasantry will know that the
wildest sayings and ideals in this
play are tame indeed compared
with the fancies one may hear in
any little hill side cabin in
Geesals, or Carroroe, or Dingle Bay
....When I was writing The
! Shadow of the Glen, some years ago,
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 servant
girls in the kitchen. This matter

17. ROBINSON, LENNO :The Irish Theatre, pp.2042-203.

 38

/ think, is of importance, for

in countries where the imagination
of the people, and tne language
they use. is rich and living, it
is possible for a writer to be
rich and copious in his words,
and at the same time to give
the reality which is the root of
all poetry, in a comprehensive
and natural form. In the modern
literature of towns, however,
richness is founa only m sonnets,
or poems, or in one or two
elaborate books that are far
away from the profound and
common interests of life. One
has on one side, Mallarme
and Huysmans producing this
literature and on the other
Ibsen and Zola dealing with the
reality of life in joyless and pallid
words. On the stage one must have
reality, and one must have joy,
and that is why the intellectual
modern drama has failed ana
people have grown sick of tne
false joy of the musical comedy,
that has been given them in
place of the rich joy found only
in what is superb and wild in
reality. In a good play every
speech should be as fully
flavoured as a nut or apple, and
such speeches cannot be written
by anyone who works among people
who have shut their lips on poetry
in Ireland, for a few years more,
we have a popular imagination
that is fiery and magnificent and
tender; so that those of us who
wish to write start with a chance
that is not given to writers in
places where the spring time of
the local life has been forgotten,
and the harvest is a memory
only, and the straw has been
40
turned into bricks.

18, Preface to The Playboy of the Western World.

 39

Though, for Synge, the most important element in drama was

humour, but by humour he doesn’t mean merely the superficial comic
laughter of farce, or the presentation of ‘Cheap and light’ devices as
mere entertainment for the unintellectual audience. Humour for him
is the most important basic aspect of human life in which morbidity
born of sophisticated and artificial urban life has not entered. Humour,
on the one hand, sustains the vitality of life, while on the other it
nourishes and enriches the imagination. Since, humour is still
abundantly present in the life of the Irish peasantry, their imagination
is still fiery and magnificent.
Besides this, these peasantry also have variety of paradoxes
and an entire series of juxtapositions: the imminence of death with a
passionate live for life; a firm faith in the present with a yearning for
the past awareness of social pressures with partly living in the world
of legends, myths and superstitions; the rootlessness of their being
with their strong sense of belonging to their humble tenements; their
gaity with sadness; their terrible sense of freedom to follow their own
nature with their utter helplessness and constriction resulting from their
tragic dependence on nature or members of the family etc. These
paradoxes can yield very effective dramatic situations and characters,
which can be seen in different Synge’s plays. He made use of the
actual situations, characters and motifs drama from the life of Irish
peasantry :
Tell Miss G—or whoever it
may be -that I write of Irish
Country life I know to be true
and I most emphatically will
not change a syllable of it
because A.B. ore may think
they know better than I do.....19

19. THE ESSAYS OF THE ABBEY THEATRE, pp.167-8.

 40

According to Syage, drama must not be used as a vehicle for

propaganda Like Yeats and Moore, Synge too believed that drama
does not teach or prove anything. The Irish writers as a whole disliked
the role of a poet as a teacher and that of a drama as a propaganda
piece except of course, Shaw, but the problem playwright did not
belong to the Abbey group. Lady Gregory's book Our Irish Theatre
gives the copy of the rejection letter to the dramatists whose plays
could not be accepted for performance at the Abbey :
We do not desire propagandist
plays, nor plays written mainly
to serve some obvious moral
purpose, for art seldom concerns
itself with these interest or
opinions that can be defended
by argument, but with realities
of emotion and character that
become self-evident when made
PD
vivid to the imagination.

After examining Synge’s views on drama, we must now

concentrate on his views on language. He objected to the
contemporary prose drama in England and on the Continent which
is related to the artifcial medium need in the plays. He was in favour
of adapting to dramatic use of the actual idiom of the people. He
knew that dramatic speech has to be more precise, beautiful and
meaningful than ordinary speech, if it is to make any significant impact
upon an audience in an hour or two. Accordingly, like that of all
considerable dramatists, his dialogue is a selection from living
language, not a copy of it. George Moore declared:
Synge discovered great literature
in barbarous idiom as gold is
discovered in quartz and to do
. such a thing is a great literary
achievement.21
strong recognizes this :

20. GREGORY. AUGUSTA LADY : Our Irish Theatre p.101

21. MOORE, GEORGE: In a letter to the Irish Times, 13 February 1905.
 41

Synge's idiom (like Shakespeare’s)

is a selection from the idiom of
his day. The language of Synge's
plays is not the language of the
peasants, in so much that no
peasant talks consistently as
Synge's characters talk: it is the
language of the peasants, in that
it contains no word or phrase a
peasant did not actually use.22

The authenticity of Synge’s idiom can be doubly assured, with

the statement of unimpeachable Colum :
The speech of the Irish country
people is fine material for the
dramatists, and the Irish dramatists
have made good use of it. Synge’s
dialogue reproduces the energy
and extravagance of the peoples
speech ... It is true that
Synge’s dialogue is a splendid
convention; all the characters
speak to the same rhythm and
their speech is made up of words
1 and phrases from different parts
of the country with Gaelic idioms,
authorized and unauthorized.
Nevertheless, I feel as much reality
in Synge's as in the speech of that
acknowledged master of Irish life
oo
and manners - William Carleton.

St. John Ervine indicts Synge’s Anglo-Irish Idiom as a fake

peasant speech,’ whereas, T.S. Eliot approves of it as a proper
language for the type of plays synge was writing, which is a high
tribute to Synge :
The plays of John Millington
Synge from rather a special
r case, because they are based
upon the idiom of a rural people
: whose speech is naturally poetic,
both in imagery and in rhythm.
I believe that he even incorporated
phrases which he had heard from

22. STRONG, L.A.G. : op, cit, J.M. Synge (1941) p.22.

23. COLUM, PADRAIC : op. cit. pp-81-2
 42

these country people of Ireland.

The language of Synge is not
available except for the plays
set among the same people —
But in order to be poetic in prose,
a dramatist has to be so consistently
poetic that his scope is very limited.
Synge wrote plays about characters
whose originals in life talk poetically,
So that he could make them talk
poetically, so that he could make them
talk poetry and remain real people.24

This’peasant speeches a selection, refraction, compression of

the language that Synge had known from boyhood, among the people
of the Dublin, Wicklow and Galway countrysides. It is reinforced and
enriched by his life in the Aran Islands and in West Kerry. He himself
told that he had learnt much from listening with his ear to a crack in
the floorboards, to the talk in the kitchen of a country farmhouse. He
listened carefully to the idioms and phrases practised by these people
and tried to master their dialect. When he started writing plays, he
selected, adopted and writing plays, he selected, adopted and
compressed the language to be put in the shape of dialogues.
Synge used the prose medium for poetic themes and hence
a study to Synge’s dramaturgy actually means a study of the language
of his plays, of the idioms used for explaining the meaning and of
the rhythm of the speeches. But for the want of metres and poetic
forms, the language of Synge is more poetic then many poets and
poet-dramatists. Synge had to make sacrifices too. In order to maintain
a consistency of language in all his plays; he confined himself to
limited themes, to a small number of typed characters and to an
extremely restricted universe.
This Anglo-Irish based upon the Gaelic Structure, echoing its
Syntax and above all its tourneurs de phrases, In dask letters was

24. ELIOT, T.S. : Poetry and Drama pp.19-20

 43

ecision, a kind of deference to the language, a searching for the exact

word, that showed the Speaker’s unfamiliarty and his habit of
transposing, often literally, the equivalent Gaelic. We may quote Lady
Gregory on this matter :
The rich abundant speech of the
people was a delight to him.
When my in dark letters Cuchulain of Muirthemne
came out. he said to Mr. Yeats
that he nad been amazed to find
in it the dialect he had been
trying to master. He wrote to me
"Your cuchulain is part of my daily oread" 25
Synge has not merely used variations of the peasant's
speeches but he consciously made selections and modification in such
a manner that the language could be transformed into a proper
'dramatic vehicle suiting the taste of the audience without damaging
the realism of the theme and the background. Of course, the audience
did not fall in tune with him at once but gradually the language of
his plays began to be appreciated. Synge’s wish was to cultivate a
language so that every speech should be as fully flavoured as nut
or an apple. W.B. Yeats’ opinion is relevent in this context:
He made his own selection of
word and phrase, choosing what
would express his own personality
Above all, he made word and
phrase dance to a very strange
rhythm, which will always, till
his plays have created their own
tradition, be difficult to actors
who have not learned it from
his lips It is essential, for it
perfectly fits the drifting emotion,
the dreaminess, the vague yet
measureless desire, for which he
; would create a dramatic form,
i It blurs definition, clear edges.
everything that comes from the
will .... and it strengthens

25. GREGORY, AUGUSTA LADY : Our Irish Theatre p.124

 44

in every emotion whatever comes

to it from far off from brooding
memory and dangerous hope26

W.B. Yeats assessment is, perhaps, an over-poetical because

at several places Synges language is hardly poetic hot having fineness
and is derinitely violent and brutal using to the full the contrast between
his lyric structure and ‘the illustrious vulgar.

It also reminds us of the dramatist’s love for the melodramatic

excesses practised by Elixabethan and Jacobean dramatists which
sometimes seem ‘tumid’ in ionginus ‘sense. He claimedc that the
language is a reaction against the ‘faint colours’ and the ‘wavering
rhythms’ of Pre-Raphaelitism:
Synge writes : “..... it is the
timber of poetry that wears most
surely, and there is no timber
■ that has not strong roots among
the clay and worms27

Synge’s plays were revolutionary in content as well as in

purpose. The Irish audience, entertained by the plays written in the
melodramatic tradition were shocked by the reality encountered in
Synge’s plays. Synge showed England and the continent, that poetic
drama was still possible and humble material and poetically handled
actual speech can be made to yield both dramatic pieces at once
effective on the stage and replete with richness and beauties of art
whose appeal is universal and permanent. If there is brutality in the
actual life of the people presented in the plays, Synge woll not sugar
caot it :

You understand my position :

I am quite ready to avoid
hurting people’s feelings need
lessly, but I will not falsify

26. YEATS, W.B.L Essays & Introductions, 1961, p.299.

27. SYNGE, J.M. : Preface to Poems and Translations
 45

what l believe to be true for

anybody. If one began that where
would one end ? I would rather
no
drop piay-writing altogether
Such was Synge’s conviction about what he was doing, such
too, his passion for realism, and his loyalty to his art which in the
spirit of Crabbe but with greater imaginative Sympathy, delighted in
the representation of an observed scenes of life as Truth will paint
it and the Bard will not’.
These, then, were the bare outlines of task which the Irish
Theatre Movement set out to accomplish. Perhaps, the major aim of
these movements was to revive, strengthen, communicate and
popularize the Irish culture, tradition folklore etc. which was done
sincerely only by J.M. Synge :
Synge’s work more than that
of any of his contemporaries
comes closer to achieving the
assimilation of the Gaelic past
which the Irish Renaissance stood
for whether he was dramatizing
a tragic fact or incident of
violence in contemporary Irish
life, exploring the applications
of ancient fold tale or heroic
myth, or merely describing in
unpretentions language the daily
life of the tinker, the farmer
or the fisherman, he was
interpreting the traditional life
of Ireland. It is to him more
than to any other irishman
writing in English that we go
for an insight into this life.29

28. op. cit.

29.