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. 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. 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. (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 In 1897, Synge suffered his first attack of Hodgkin's, after which an enlarged gland was removed from his neck. He visited
Lady Gregory's home, at
Coole Park near Gort, County Galway, where he met Yeats again and also
Edward Martyn. He spent the following five summers there, collecting stories and folklore, perfecting his Irish, but living in Paris for most of the rest of each year. He also visited
Brittany regularly. During this period he wrote his first play,
When the Moon Has Set which he sent to Lady Gregory for the
Irish Literary Theatre in 1900, but she rejected it. The play was not published until it appeared in his
Collected Works. Synge's first account of life on the Aran Islands was published in the
New Ireland Review in 1898 and his book,
The Aran Islands, completed in 1901 and published in 1907 with illustrations by
Jack Butler Yeats. The book conveys Synge's belief that beneath the Catholicism of the islanders, it was possible to detect a substratum of the pagan beliefs of their ancestors. His experiences in the Arans formed the basis for the plays about Irish rural life that Synge went on to write. Synge left Paris for London in 1903. He had written two one-act plays,
Riders to the Sea and
The Shadow of the Glen, the previous year. These met with Lady Gregory's approval and
The Shadow of the Glen was performed at the Molesworth Hall in October 1903.
Riders to the Sea was staged at the same venue in February the following year.
The Shadow of the Glen, under the title
In the Shadow of the Glen, formed part of the bill for the opening run of the Abbey Theatre from 27 December 1904 to 3 January 1905.
The Shadow of the Glen is based on a story about an unfaithful wife, and was criticised by the
Irish nationalist leader
Arthur Griffith as "a slur on Irish womanhood". Griffith's criticism encouraged more attacks alleging that Synge described Irish women in an unfair manner. but later critics have stated he idealised the Irish peasantry too much. When the Abbey Theatre was established, Synge was appointed literary adviser and became a director, along with Yeats and Lady Gregory. He differed from what they believed the Irish theatre should be. He wrote to
Stephen MacKenna:I do not believe in the possibility of "a purely fantastic, unmodern, ideal, breezy, spring-dayish,
Cuchulainoid National Theatre" ... no drama can grow out of anything other than the fundamental realities of life, which are never fantastic, are neither modern nor unmodern and, as I see them, rarely spring-dayish, or breezy or Cuchulanoid. Synge's next play,
The Well of the Saints, was staged at the Abbey in 1905, again to nationalist disapproval, and then in 1906 at the
Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The critic Joseph Holloway asserted that the play combined "lyric and dirt".
Playboy riots and after Synge's widely regarded masterpiece,
The Playboy of the Western World, was first performed on 26 January 1907, at the Abbey Theatre. A comedy about apparent
patricide, it attracted a hostile reaction from sections of the Irish public. The ''
Freeman's Journal'' described it as "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood". Arthur Griffith, who believed that the Abbey Theatre was insufficiently politically committed, described the play as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform", and perceived a slight on the virtue of Irish womanhood in the line "... a drift of chosen females, standing in their
shifts ..." At the time, a shift was known as a symbol representing
Kitty O'Shea and her adulterous relationship with
Charles Stuart Parnell. A section of the audience at the opening rioted, causing the third act to be acted out in
dumbshow. The disturbances continued for a week, interrupting the following performances. Years later, after a similar disturbance at the opening of
The Plough and the Stars by
Seán O'Casey, Yeats said the audience had "disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an ever-recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius? Synge first and then O'Casey?" The writing of ''The Tinker's Wedding
began at the same time as Riders to the Sea
and In the Shadow of the Glen''. It took Synge five years to complete. ==Death==