The Aran Islands

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When the wind is from the north the old woman manages my meals with fair regularity; but on the other days she often makes my tea at three o'clock instead of six. If I refuse it she puts it down to simmer for three hours in the turf, and then brings it in at six o'clock full of anxiety to know if it is warm enough....The general ignorance of any precise hours in the day makes it impossible for the people to have regular meals.-from The Aran IslandsAt the behest of William Butler Years, whom he met in Paris during his bohemian sojourn there, JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE (1871-1909) traveled to the remote Irish Aran Islands for part of every summer from 1898 to 1902. The native Dubliner was seeking the hidden treasures of his native land, and he found the inspiration for the plays that would see his name live in posterity, including 1907's The Playboy of the Western World.This beautifully revealing 1906 work is Synge's journal of his time in the primitive Arans and among its hale, stalwart inhabitants. From the folktales of the Aran people to the quirks of their Gaelic-tinged English, from the pagan remnants that inflect their rough Christianity to the coarse monotony of their diet, Synge celebrates the simplicity of life in the Arans but never romanticizes it. These are the people who sparked Synge's imagination so strongly that all his plays reflect their hopes, their dreams, and their tragedies.

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After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, Synge left for Europe to write poetry. If W. B. Yeats had not discovered him in Paris and persuaded him to return to Ireland and absorb its native traditions, the Irish renaissance might have lost its best playwright. As it was, Synge's poetry of Celtic romanticism was rather more tempered with a European realism than Yeats and his renaissance had anticipated. Yeats sent Synge to the West of Ireland to get to know the peasants there. The result was, in addition to the journal The Aran Islands (1907), two short plays for the Abbey: The Shadow of the Glen (1903), in which a comic resurrection interrupts a widow's marriage bargaining, and Riders to the Sea (1904), about a mother's loss of her last son, a perfect condensed tragedy and probably the finest one-act play. The poorly received The Well of the Saints (1905), whose characters vehemently reject reality for comfortable illusion, offered the Abbey audience a warning of what was to come. This was Synge's masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World (1907), which touched off rioting at the theater. The playboy is Christy Mahon, a lout who becomes a hero among the Mayo peasantry when he boasts he has murdered his father. Satire on Irish romanticism conceals a parable of the poet's development and estrangement from his public. But Dublin nationalists heard only the people slandered, and Dublin prudery heard only the forbidden word "shifts" on Christy's lips. Playboy was the last play Synge saw staged. He died of cancer at age 37, never having completed Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910), his only work in the Celtic legendary mode.

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