Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

One wonders where that speech came from, that speech that is, as he would have it, "fully flavored as a nut or apple." Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory tell us that he did not have it until he had been made free, through residence there, of the life of the Aran Islands. If one has read, however, the English of the prose translations of Dr. Hyde's "Love Songs of Connacht," one may see in their style the genesis of the style of "Riders to the Sea," and if one has read the "Dialogue between Two Old Women" of "The Religious Songs of Connacht," and "The Lout and his Mother," one may come to believe that these turned Synge toward the even more fully flavored and more rhythmic speech of the other plays. Perhaps, too, there were memories of the rhythm and of the flavor of the speech of him who made these words for Jasper Petulengro: "Life is sweet, brother, ... there's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die!"

The speech of Connacht folk-song rendered into the English of Connacht by Dr. Hyde, however, and the speech of Borrow were no more than the start, if they were as much as the start, that put him on the right road. If ever a man made his style himself, it was Synge. He made it out of his memory and out of his imagination, using "one or two words only that I have not heard," he said, "among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspaper," but evolving from that memory by his imagination a speech that is in harmony with the imagination of the people an imagination that is, he tells us, "fiery and magnificent and tender," though no such actual speech would be possible of reproduction from any one of them.

Synge is very definite in his statement of what he believes drama should be, and what he would make his own drama of Irish life, expressing his belief in the preface to "The Tinker's Wedding":—

The drama is made serious ... not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live....

We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's or a dramshop, but as we go to a dinner where the food we need is taken with pleasure and excitement....

The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything....

Of the things which nourish the imagination, humor is one of the most needful and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed at, in their own comedies.

In the preface to "The Playboy of the Western World" is this paragraph, completing his credo as to drama:—

On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality.

Although there are only about forty characters, all told, in the six plays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which for all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are men and women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality." Nora is "superb and wild" in her longings, and Maurya in her sorrow; and old Martin Doul "superb and wild" in his dream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb and wild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, if not representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way of romance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lament of Deirdre over Naisi! In the creation of character, as in style, and in technique of drama, Synge has done what he would. In only one of his plays, in "Riders to the Sea," are his leading characters representative Irish peasants; and even Maurya and her children, not only because of the isolation of their home in Aran, but because of the fate which has marked her mankind for death at sea, are somewhat apart from the fisher-people of the west coast. In all his four other plays of modern life, Synge has chosen characters who are, in his own words, "variations from the ordinary types of manhood,"—chosen them because of his deep-seated love of the unconventional. In "In the Shadow of the Glen," Michael Dara, the herd, is a common type, and Dan Burke, the old sheep farmer, not an uncommon type, but the tramp and Nora, the one by his wandering and the other by her brooding, are "variations," though very human both. Of the cottager class, too, are Timmy the Smith, Molly Byrne, and the "villagers" of "The Well of the Saints," as are, too, the girls and men of "The Playboy of the Western World" other than the Mahons and Michael James. Shawn Keogh, indeed, is a cut above cottagers, being almost a strong farmer, and Michael James himself was, no doubt, of a similar cottager respectability before he took to shebeen-keeping. Almost all the other characters of these modern plays are, with the exception of the priest of "The Tinker's Wedding" and the saint of "The Well of the Saints," squatters, beggars, and tinkers. Among them, few as they are all told, are very differing personalities—Christy the Playboy and his father, "a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old and crusty"; Martin Doul, a "shabby stump of a man," "of queer talk," middle-aged and blind and a beggar; Michael Byrne, the hardy, thieving, unimaginative tinker; and the romancing young tramp who gallants Nora when her own husband turns her out on the road;—"variations" all, perhaps, but human, and compelling, all of them, our interest, and greater or less sympathy. And the women! Nora, whom we leave as road-woman, I have likened to Hedda Gabler, and Sarah Casey in externals to Isopel Berners, but I do not know to whom to compare the others save Mary Byrne, as slightly suggestive of Villon's old woman. Mary Doul, blind Martin's blind wife, has a general likeness to some old witch out of a fairy tale, but she is far from being a witch; and Widow Quinn the incomparable might be compared, were she not too high-hearted, to the hag of "The Lout and Mother" in being