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J. M. Synge

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Edmund John Millington Synge (/sɪŋ/; 16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, travel writer and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for his play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre.

Quick facts: Born, Died …
Although he came from a privileged Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Synge developed Hodgkin's disease, a metastatic cancer that was then untreatable. He died several weeks short of his 38th birthday as he was trying to complete his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Biography
Early life
Synge was born in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, on 16 April 1871. He was the youngest son in a family of eight children. His parents were members of the Protestant upper middle class. his father, John Hatch Synge, who was a barrister, came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow. He was the uncle of brothers, mathematician John Lighton Synge and optical microscopy pioneer Edward Hutchinson Synge. Synge's paternal grandfather, also named John Synge, was an evangelical Christian involved in the movement that became the Plymouth Brethren and his maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, had been a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Famine.

Synge's father contracted smallpox and died in 1872 at the age of 49. He was buried on his son's first birthday. Synge's mother moved the family to the house next door to her mother's house in Rathgar, County Dublin. Synge, although often ill, had a happy childhood there. 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.

Synge was educated privately at schools in Dublin and Bray, and later studied piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He travelled to the continent to study music, but changed his mind and decided to focus on literature. He was a talented student and won a scholarship in counterpoint in 1891. The family moved to the suburb of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in 1888, and Synge entered Trinity College, Dublin, the following year. He graduated with a BA in 1892, having studied Irish and Hebrew, as well as continuing his music studies and playing with the Academy Orchestra in the Antient Concert Rooms. Between November 1889 and 1894 he took private music lessons with Robert Prescott Stewart.

Synge joined the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club and read the works of Charles Darwin. He wrote: "When I was about fourteen I obtained a book of Darwin's .... My studies showed me the force of what I read, [and] the more I put it from me the more it rushed back with new instances and power ... Soon afterwards I turned my attention to works of Christian evidence, reading them at first with pleasure, soon with doubt, and at last in some cases with derision." He then continued, "Soon after I had relinquished the kingdom of God I began to take up a real interest in the kingdom of Ireland. My politics went round ... to a temperate Nationalism."

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, Kottabos: A College Miscellany.

Emerging writer
After graduating, Synge decided that he wanted to be a professional musician and went to Germany to study music. He stayed in Coblenz during 1893 and moved to Würzburg in January 1894. Partly because he was shy about performing in public, and partly because of doubt about his ability, he decided to abandon music and pursue his literary interests. He returned to Ireland in June 1894, and moved to Paris in January 1895 to study literature and languages at the Sorbonne.

During summer holidays with his family in Dublin he met and fell in love with Cherrie Matheson, a friend of one of his cousins and a member of the Plymouth Brethren. 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. This rejection affected Synge greatly and reinforced his determination to spend as much time as possible outside Ireland.

In 1896 Synge visited Italy to study the language for a time before returning to Paris. Later that year he met W. B. Yeats, who encouraged him to live for a while in the Aran Islands, and then return to Dublin and devote himself to creative work. That year he joined with Yeats, Augusta, Lady Gregory, and George William Russell to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which later established the Abbey Theatre. He also wrote some pieces of literary criticism for Gonne's Irlande Libre and other journals, as well as unpublished poems and prose in a decadent fin de siècle style. (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

The cottage where Synge lodged on Inis Meáin, now turned into the Teach Synge museum

John Millington Synge
A resident of the island of Inishmaan
In 1897 Synge had his first attack of Hodgkin's disease and also had an enlarged gland removed from his neck. The following year he spent the summer in the Aran Islands. He spent the next five summers in the Aran Islands, collecting stories and folklore, and perfecting his Irish, while continuing to live 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 and sent it to Lady Gregory for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1900, but she rejected it. (The play was not published until it appeared in the Collected Works.)

Synge's first account of life in the Aran Islands was published in the New Ireland Review in 1898 and his book, The Aran Islands, based largely on journals, was completed in 1901 and published in 1907 with illustrations by Jack Butler Yeats. Synge considered the book "my first serious piece of work". When Lady Gregory read the manuscript she advised Synge to remove any direct naming of places and to add more folk stories, but he refused to do either because he wanted to create something more realistic. The book expresses 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 Aran Islands were to form the basis for the plays about Irish rural life that Synge went on to write.

Synge Irish I Aran Family Synge's John Dublin