John Millington Synge, the Aran Islands, and His Influences: A Short Study

By James MacGuire

John Millington Synge, who along with William Butler Yeats and Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory spearheaded the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century, was chiefly inspired by the four trips he took to the Aran Islands in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Synge was born into a prominent, if fading, landholding family of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy. After taking his degree at Trinity College, Dublin, he used his modest income to live in Europe in hopes of becoming a writer. His life took a decisive turn in Paris, where he met Yeats, who urged him to visit the Aran Islands – rocky, Irish-speaking outposts off the coast of Galway, and there “find a life that he has never found expression.” Synge’s resulting visits and the highly charged poetic language that flowed from them in prose, verse and, most of all, drama, changed the course of Irish and world literature. James MacGuire examines Synge’s background and early life, recounts the origins of the Irish Literary Revival, and compares and contrasts Synge’s writing on the Aran Islands with earlier and later accounts. This study also examines Synge’s work using Thomas Hardy as a contemporary point of reference in rural literature as well as Synge’s influence on later Irish dramatists, including Sean O’Casey, Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, and, in the twenty-first century, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, and Mikel Murfi. The book concludes with an appreciation of Synge’s continuing influence on Irish literature and Irish nationalism generally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: May 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781680532999

Book preview

PART ONE: Synge and Aran

Chapter One:

Preface

In 1973-4, as a Teaching Fellow in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, I took full advantage of the University’s pioneering History of Ideas approach to the relationship between the artist (especially writers) and Nature over the previous two centuries.

As an undergraduate, I had been impressed by J. Hillis Miller’s study, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, and he became a generous teacher and mentor. It was in this context that I first read Raymond Williams groundbreaking book, The Country and the City. Having visited Cambridge the previous summer where my friend Ellis Wasson was in the midst of his doctoral research on the Third Earl Spencer and the Great Reform Act of 1832, I made bold to write Professor Williams, then the chair of the English faculty, to propose I undertake research on the Anglo-Irish playwright John Millington Synge, who found his inspiration in the rugged life still lived at the end of the 19th century by the Irish-speaking Aran Islanders off the Galway coast.

I noted my own interest in American wilderness literature (Melville, London, Twain, Hemingway, etc.) and that I myself came from a small village on the south shore of Long Island, just twenty miles from Manhattan, where the Rockaway Indian had lived in the wild. With the coming of the white man in the 17th century, cattle had been grazed on the abundant marshlands there stretching to the Atlantic Ocean. Fox hunting had survived to the dawn of the 20th century, at which point the railroad and prosperity had combined to transform it temporarily into an early, stylish (for the time) seaside resort area. Even in my youth in the 1950s and 1960s, however, some roads were as yet unpaved, land was still farmed, there were still horses and riding, and a hardy surviving community of clam diggers and bay men lived off the channel and estuary waters.

Of course, today, little of that remains, as the Great City has inexorably crawled outward, and development has slowly squeezed the noose on the Five Towns, although there are still epiphanies in the seals and swans, wild turkeys, eagles and other creatures who remain undaunted, however surrounded by an inner suburb.

In any event, to my amazement, in the spring of 1974 Professor Williams wrote back kindly, and at the end of his letter said, If you would like to pursue any of these questions at Cambridge, we would welcome you here.

And so I went.

My initial focus was on Synge and the Aran Islands, which he visited five times between 1898 and 1902, and where his early one-act play Riders to the Sea, is set. Nicholas Grene had written a study of Synge in 1972 which, while excellent in his discussion of Synge’s County Wicklow heritage and also as a European dramatist, largely bypassed the Aran Islands, which I believed to be central to understanding Synge’s art.

I travelled to the Islands twice and spent weeks studying the Synge manuscripts in the Trinity College Dublin Library under the supervision of the tweedy and welcoming Dr. William O’Sullivan. After two years of my research at Cambridge I had accumulated about 200 pages of writing on my thesis subject. I had also run out of money from the research grant I had won and my other meager resources.

Thus, I made the decision to go to Thailand in the Peace Corps, which in turn led me to years of running maternal child health care programs and agricultural development projects in Burundi, Central Africa. In 1980 I made my way back to New York City and spent most of the next thirty years on the business side of publishing and television, writing when I could. I never stopped thinking about Synge, but it was only when my two sons had graduated from college and were starting careers of their own that I dared to resume my research and writing on him. And, not surprisingly, by this time my thinking had evolved, and I had decided to pay attention to Synge’s enormous influence on those who came after him as well, including Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Casey, Brian Friel, Martin MacDonagh, Conor McPherson and Mikel Murfi.

And so I set in.…

Chapter Two:

The Irish Literary Revival

Lady Augusta Gregory was born in 1852 at Roxburgh, a large west of Ireland estate owned by her father, Dudley Persse. The family was Ascendancy-- Protestant and Unionist in a Catholic, increasingly nationalist country. At 27 she married the 63 year-old Sir William Gregory, who had just retired from the governorship of Ceylon. He was the owner of a large estate, Coole, near Roxburgh. They lived the typical life of Irish landowners—social life in London, travel on the Continent, and raising her only son, Robert, at home. After Sir William’s death in 1892, she spent most of her time at Coole, learning Gaelic, editing her husband’s autobiography (published in 1894) and editing and publishing a selection of her grandfather’s letters.

Her interest in Gaelic brought her in touch with the Gaelic League, then a non-political organization founded by Douglas Hyde to encourage the use of Gaelic, or Irish.

In the summer of 1892 Lady Gregory met William Butler Yeats as he proceeded on a walking tour in the West with fellow Celtic enthusiast and well-to-do literary man, Douglas Martyn. Yeats was still suffering from his miserable love affair with Maud Gonne.

At Duras House, County Clare, in 1897, Yeats, Martyn and Gregory began talks to found the Irish Literary Theatre. The first objective was to obtain financial support for putting on plays in Dublin. We propose, they wrote in a prospectus, To have performed in Dublin in the Spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays with whatever their degree of excellence will be written with a right ambition and so build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature.

In 1900 Yeats published his manifesto, The Irish Literary Theatre in Literature. Later, George Moore would write, No praise would be too high for Yeats and those who were with him against every opposition and difficulty during those three years of pioneer work.

They sought three hundred pounds to this end and had many expressions of support, but eventually Martyn provided the guarantee himself. Originally, English actors were imported to perform the first plays at the Antient Concert Rooms in 1899, but in 1902 William and Frank Fay, two gifted amateur actors, were able to form a company of Irish players, and thereafter the plays were entrusted to their care by authors including Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory. As Moore recollected, "But the real beginning of a national theatre came in 1902, when in a little hall in Clarendon Street, the brothers Fay produced Kathleen ni Houlihan by Yeats and another early Literary Revival founder, AE’s Deirdre. Those who had the privilege of being present on the occasion will remember it as long as they live."

In 1904 Miss Annie Horniman, a wealthy Englishwoman from Manchester, grew interested in the Irish national theatre. As William Fay remembered, "She offered support and came to costume On Baile’s Strand, the show that opened the Abbey Theatre, for which she had paid 7,000 pounds. The first time we met I asked her if her hotel was comfortable. She said it was. "At breakfast my table was a bit rickety, and I called the waitress’ attention to it. ‘It’s real sorry I am, ma’am.’ Then she crossed to the sideboard, cut a thick slice of bread and propped it under the short leg.

The next time she visited, Fay recounted, I asked if the bread was still there. ‘It is,’ she said, ‘but they toasted it.’

Filled with a passionate interest in theatre, Horniman paid for the reconstruction of an abandoned Dublin theatre and provided an annual operating subsidy for six years.

There were many frictions in this period among the audience, the actors and the directors. The country as a whole was divided along religious lines with a small Protestant minority (Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory were all Protestants) controlling much of Ireland’s land and wealth.

We will see in greater detail in later chapters, but as his early artistic development matured, Synge had condemned early English directors putting on a bastard literary pantomime with many of the worst frights of the English stage. When Synge’s first play In the Shadow of the Glen was presented at Molesworth Hall in 1903 and later in an early American tour, the story (wherein an old Wicklow cottager fakes being dead to test his younger wife’s virtue) was recognized by elder viewers as being an old fireside story or hearth tale.

Lady Gregory first saw Synge in the north of Aran, where she was gathering folklore. Later he came to meet Yeats and her. We became friends at once, she wrote. He was direct, sincere and simple, not only a good listener but too good a one, not speaking much in general society. Later Yeats wrote to her of Synge’s plays, calling them Poetry in unlimited sadness.

He spent a good deal of time (at Coole) wandering in the woods where many shy creatures make their homes—marten, cats and squirrels, otters and badgers, and by the lake where the wild swans come and go.

Others had vivid memories of Synge at the theatre. Poet, playwright and fiction writer Winifred Letts:

"I forget the details of the day, only that the play was Riders to the Sea, that Sara Allgood was the mother and William Fay the son, that Maire O’Neill and Brigid Fay were the two daughters. This was not a play. It was life: It was the eternal battle of man with the sea that lets us bathe so safely at Blackrock Baths. This was tragedy as the Greeks knew it.

"I cannot remember any applause, only that hush that falls on supreme art…

"Memories of others I have in plenty. I see Kerrigan as the dead Naisi in Synge’s version of the Deirdre legend. Mrs. Pat Campbell was lying on his chest. One wondered if the weight equaled the glory of the moment.

"I seem to see Synge sitting there, dark, inscrutable as Fate. Of a poverty in the human spirit he was well aware.… ruthlessly he dragged it before the footlights. The Well of the Saints was to prove his point; better, he