Plays, Poems and Prose [antikvár]

Some casual recollections of a talk with W. B. Yeats about a visit paid to Synge in Paris, before the Playboy and other plays were written, left me, I fear, with an exaggerated idea of Synge's debt to the French drama. Staying opposite the Odéon Theatre at the Hőtel Corneille, which became Synge's favourite Paris resort, Yeats found him reading Racine and vainly looking for a cue in the French classic drama, and wondered why he did not go back to Ireland and the Aran Islands both for health and an Irish initiative. Certain allusions in his letters and journals seem to show he had already then laid the seeds of ill health in his muscular frame, and learnt to touch the curious foreboding note he often sounded in his poems-not always sadly as we see in his paraphrase of Ronsard's comic Rabelais epitaph, which ends: Then death that changes happy things Damned his soul to water springs. No doubt at the Odéon Theatre, Synge had studied French comedy and seen plays of Moliere on the stage, and from a character like Sganarelle might have learnt how to weave with an Irish twist the cross-threads and contrarieties of The Playboy of the Western World. As for serious drama, he says (in a preface to his most unserious play-The Tinkers Wedding) that in the French sense of the word a drama is made serious, 'not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment not easy to define, on which our imagination lives.' When eventually he got to grips with a serio-comic subject, as in The Tinker's Weddings he drew upon the Wicklow and other folk-life with a zest, using the dialect to good effect. In the Aran note-books we easily trace the vii