Edmund John Millington Synge (; 16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909), popularly known as J. M. Synge, was an Irish playwright, poet, writer and collector of folklores. As a key figure of the Irish Literary Revival during the early 20th century, he is widely regarded by critics and scholars as the most prolific playwright in Irish literature of the Edwardian era, and by several of his peers, among them William Butler Yeats. His play The Playboy of the Western World (1907), one of his best-known works, was initially poorly received, due to its bleak ending, crude depiction of poor Irish peasants, and the idealisation of patricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and street riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Tinker's Wedding (1909). Most of his plays were known for their highly realistic depictions of Irish society and culture, and included plots, themes, landscapes, and settings drawn from places he visited during his travels. Synge came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background, and mainly wrote about working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and what he saw as their pagan worldview. Owing to his ill health, he was schooled at home. His early interest in music led to a scholarship and a degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music. In 1894, he moved to Paris, where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and later returned to Ireland. Synge had a relatively short career (c. 1903–1909), but his works continue to be held in high regard due to their cultural and literary significance. He was also one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, along with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. He suffered from Hodgkin's disease, and died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910), considered by some as his masterpiece, though it was unfinished during his lifetime. Since his death, Synge has become one of Ireland's most popular and significant playwrights, and his works continue to be studied and discussed in Irish literary circles. He had a direct influence on later writers such as Samuel Beckett and Brinsley MacNamara, and several of his plays are still occasionally performed in Dublin.
Biography
Early life Synge was born on 16 April 1871, in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, the youngest of eight children of upper-middle-class Protestant parents. His older brother, Samuel Synge became a medical missionary to Southern China. His father John Hatch Synge was a barrister and came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow. Synge's paternal grandfather, also named John Synge, was an evangelical Christian involved in the movement that became the Plymouth Brethren, and his maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, was a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Famine. He was a descendant of Edward Synge, Archbishop of Tuam, and Edward's son Nicholas, the Bishop of Killaloe. His nephews included mathematician John Lighton Synge and optical microscopy pioneer Edward Hutchinson Synge. Synge's father died from smallpox aged 49 and was buried on his son's first birthday. His mother moved the family to the house next door to her mother's house in Rathgar, County Dublin. Although often ill, Synge had a happy childhood. He developed an interest in bird-watching along the banks of the River Dodder, and during family holidays at the seaside resort of Greystones, County Wicklow, and the family estate at Glanmore. He was home-educated at schools in Dublin and Bray, and studied piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He travelled to the continent to study music, but later decided to focus on literature. He was a talented student and won a scholarship in counterpoint in 1891. The family moved to the suburb of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in 1888, and Synge entered Trinity College, Dublin, the following year. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1892, having studied Irish and Hebrew, as well as continuing his music studies and playing with the Academy Orchestra in the Antient Concert Rooms. Between November 1889 and 1894 he took private music lessons with Robert Prescott Stewart. Synge later developed an interest in Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, and became a member of the Irish League for a year. He left the League because, as he told Maud Gonne, "my theory of regeneration for Ireland differs from yours ... I wish to work on my own for the cause of Ireland, and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement." In 1893 he published his first known work, a poem influenced by Wordsworth, in Kottabos: A College Miscellany.
Early work After graduating, Synge moved to Germany to study music. He stayed in Coblenz during 1893 before moving to Würzburg in January 1894. Because of his shyness about performing in public, coupled with his doubt about his own ability, he abandoned music to pursue his literary interests. He returned to Ireland in June 1894 before moving to Paris in January 1895 to study literature and languages at the Sorbonne. He met Cherrie Matheson during summer breaks with his family in Dublin. He proposed to her in 1895 and again the next year, but she turned him down on both occasions because of their differing views on religion. The rejections greatly affected him and reinforced his determination to move abroad. In 1896, he visited Italy to study the language before returning to Paris. He planned on a career in writing about French authors. That year he met W. B. Yeats who encouraged him to spend time on the Aran Islands, after which he returned to Dublin. In 1899 he joined Yeats, Augusta, Lady Gregory and George William Russell to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which later established the Abbey Theatre. He wrote some pieces of literary criticism for Gonne's Irlande Libre and other journals, as well as unpublished poems and prose in a decadent fin de siècle style. (These writings were eventually gathered in the 1960s for his Collected Works.) He also attended lectures at the Sorbonne by the noted Celtic scholar Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville.
Aran Islands and first plays
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
