Riders to the Sea/The Shadow of the Glen/The Tinker's Wedding/The Well of the Saints/The Playboy of the Western World/Deirdre of the Sorrows [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Each work of art must have been possible to only one man at one period and in one place." This entry from an early notebook aptly describes not only John Millington Synge's personal aesthetic but also his contribution to the Irish dramatic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. For there is more than a grain of truth in William Butler Yeats's assertion that the Abbey Theatre was 'Synge's theatre'/ despite the heroic efforts of Lady Gregory and himself to keep it alive after their colleague's early death in 1909. Certainly in terms of numbers and variety Lady Gregory's contribution was immense; a good deal of Yeats's energy also went into 'theatre business, management of men'.^ But it was Synge's plays that provoked the greatest controversy and first received professional productions in other languages. And it is to Synge that critics now most frequently turn as the forerunner of contemporary dramatists such as Samuel Beckett. It was not always so. When Yeats and Lady Gregory first met in '896 and conceived the idea of a literary theatre which would encourage a national movement of the arts, thereby, in Lady Gregory's famous phrase, restoring to Ireland its native dignity, Synge was attempting to establish a career in Paris. He had originally planned to be a violinist and composer, and studied first at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, then for a year in Germany. But by 1895 he had switched his allegiance to languages, moving beyond the Irish and Hebrew he had studied at Trinity College to incorporate German, French, and Italian, with the vague intention of becoming European correspondent for various Irish and English journals. More important still, perhaps influenced by the courses he was taking at the Sorbonne and his reading of contemporary writers, he attempted some poetry ' Unless otherwise stated, all Synge's notebook entries are published in vol. ii of the IVorks, J. M. Synge: Prose, cd. Alan Price (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), 347-51. ' Quoted by Joseph Hottoway, jfoseph HoHomay's Abbey Theatre: A Selection from his Unpublished Journal Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O'Neill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 172. ' W. B. Yeats, 'All things can tempt me'. Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1952), 109.