John Millington Synge
The Irish playwright John Millington Synge (1871-1909) was part of the group clustered around the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in the early twentieth century. Synge, who had been teaching English in Paris, was convinced by W.B. Yeats to go live among the peasants in the rural west of Ireland. His plays are naturalistic representations of peasant life; they tended to shock Irish audiences because of their unidealized representation of rural violence and sexuality. The most famous attack occurred on The Playboy of the Western World, a comedy on the classical subject of patricide. Audiences rioted after the premiere in Dublin in 1907 and again in several American cities when the company toured the United States in 1911-12. Yeats and Lady Gregory defended Synge, who died of Hodgkins disease at the age of 37.[1]
- ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 203.