J.M. Synge And The Drama Of Art

THE NEWSPAPER ATTACKS THAT GREETED Synge's first play, In the Shadow of the Glen, and the famous riots at the opening performance of The Playboy of the Western World took as their theme the notion that Synge was a traducer of Irish womanhood and a corrupter of the Irish nation. That the depiction in the first play of a peasant girl discontented with a crass, cold, miserly husband or the mention in the second of a ladies' undergarment could subvert the institution of marriage or demonstrate that the people of Ireland were unfit for home rule seems at this date unlikely. The student of Synge may by now be excused from defending him against these charges or even against the slightly more coherent assertions that his works are untrue to Irish life and language. Synge's plays are valid representations of the human world of thought and feeling which we all inhabit, and whether or not the pattern of life and speech portrayed in them is precisely coincident with that of the Irish peasantry at the tum of the century is a question irrelevant to matters of literary analysis or judgment. Unfortunately, much of the writing on Synge has been too partisan or simply too general to deal with him as a literary and dramatic artist.