John Millington Synge (1871-1909)
       |
Life
| [Edmund John Millington Synge; JMS] b. 16 April, Newtown Little [i.e., No. 2, Newtown Villas - one of two houses], Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin; family fortune derived from John Hatch, son of Sir Wm. Temple’s agent who massed estates in Wicklow, Meath and Dublin; owned town-house on Harcourt St. (later the High School); Glanmore Castle, a 4,000-acre estate in Co. Wicklow incorporating Roundwood Park, was built by John Hatch’s son-in-law Francis Synge, whose son John Hatch Synge (d.1845 - JMS’s grandfather) was known as “Pestalozzi John” after the Italian educationalist whose method he followed in the estate school, incorporating its own printing-press for pedagogical materials; the family estate in Wicklow was lost by his son (also John), under the terms of the Encumbered Estates Act of 1848 but partially repurchasing at auction in 1850, Francis Synge, his brother, and hence re-established Glanmore Castle as the family seat - both brothers being members of the Plymouth Brethern; JMS’s maternal gf. was Rev. Robert Traill (d. of fever, 1847), anti-Papist Rector of Schull and principal of the Schull Relief Committee and translator of Josephus’s The Jewish Wars - publ. posthum.); Traill’s widow was dg. of Drumboe Castle, Co. Donegal, and later lived with her family at Orwell Park, Dublin; his dg. Kathleen Traill m. John Hatch Synge, 1856 (3rd son of “Pestalozzi John” and father of JMS), living at first on Hatch St., and later at Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham [a terrace of 2 houses]; |
| JMS’s father, a lawyer, died of smallpox in 1872; his mother Kathleen, receiving an income of £400 from a Galway property, bolstered by annuities for her children from an uncle, moved from Hatch St. to 4 Orwell Park, Rathgar, to be next door to her mother Mrs. Traill whose house was afterwards occupied by his [JMS] sister Annie and her family - maintaining the practice of living together as an extended family of evangelical religious temper under the tutelage of Kathleen; Mrs Synge and her family moved to 31 Croswaithe Park, Kingstown [Glasthule, Dun Laoghaire], remaining from 1890-1906; one br. of JMS, Robert Synge, settled in Argentina as an engineer; another, Rev. Samuel Synge, settled in China as missionary (and wrote a Letters to his Daughter, in which he spoke of JMS’s religious doubts and lack of paternal direction); a third, Edward Synge, became land agent to the Synge estates and later to Lord Gormanstown, and was involved in evictions in Galway and Wicklow, causing JMS to reproach his mother - to which she replied, ‘What would become of us if our tenants in Galway stopped paying their rents?’; his sister Annie also married a solicitor; an aunt Jane dandled Parnell on her knee and later lamented his politics; Mrs. Synge moved the family to 31 Crosthwaite Park, a house adjoing that of her daughter and devoted herself to instructing her children and grandchildren (‘John - poor boy ... He had not found the Saviour yet’); JMS records in diary having got his head stuck in the front fence; ed. privately, at Mr. Harick’s Classical and English School, Upr. Leeson St., and later briefly at Aravon School, Bray; |
| JMS visits Isle of Man with his mother at eleven; shares childhood interest in ornithology with his cousin Florence Ross; reads and annotates Charles Waterson’s Wanderings in South America; reads Darwin and espouses atheism (‘By the time I was sixteen or seventeen I had renounced Christianity after a good deal of wobbling’); studies the violin with Patrick Griffin for two years; becomes an RIAM student, playing piano, flute, violin and winning awards for counterpoint and harmony; enters TCD, 1889; studies Irish with Rev. James Goodman (1828-96; ‘an amiable old clergyman who made him read a crabbed version of the New Testament ...’); studies Hebrew in his final year; reads George Petrie on Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands; joins Academy orchestra, 1891; grad. TCD BA (Hebrew & Irish, Pass), 1892; writes diary-entries in Irish, presum. for privacy from 1893; campaigns against Home Rule in the belief that it would provoke sectarian conflict, 1893; the Synges summered in Delgany and later in Duff House, a rented home at Lough Dan; publishes a Wordsworthian poem in Kottabos, 1893; decides to become a professional musician; travels to Germany with a cousin of his mother, Mary Synge, to study music, staying at Coblenz [Koblenz] with the van Eicken sisters (among whom Valeska), 1893; moves to Wurzburg, Jan. 1894, and studies piano and violin there, composing privately; returns to Ireland, June 1894; moves to Paris, 1 Jan. 1895; joins a debating society; studies literature and languages at Sorbonne, reading widely; summers in Ireland but returns to Paris, beginning of 1896; meets Cherrie Matheson, dg. of a leading a Plymouth Brethren, in Dublin; proposes to her in 1895 and 1896 - on the latter occasion in a letter written after three months in Rome; returns to Ireland and resumes seeing Cherrie; |
| [ top ] |
| forms friendship with Stephen MacKenna; meets W. B. Yeats [WBY] in Paris, Dec. 1896 (‘Fait la connaissance de W.B. Yeates’ [sic], Diary, 21 Dec. 1896), and is encouraged by him to go to the Aran Islands [as Yeats tells, Pref., Well of the Saints]; writes an autobiographical account of his youth in a notebook, Paris 1890s; later rewritten as the narrative of “Dora Comyn”; reads Pierre Loti (e.g., Pêcheur d’Islande/Iceland Fisherman, 1886, set among Breton fishermen); attends lecture by Anatole le Braz on Brittany, April 1897 and read his La Légend de la Morte en Basse Bretagne (1893) and Au Pays des Pardons (1894); attends lectures by Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville at the Sorbonne and writes criticism for various journals; finds Maud Gonne’s Paris group - Irlande Libre, with a newspaper of the same name - mendacious and gives up attending; suffers his first attack of Hodgkins’ disease, summer 1897; undergoes removal of enlarged gland in neck, Dec. 1897, resulting in “Under Ether” (essay); writes Vita Vecchia (1897-99), fourteen poems connected by prose narrative, after Petrarch [later incl. in Poems and Translations], and Étude Morbide (1899), an ‘imaginary portrait’, later rejected as unduly influences by literary decadence; purchases a Lancaster hand camera [using glass-plate negs.] for his first trip to Inishmore [Inis Mór]; 1898 - and subsequently records 53 images [Synge Papers, TCD Lib.; see Lilo Stephens, intro., Wallet, 1971]; travels to Galway for Inismore in the Aran Islands, 9 May 1898, following a dressing-down by Cherrie’s mother (a Plymouth Brethren) for pressing a marriage proposal on her daughter in view of his lack of means - apparently with her dg. Cherrie’s assent; first invited to visit Coole, meeting Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edward Martyn, summer 1898 - en route to Aran Islands - and subsequently spends four more late summers on the Aran Islands in 1899-1902; |
| stops first at Aranmore - where an uncle, Alexander Synge, had prev. visited as a proselytiser - unfortunately banning Sunday games - but soon decides to move ‘move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic is more generally used and the life is perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe’ (CW, Prose II, p.53); continues living chiefly in Paris, visiting Brittany and Ireland annually in other seasons - viz., returned to the islands in Sept. and travelled to Paris in Nov. 1989; his earliest account of Aran appears in New Ireland Review (“A Story from Inishmaan”, Nov. 1898); prob. first encounters Lady Gregory at Lit. Theatre productions, May 1899 and briefly afterwards in Paris, May 1900; returned to Ireland in May 1900 to summer with his family over three months;returned to Aran in Sept. 1900; encountered Cherrie with her fiancé on a Dublin street; purchased Blickensderfer typewriter on advice from Richard Best, autumn 1900; writes When the Moon has Set, 1900 - set on a ‘big house’ and based on dialogue fragment of 1896, reflecting his pain at being refused by Cherrie; gives a two-act version to WBY and Lady Gregory in 1901, to be rejected by them [continues long after to work on the MS, now held in TCD Library]; makes a week-long visit [the second] to Coole Park, Sept. 1901 and presents Yeats and Lady Gregory with a draft of The Aran Islands, shortly receiving enthusiastic response from the latter; publishes The Aran Islands (completed 1901; publ. Maunsel 1907), ‘[my] first serious piece of work’, ill. Jack B. Yeats, arising out of collaboration on articles on Congested Districts for Manchester Guardian, placed by its editor John Masefield, 1905; writes review of Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne, praising its dialect as ‘wonderfully simply and powerful ... almost Elizabethan [with a] force of language that makes it the only form of English that is quite suitable for incidents of the epic kind’; writes two-act plays Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen [later called The Shadow of the Glen and first drafted as In the Glen], Summer 1902 - set in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, nr. Synge family summer residence at Tomriland, Co. Wicklow, and based on a story narrated to Synge by Pat Dirane; |
| makes rough-drafts The Tinker’s Wedding, 1902; not played till 1909 (11 Nov. 1909, London) and 1971 (in Dublin) due to risk of offence to Catholic audiences; JMS’s third sojourn at Coole Park, Oct. 1902; quits Paris flat, March 1903, moving to London; his one-act play In the Shadow of the Glen was premiered (under that title) by Irish National Theatre at Molesworth Hall on 8 October 1903 - and the first of his plays to be staged - with W. G. Fay in the lead; based on a story of an unfaithful wife told him by Pat Dirane and narrated in The Aran Islands, it was attacked by Arthur Griffith and others in nationalist press as a slur on Irish womanhood and ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to ...’ (Griffith, United Irishman); the unflattering descriptions of peasants the play caused George [“Æ”] Russell, Maud Gonne and Douglas Hyde to resign their from the Irish National Theatre Society; Riders to the Sea premiered by the Irish National Theatre Society on 25 February 1904 at the Molesworth Hall; likewise attacked by Patrick Pearse (‘a sinister and unholy gospel ...’) and others; JMS produced fragment of play on Rebellion of 1798 at behest of Frank Fay, March 1904; living at family home, 31 Crosthwaite Park, Glasthule [Kingstown/Dun Laoghaire] but moved to 15 Maxwell Rd., Rathmines, some time before Oct. 1904; begins writing The Playboy of the Western World, a play based on the story of a man who killed his father with a loy [turf-cutting implement] which he purported to have heard from Pat Dirane on Aran; set in Belmullet, Co. Mayo, and first drafted as “The Murderer: a Farce” [later as “Murder Will Out” and “The Fool of the Family” before the final title was struck on]; appt. literary adviser to Abbey Theatre at its foundation, Dec. 1904; later appt. director with Yeats and Lady Gregory in the limited liability company, Sept. 1905; his play The Well of the Saints (Abbey 1905), also attacked by nationalists, but produced by Max Meyerfeld at Berlin Deutsches Theater, Jan. 1906; the play included a walk-on part for Molly Allgood [aka Máire O’Neill, q.v.]; JMS spends summer of 1905 in Ballyferriter perfecting his Irish (resulting in In West Kerry, 1907); moved back into the family home at Crosthwaite Park, Nov. 1906; told is mother of his feelings for Molly Allgood, Dec. 1905; |
| [ top ] |
|
The Playboy first produced Abbey Th., 26 Jan. 1907 (with Riders to the Sea as curtain-raiser), amid riots triggered by the phrase ‘chosen females in their shifts alone’ - which Fay aggravated by misquoting as ‘Mayo girls’ - counted the chief outrage by the Freeman’s Journal (i.e., the word shift) and thus conveyed in telegram from Lady Gregory to Yeats, then in Aberdeen [but note that the ‘shift’ sentence is considered one that was ‘struck out’ according to the FJ report, and not therefore in the staged version of the play at all; James Joyce, Sel. Letters, 1975, p.147, n.5]; riots exacerbated by Robert Gregory’s band of Trinity students who sing “God Save the King”; theatre seats torn up; Yeats returns from Aberdeen to address the audience as ‘The author of Cathleen Ni Houlihan’ and calls the DMP [police] into the theatre to keep the peace; Synge harried into an interview with Evening Mail, which he afterwards regrets; writes cautious letter to The Irish Times (‘There are, it may be hinted, several sides to The Playboy’); The Playboy published with preface acknowledging debt to ‘the folk imagination’ (1907); moved to flat on York Rd., Rathmines (13s. 6d. p.w.); underwent further operation of Hodgkins, as did his mother; returned to 31 Crosthwaite Park; travelled to London, and to Coblenz [Koblenz], writing to Molly as ‘your old tramp’ while working on his play Deirdre of the Sorrows, written for her; suffered death of his mother; returned to Ireland and settled in her house, 7 Nov. 1908; enters Elpis Nursing Home, Dublin, Feb. 1909; visited daily by Molly, with whom he became engaged; read the Bible in a brown-paper wrapping during his last days (acc. Edward Stephens); d. at Elpis of Hodgkins disease, in a bed with a view of the mountains, 24 March 1909; bur. Mount Jerome, Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin, in a family grave with Jane Synge (d.1899), 2nd dg. of John Synge of Glanmore, Co. Wicklow, and Mary Synge with her husband Samuel Synge (resp. 1864-1939 and 1867-1951); the Synge family refused to permit Molly to attend his funeral; Deirdre, left uncompleted, was performed at the Abbey in a version prepared by Yeats and Molly Allgood, for whom it was written, Jan. 1910 (being ‘Synge’s reverie over death, his own death’, acc. Yeats in in Autobiographies); |
| for W. B. Yeats, in his Nobel Award for Literature acceptance speech, Synge was ‘incapable of a political thought or of a humanitarian purpose’, meaning that he was pure imagination (Autobiographies; p.567); Vaughan Williams wrote an operatic version of Riders to the Sea in 1927 (premiered in Dec. 1937 at the Royal College of Music, London); the Collected Works were edited by Alan Price, Ann Saddlemyer, et al. (OUP 1962-68); JMS’s letters to Molly published in the centenary year when the catalogue of the Synge MSS in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin was also issued by Dolmen Press (1971); there is a portrait of Synge by J. B. Yeats in the Municipal Gallery, Dublin, and a plaque to him at 31 Crosthwaite Tce., Dun Laoghaire; his papers are held in the National Library of Ireland; in 1979, the Abbey Theatre presented Pope John-Paul II with a rare edition of The Playboy during his visit to Ireland; an annual Synge Summer School was opened by Cyril Cusack at Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow in 1991 and directed for many years thereafter by Nicholas Grene (TCD) at “Avondale”, the home of Charles Stewart Parnell; the session in 2000 was opened by Seamus Heaney; Druid Th. Company produced the six major plays as DruidSygne, premiered at Galway Theatre Festival (July 2005). PI NCBE DIB DIW DIH DIL OCEL KUN FDA G20 OCIL |
| [ top ] |
The authorised biography, J. M. Synge, 1871-1909 (Macmillan 1959) was published by David Greene (NYU) using papers held by Edward Stephens, the nephew of the writer, who received them in 1939 and died in 1955. Among these were manuscript versions of plays, completed and uncompleted, correspondence, diaries and 40 pocket-size notebooks filled by Synge. In 1953 Stephens asked Professor Greene to collaborate with him in editing a 750,000-word typescript which the former had prepared and shown to publishers. The state of the MS reflected the fact that - as Greene puts it in his Introduction - ‘he [Edwards] felt too keenly his obligations as a member of one of Ireland’s historic families’ and that ‘in places at least, the story of J. M. Synge tended to be obscured by that of the Synge family.’ When Stephens died of a heart attack in March 1955, his widow Lilo [pronounced with a short ‘i’] asked him to write the biography on condition that it appear as joint-authored with her husband. Greene acknowledges the importance of the records which only Edward Stephens could have assembled, but insists that ‘the telling of the story of Synge’s life has been my responsiblity’ and that ‘[t]he interpretations and conclusion [...] and the actual writing, are my own’. (pp.viii-ix.) Greene’s acquaintance with Edward Stephens dated back to 1939, at which period he also met Molly Allgood and her sister Sara, W. G. Fay and Rev. Samuel Synge - all deceased by 1955. Miss Peggy Mair supplied letters of Synge to Molly Allgood and Mrs. W. B. Yeats lent letters and other papers relating to Synge, while Richard Ellmann lent letters written by Yeats to Lady Gregory in the same connection, as well as assisting with Yeats’s handwriting. Greene commenced the book in September 1955 during a sabbatical in Dublin, but was later permitted by Mrs Stephens to carry the relevant papers to New York, where he completed it. (See Introduction to J. M. Synge, 1871-1909 (Macmillan 1959). [See also John Millington Synge: A Letter to His Mother (1903) - as attached.] |
 |
 |
 |
| [ See Synge Gallery - in this window or in a new window ] | ||
Works
| Poetry |
|
| Plays |
|
|
| Prose |
|
| Correspondence |
|
|
See also [q.auth.,] ‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room: The Manuscripts of J. M. Synge’, in Long Room, 1, 3 (TCD Library [q.d.]) |
| [ top ] |
| Collected Editions |
|
| Reprint Editions |
|
Reprints of The Playboy of the Western World |
|
|
[ top ]
| Works of J. M. Synge available at Gutenberg Project (June 2007) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
| .... Go to Gutenbergy Project [ online ] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Also at Internet Archive | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||
[ top ]
Bibliographical Details
The Works of John M. Synge, 4 vols. (Dublin: Maunsel & Company, Ltd. 1910), front. (ports.); 21.9 cm. Vol. I: In The Shadow Of The Glen. Riders To The Sea. The Well Of The Saints. The Tinker's Wedding. Vol. II. The Playboy Of The Western World. Deirdre Of The Sorrows. Poems. Translations from Petrarch. Translations from Villon and Others. Appendix: First performance of the plays. Vol. III. The Aran Islands. Vol. IV. In Wicklow. In West Kerry. In the Congested Districts. Under ether. [Note: Vol. IV represents the first printing in book form of “In Wicklow and West Kerry”.] Frontispieces - Vol. I.: From a photograph by James Paterson; Vol. II: From a drawing by J. B. Yeats; Vol. III: From a photograph by Chancellor; Vol. IV: From a photograph by James Paterson].Robin Skelton, Alan Price & Ann Saddlemyer, ed., Collected Works of John Millington Synge (London: Oxford University Press 1962-68), as follows: Robin Skelton [General Editor], Vol. I, containing “Poems, Translations, and some Poetic Drama”; Alan Price, ed., Vol. II (1966), containing “Prose: Autobiographical Sketches The Aran Islands; In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, and various Reviews and Essays or Notes about Literature”; Ann Saddlemyer, ed., Vol. III (1968), containing “Riders to the Sea”; “The Shadow of the Glen”; “The Well of the Saints”; “When the Moon Has Set”; Fifteen Scenarios, Dialogues, and Fragments from Unpublished Material; Draft Material; editorial apparatus”. Ann Saddlemyer, ed., Vol. IV (1968), containing “The Tinker’s Wedding”; “The Playboy of the Western World”; “Deirdre of the Sorrows”; Draft Material; editorial apparatus. [See Weldon Thornton, Synge and the Western Mind, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979.]
Anne Saddlemyer, ed., The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays [World Classics Series] (OUP 1995), 213pp., in which the texts stand as in 1968 edn., with refs. to variants for The Well of the Saints more recently discovered; also select bibliography and bio-chronology; titles include Riders to the Sea [first publ. 1903]; The Shadow of the Glen ([1904]; The Tinker’s Wedding [1907]; The Well of the Saints [1905]; The Playboy of the Western World [1907]; Deirdre of the Sorrows [orig. 1910].
Alison Smith, ed., Plays, Poems and Prose [Everyman] (London: J. M. Dent 1975), and Do [rev. edn. as] Collected Plays, Poems and The Aran Islands [Everyman Library; rev. edn.] (London: J. M. Dent 1992, 1996), xxxiv, 382pp. CONTENTS: Plays in one act: Shadow of the glen; Riders to the sea. Plays in two acts: Tinker’s wedding. Plays in three acts: Well of the saints; Playboy of the western world; Deirdre of the sorrows. Poems and translations: Aran Islands. Bibl., pp.[xxxiii]-xxxiv.]
In Wicklow and West Kerry (1910) [first published in The Works of J. M. Synge, 1910, as Vol IV of 4], contains “In Wicklow” [The Vagrants of Wicklow; The Oppression of the Hills; On the Road; The People of the Glens; At a Wicklow Fair - The Place and the People; A Landlord’s Garden in County Wicklow; Glencree], and “In West Kerry” (1907), “In the Congested Districts”, and “Under Ether”. The 1911 edn. omits “Under Ether” and retitles the third “In Connemara” [From Galway to Gorumna; Between the Bays of Carraroe; Among the Relief Works; The Ferryman of Dinish Island; The Kelp Makers; The Boat Builders; The Homes of the Harvestmen; The Smaller Peasant Proprietors; Erris; The Inner Lands of Mayo - the Village Shop; The Small Town; Possible Remedies]. The Kerry pieces first appeared in successive numbers of The Shanachie for 1907; the Connemara sections originally appeared as a series of twelve articles in Manchester Guardian (10 June-26 July 1905); ill. Jack B Yeats [A Wicklow Fair; A Wicklow Vagrant; A Man of the Glens; The Circus; The Strand Race; The Ferryman of Dinish Island; The Boat Builder; A Small Town].
The Works of John M. Synge, Library Edition, Large Crown 8vo., 5 vols. (25/6 net); Pocket edn., foolscap 8vo., quarter parchment, gilt top. Complete set of 8 vols. in box (20/- net), also separately (2/6 net). Vol. 1, The Playboy of the Western World; Vol. II, Deirdre of the Sorrows; Vol. III, The Well of the Saints; Vol. IV, The Tinker’s Wedding, Riders to the Sea, and In the Shadow of the Glen; Vol. V, Poems and Translations; Vol. VI & VII, The Aran Islands; Vol. VIII, In Wicklow and West Kerry. Also, The Aran Islands, with drawings by Jack B. Yeats, large Crown 8vo., cloth, gilt, 6/-.
DruidSynge: The Plays of John Millington Synge [Catalogue of Druid Th. Co. presentation of the Synge stage canon] (Galway: Druid Performing Arts 2005), 121pp., ill., ports. [incl. “John Millington Synge” by Tim Robinson, p.27; biographies of cast and crew.
Query, An Old Woman’s Lamentations (Dublin: Cuala Press 1907) [presum. Riders to the Sea].
[ top