1871-1909 [Edmund John Millington Synge]; b. 16 April, Newtown Little [i.e., No. 2, Newtown Villas - one of two houses], Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin; pat. grandfather was John Hatch Synge, called ‘Pestalozzi John’ on account of his admiration for the Italian educationalist, and founder of an educational experiment at his estate in Glamore, Co. Wicklow; maternal gf. was Rev. Robert Traill of Schull Relief Committee (d.1847); his father, 3rd son of ‘Pestalozzi John’, became a lawyer and died of smallpox in 1872; his mother then moved from Hatch St. to 4 Orwell Park, Rathgar, next door to grandmother, after occupied by his sister Annie [there is a plaque to Synge at Croswaithe Tce., Dun Laoghaire]; his br. Robert settled in Argentina as engineer; br. Samuel settled in China as missionary; Edward became land agent to the Synge estates and later to Lord Gormastown, and was involved in evictions in Galway and Wicklow, causing John to reproach his mother - to which she replied, ‘What would become of us if our tenants in Galway stopped paying their rents?’); ed. privately, at Mr Harick’s Classical and English School, Upr. Leeson St., and later briefly at Aravon School, Bray; visited Isle of Man with his mother at eleven; shared childhood interest in ornithology with his cousin Florence Ross; read and annotated Charles Waterson’s Wanderings in South America; read Darwin; studied violin with Patrick Griffin for two years; RIAM student, piano, flute, violin, winning awards for counterpoint and harmony; entered at TCD, 1889, and studied Irish with Rev. James Goodman (1828-96; ‘an amiable old clergyman who made him read a crabbed version of the New Testament ...’), ‘and Hebrew in final year; read Petrie on Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands; joined Academy orchestra, 1891; grad. TCD BA (Pass), 1892; published Wordsworthian poem in Kottabos, 1893; decided to become professional musician; travelled to Germany with a cousin of his mother, Mary Synge, to study music, staying at Coblenz with the van Eicken sisters (among whom Valeska), 1893; moved to Wurzburg, Jan. 1894, and studied piano and violin there, composing privately; returned to Ireland, June 1894; moved to Paris, 1 Jan. 1895; joined debating society; studied literature and languages at Sorbonne, reading widely; visited Italy, 1896; visited Dublin in summers, meeting Cherrie Matheson, dg. of a leading a Plymouth Brethren; proposed in 1895 and 1896; friendship with Stephen MacKenna; met Yeats in Paris, Dec. 1896, and was encouraged by him to go to the Aran Islands [Yeats, Pref., Well of the Saints]; read Pierre Loti; attended lecture of Anatole le Braz on Brittany, April 1897; also attended lectures by Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville at the Sorbonne and wrote criticism for various journals; found Maud Gonne’s Paris group (Irlande Libre with a paper of the same name) mendacious and gave up attending; first attack of Hodgkins’ Disease, 1897; Vita Vecchia, 1897-99, fourteen poems connected by prose narrative, after Petrarch, and Étude Morbide, 1899, an ‘imaginary portrait’, later rejected as unduly influences by literary decadence; removal of enlarged gland in neck, 1897 (producing “Under Ether” essay); When the Moon has Set, 1900 [var. 1901], all unpublished prior to Collected Works (1962-68); travelled to Inismore, May 1898; first invited to visit Coole, meeting Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edward Martyn, summer 1898; spent late summers of 1899-1902 on Aran Islands (where an uncle, Alexander Synge, had prev. visited as a proselytiser, unfortunately banning Sunday games), living chiefly in Paris; visited Brittany and Ireland annually in other seasons; his earliest account of Aran appeared in New Ireland Review, 1898; met Lady Gregory briefly in Paris, May 1900 and prob. in at Lit. Theatre productions, May 1899; published ‘first serious piece of work’, The Aran Islands (completed 1901; publ. Maunsel 1907), ill. Jack B. Yeats, arising from collaboration on articles on Congested Districts for Manchester Guardian, placed by John Masefield, 1905; made a week-long visit [the second] to Coole Park, Sept. 1901 and presented Yeats and Lady Gregory with a draft of The Aran Islands, shortly receiving enthusiast from the latter in response; wrote two-act plays Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen [earliest title; drafted as In the Glen], written Summer 1902; rough-drafted The Tinker’s Wedding, 1902; not played till 1909 (London) and 1971 (Dublin) due to risk of offence to Catholic audiences; third sojourn at Coole Park, Oct. 1902; quit Paris flat, March 1903, moving to London; In the Shadow of the Glen performed (under that title) by Irish National Theatre with W. G. Fay in the lead, at Molesworth Hall, 10 October 1903; based on a story of an unfaithful wife told him by Pat Dirane and narrated in The Aran Islands, is was attacked by Arthur Griffith and others in nationalist press for slur on Irish womanhood; Riders to the Sea, performed in Feb. 1904, likewise attacked by Patrick Pearse (‘a sinister and unholy gospel ...’) and others; produced fragment of play on Rebellion of 1798 at behest of Frank Fay, March 1904; appt. literary adviser to Abbey Theatre at its foundation, Dec. 1904; later appt. director with Yeats and Lady Gregory in the limited liability company, Sept. 1905; The Well of the Saints (Abbey 1905), also attacked by nationalists, but produced by Max Meyerfeld at Berlin Deutsches Theater, Jan. 1906; spent summer of 1905 in Ballyferriter perfecting his Irish (resulting in In West Kerry, 1907); The Playboy of the Western World (Abbey, 26 Jan. 1907), based on the story of a man who killed his father with a loy [turf-cutting implement] which Synge purported to have heard from Pat Dirane on Aran, first produced amid riots triggered by the word ‘shift’ - (accounted the chief outrage by Freeman’s Journal and thus recounted in letter of Yeats to Lady Gregory; riots exacerbated by Robert Gregory’s band of Trinity students who sang ‘God Save the King’; Yeats returned from Aberdeen to address the audience as ‘The author of Cathleen Ni Houlihan’, and brought police into the theatre; Playboy published with preface acknowledging debt to ‘the folk imagination’; last illness; engagement to Molly Allgood, to whom he wrote letters signed ‘your old tramp’; acc. Edward Stephens, read the Bible in brown-paper wrapping during last days; d. at Elpis Nursing Home, Dublin, of Hodgkins disease, 24 March; Deirdre of the Sorrows, begun 1907, uncompleted, and performed at the Abbey in version prepared by Yeats and Máire O’Neill [Molly Allgood], for whom it was written, Jan. 1910 (Yeats calling it in Autobiographies, ‘Synge’s reverie over death, his own death’); ; letters to Molly published in the centenary year when the catalogue of the Synge MSS in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin was also issued by Dolmen Press (1971); the entry in the DNB (2nd Supplement, III) was written by John Masefield; an annual Synge Summer School was opened at Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow by Cyril Cusack in 1991, and proceeds annual under the direction of Nicholas Grene; there is a portrait of Synge by J. B. Yeats in the Municipal Gallery, Dublin. PI NCBE DIB DIW DIH DIL OCEL KUN FDA G20 OCIL
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Poetry
Poems and Translations (Dublin: Cuala Press 1909) [ltd. edn. 250 copies], prefs. by W. B. Yeats (April 4 1909) and J. M. Synge (Glenageary, Dec. 1908); another edn. published privately by John Quinn (1909) [75 copies]; Robin Skelton, ed., ‘Some Sonnets from ‘Laura in Death’, after the Italian of Petrarch (Dublin: Dolmen 1971) [ltd. edn. 775]; Robin Skelton, ed., Poems, Collected Works, Vol. I (Dolmen Press/OUP 1962), 128pp. [with introduction and apparatus].
Plays
The Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea (London: Elkin Mathews 1905) [4,000 iss. in 1910 rep.]; The Well of the Saints by J. M. Synge: Being Volume Four of Plays for an Irish Theatre (London: A. H. Bullen 1905), with an ‘Introduction: Mr. Synge and His Plays’ by W. B. Yeats; Do., [Maunsel Pocket Edn.] (Dublin: Maunsel 1911); The Aran Islands (Dublin: Maunsel 1907); The Playboy of the Western World (Dublin: Maunsel 1907), J. B. Yeats port.; Deirdre of the Sorrows (Dublin: Cuala 1910), Do., [Maunsel Pocket Edn.] (Dublin: Maunsel 1911); The Tinker’s Wedding, Riders to the Sea, and The Shadow of the Glen, all in Maunsel Pocket Edns. (Dublin: Maunsel 1912).
Correspondence
‘Letters of John Millington Synge and Material Supplied by Max Meyerfeld’, in Yale Review (July 1924), pp.690-709; Ann Saddlemyer, ed., John Millington Synge, Some Unpublished Letters (Montreal: Redpath Press 1959), 33pp.; Saddlemyer, ed., Some Letters of John M Synge to Lady Gregory and WB Yeats (Cuala Press 1971), 85pp. [ltd. end. 500 copies]; Saddlemyer, ed., Letters to Molly, John Millington Synge to Maire O’Neill (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UP 1971), xxxiv+330pp.; My Wallet of Photographs, sel. by L[ilo] M. Stephens (Dublin: Dolmen 1971); Saddlemyer, ed., Some Letters of John M. Synge to Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Cuala 1971); Saddlemyer, ed., ‘Synge to MacKenna: The Mature Yeats’, Massachusetts Review, 5, 2 (Winter 1964), pp.279-295 [rep. in Robin Skelton and David R. Clark, eds., Irish Renaissance: A Gathering of Essays, Memoirs, and Letters from the Massachusetts Review, Dublin: Dolmen 1965, pp.65-79]; Synge Manuscripts in the Library of TCD, A Cat. Prepared for [...] the Synge Centenary Exhibition, 1971 (Dublin: Dolmen 1971), 55pp.
Collected Editions
Robin Skelton, Alan Price & Ann Saddlemyer, eds., Collected Works of John Millington Synge, 4 vols. (OUP 1962-68), Vol. 1: Poems, ed. Skelton (1962), Vol. 2: Prose, ed. Price (1966), Vols. 3 & 4: Plays, ed. Saddlemyer (1968); J. M. Synge, Plays, Poems and Prose [Everyman] (London: J. M. Dent 1975); Do., reps. (1992, &c.); T[om] R Henn, ed., The Plays and Poems of J. M. Synge [Univ. Paperback Drama Book] (London: Methuen 1963; rep. 1968) [infra]
Reprint Editions
David R. Clark, ed., John Millington Synge, Riders to the Sea (Columbus Ohio: Merrill 1970), vi+137pp.; Anne Saddlemyer, ed., The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays [World Classics Series] (OUP 1995) [infra]; The Playboy of the Western World and Two Other Irish Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1996), 224pp. [Synge, Yeats, and O’Casey]; Tim Robinson, ed. & intro., The Aran Islands [1907] (Penguin 1997), 150pp.
Bibliographical Details
Robin Skelton, Alan Price, & Ann Saddlemyer, ed., Collected Works of John Millington Synge (London: Oxford University Press 1962-1968), as follows: Robin Skelton [General Editor], VOL II, containing "Poems, Translations, and some Poetic Drama"; Alan Price, ed., VOL. II (1966), containing "Prose: Autobiographical Sketches The Aran Islands; In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, and various Reviews and Essays or Notes about Literature"; Ann Saddlemyer, ed., VOL III (1968), containing "Riders to the Sea"; "The Shadow of the Glen"; "The Well of the Saints"; "When the Moon Has Set"; Fifteen Scenarios, Dialogues, and Fragments from Unpublished Material; Draft Material; editorial apparatus". Ann Saddlemyer, ed., VOL. IV (1968), containing "The Tinker’s Wedding"; "The Playboy of the Western World"; "Deirdre of the Sorrows"; Draft Material; editorial apparatus. [See Weldon Thornton, Synge and the Western Mind, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979.]
Anne Saddlemyer, ed., J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays [World Classics Series] (OUP 1995), 213pp., in which the texts stand as in 1968 edn., with refs. to variants for The Well of the Saints more recently discovered; also select bibliography and bio-chronology; titles include Riders to the Sea [first publ. 1903]; The Shadow of the Glen ([1904]; The Tinker’s Wedding [1907]; The Well of the Saints [1905]; The Playboy of the Western World [1907]; Deirdre of the Sorrows [orig. 1910].
In Wicklow and West Kerry (1910), contains "In Wicklow", "In West Kerry" (1907), "In the Congested Districts", and "Under Ether". The 1911 edn. omits the last-named and retitles the third "In Connemara". The Kerry pieces first appeared in successive numbers of The Shanachie for 1907; the Connemara sections originally appeared as a series of twelve articles in Manchester Guardian (10 June-26 July 1905); ill. Jack B Yeats.
The Works of John M. Synge, Library Edition, Large Crown 8vo., 5 vols. (25/6 net); Pocket edn., foolscap 8vo., quarter parchment, gilt top. Complete set of 8 vols. in box (20/- net), also separately (2/6 net). Vol. 1, The Playboy of the Western World; Vol. II, Deirdre of the Sorrows; Vol. III, The Well of the Saints; Vol. IV, The Tinker’s Wedding, Riders to the Sea, and In the Shadow of the Glen; Vol. V, Poems and Translations; Vol. VI & VII, The Aran Islands; Vol. VIII, In Wicklow and West Kerry. Also, The Aran Islands, with drawings by Jack B. Yeats, large Crown 8vo., cloth, gilt, 6/-.
Query, An Old Woman’s Lamentations (Dublin: Cuala Press 1907).
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Early notices: For contemporary Irish views of Synge, see Irish Book Lover, Vols. 1-6; also Frank Hugh O’Donnell, The Stage Irishman and the Pseudo-Celtic Drama (1904), attack on the Abbey rep. in Stephen Brown, Stephen Brown, S.J., Guide to Books on Ireland (Dublin: Talbot 1912) [q.pp.].
Standard Biographies & Major studies, Daniel Corkery, Synge and the Anglo-Irish Literature: A Study (Cork UP; London: Longmans, Green 1931; Cork UP 1966); David H. Greene & Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge 1871-1909 (NY: Macmillan 1959; 1961); D. Gerstenberger, John Millington Synge (NY: Twayne UP 1964); Ann Saddlemyer, J. M. Synge and Modern Comedy (Dublin: Dolmen 1968); Robin Skelton, J. M. Synge and His World (London: Thames & Hudson; NY: Viking 1971), 144pp., ills.; Andrew Carpenter, ed., My Uncle John: Edward Stephens's Life of J. M. Synge (OUP 1974), 222pp., index [infra]; N. Grene, Synge: A Critical Study Interpretation of the Plays (NJ: Rowman & Littlefield; London: Macmillan 1975); Weldon Thornton, Synge and the Western Mind (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979), 169pp.; Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language (London: Macmillan 1979), and Do., [2nd edn.] (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1993), 294pp. Mary C. King, The Drama of J. M. Synge (London: Fourth Estate 1985); David M. Kiely, J. M Synge: A Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994). W. J. McCormack, The Fool of the Family: The Life and Death of J. M. Synge (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2000), 499pp.;
Paper collections, Thomas R. Whitaker, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Playboy of the Western World (NJ: Prentice Hall 1969); Maurice Harmon, ed., J. M. Synge Centenary Papers, 1971 (Dublin: Dolmen 1972), xvi+202pp [inc. Seán Ó Tuama, ‘Synge and the Idea of a National Literature’, pp.1-17; Alan J. Bliss, ‘The Language of Synge’, cp.35; Thomas Kilroy, ‘Synge and Modernism’, pp.167-79, &c.]; Suheil B Bushrui, ed., Sunshine and the Moon’s Delight, A Centenary Tribute to John Millington Synge (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1972) [incl. Ann Saddlemyer, ‘Art, Nature and "The Prepared Personality", A Reading of The Aran Islands and Related Writings’, pp.107-20; Robert O’Driscoll, ‘Yeats’s Conception of Synge’, pp.159-71]; Ayling, ed., J. M. Synge: [Collection of Critical Essays on] Four Plays (London: Macmillan 1992); Nicholas Grene, ed., Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991-2000 (Dublin: Lilliputt 2000), 220pp. [infra].
Bibliographies & reference, [q. auth.,] ‘A Check List of First Editions of Works by John Millington Synge and George William Russell’, TCD Annual Bulletin (1956), pp.4-9; M. J. MacManus, A Bibliography of Books Written by John Millington Synge [Bibliograpies of Irish Authors, No. 4] (Dublin: Talbot Press 1930) [prev. in Dublin Magazine, n.s., V (Oct.-Dec. 1930), pp.47-51]; Sean O’Faolain, ‘John Millington Synge’ (1871-1909), in F. W. Bateson, ed., The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, III (Cambridge UP [1967]), pp.1062-63; E. A. Kopper Jr., ed., John Millington Synge, A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall; London: George Prior 1970); Paul M. Levitt, J. M. Synge: Bibliography of Published Criticism (Dublin: IUP 1974), 224pp. E. H. Mikhail, J. M. Synge: A Bibliography of Criticism (London: Macmillan; Totowa, NJ: Rowman &c. 1975), 214pp.; Kopper, A J. M. Synge Literary Companion (NY: Greenwood Press 1988).
Critical studies: annual listing
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Andrew Carpenter, ed., My Uncle John: Edward Stephens's Life of J. M. Synge (OUP 1974), 222pp., index; Foreword by Lilo M Stephens; Introduction & Acknowledgements; The Synge Family; My Uncle John; Pt. I: 1871-1892; Pt II: 1893-1900; III: 1901-1909 [back-paper notice of Collected Works, ed. Robin Skelton, et al. Letters to Molly [Maire O’Neill], ed. Ann Saddlemyer; My Wallet of Photographs, Collected Photographs of J. M. Synge, arranged and introduced by Lilo Stephen (Dublin: Dolmen Press ); J. M. Synge Centenary Papers, ed. Maurice Harmon (1971). Crayon Port. by James Paterson.
Daniel J. Casey, ed., ed., Critical Essays on John Millington Synge (NY: G.K. Hall [1994];), ix, 188pp. Contents: Casey, ‘J. M. Synge: a reappraisal’; David H. Greene, ‘Synge’s poetic use of language’; Seamus Deane, ‘Synge’s prose writings : a first view of the whole’; Alan Price, ‘The poems’; Robin Skelton, ‘Text and context in When the moon has set’; Mary C. King, ‘Yeats and Synge: 'A young man’s ghost'’; Donna Gerstenberger, ‘Synge’s The shadow of the glen: repetition and allusion’; Nicholas Grene, ‘An Aran requiem : setting in Riders to the sea’; Daniel J. Casey ‘The two worlds of Synge’s The well of the saints’; Anthony Roche, ‘Myth and journey in The well of the saints’; Kate Powers, ‘The playboy as poet’; James F. Kilroy, ‘A carnival Christy and a playboy for all ages’; George Brethertonm, ‘Synge’s ideas of life and art: design and theory in The playboy of the western world’; William Hart, ‘“Too immoral for Dublin”: Synge’s The tinker’s wedding’; Denis Donghue, ‘The tinker’s wedding’; Weldon Thornton, ‘Deirdre of the sorrows: literature first [ ..] drama afterwards’; Ann Saddlemyer, ‘The realism of J. M. Synge’; Ronald Gaskell. ‘Ireland In literature’.
Nicholas Grene, ed., Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School, 1991-2000 (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2000) [incls. Ann Saddlemyer, George Watson, Philips Edwards, Lucy McDiarmid, Anna McMullan & Adrian Frazier; also Lynne Parker, Stephen Rea, Olwen Fouere, Tom Murphy, Fiona Shaw, Jocelyn Clarke & Anne Enright; contribs. by Roy Foster, Angela Bourke, Christopher Morash & Frank McGuinness, poems by Brendan Kennelly, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill - Irish transl. of Synge's poems, Seamus Heaney & Gerald Dawe.]
Notes
Riders to the Sea: The celebrated last phrases of Riders to the Sea were taken from a letter of Martin McDonough, an Aran friend: ‘It happened that my brother's wife, Shawneen, died. And she was visiting the last Sunday in December, and now isn't it a sad story to tell? but at the same time we have to be satisfied because a person cannot live always.' (David Greene and Edward Stephens, ‘Coole Park: Beginings of the Literary Theatre. Paris: Brittany [&] Second Visit to Aran., in J. M. Synge, 1871-1909, NY: Macmillan 1959, p.105; cited by Angela Cushley, UUC 3rd Yr Diss., p.23).
The Tinker’s Wedding, rough-drafted 1902; orig. titled ‘The Movements of May’, later writing to the publisher Elkin Matthews, that the central scene where a priest is tied up in a sack seemed likely to displease ‘a good many of our Dublin friends’ (letter of 1905); completed, using material from Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht, 1907; performed London 1909; not played in Dublin until 1971; revived by Druid Theatre Co. in Dublin as part of DruidSynge Project, Oct. 2004, with Gary Lydon and Nora Sheahan as the title-characters, and Marie Mullen - Druid founder with Mick Lally - as the drunken mother.
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Playboy riot (Feb. 1907): Yeats telegrammed Lady Gregory: ‘audience broke up in disorder at the word shift’, in reference to the line: ‘If all the girls in Mayo were standing before me in their shifts [alone]’.
Buck Mulligan [char.], in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), remarks of Synge: ‘The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to murder you'; ‘Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature. [...] Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In words of words for words, palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods, brandishing a winebottle, C'est vendredi saint! Murthering Irish. His image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i' the forest.' (Bodley Edn., 1963, p.256.)
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Molly Allgood's letters to Synge were returned to her after his death and have not survived.
George Cornewall Lewis, On Local Disturbances in Ireland (London: B. Fellowes 1836), pp.251-2, makes reference to the sympathy elicited by an out-of-work labourer by the pretence that he had committed a murder (quoted at some length in Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Field Day/Cork UP 1996), p.35).
James Carney, The Playboy and the Yellow Lady (Dublin: Poolbeg Press 1986) [var. 1987], gives an account of the assault of land-agent James Lynchehaun, on an English landowner Agnes MacDonnell in 1894, his capture, and his escape to America; a person and event alluded to in the context of ‘agrarian' [crime] in Lady Gregory's Spreading the News [‘sure he might give them the slip yet, the same as Lynchehaun'.
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Art Mac Uidhir wrote of Synge in a review of 1910, ‘Gaedhealighe go mór ... ná Eoghan Ruadh Ó Suilleabháin ... Aon-fhuil do Cholum Cille agus Synge [far more Gaelic than Owen Roe O'Sullivan ... Synge and Columcille are of the same blood]'.
Stephen Brown, Guide to Books on Ireland (1912), Appendix, contains an account of account of Frank Hugh O'Donnell's attack on Synge in the pamphlet Souls for Gold (1899) [see also Cardinal Logue]; and RX Griffith, who editorialised the Playboy as ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to ..'; Stephens calls Griffith ‘Synge's nemesis'; Joseph Holloway, D J O'Donoghue, and W J Lawrence, ‘all huddled at the back of the auditorium on Tuesday night and concurred in hating it' (Edward Stephens & David Greene, J. M. Synge, 1959. p.245).
Estyn Evans quotes Synge: ‘[F]rom the moment a roof is taken in hand there is a whirl of laughter and talk till it is ended, and, as the man whose house is being covered is a host instead of an employer, he lays himself out to please the men who work with him’ (Aran Islands, p.156; cited in Evans, Irish Folk Ways, 1957, pp.57-58.)
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Gregory Allen, ‘An Irishman's Diary', Irish Times (31 Jan. 1997): A William Maley killed his father Patrick Maley with a spade on 28 Jan. 1873 [1872] at Calla, in the barony of Ballinahinch, parish of Ballindoon, police sub-district of Errismore, Co. Galway; RIC papers recording the case was discovered in the barracks by Fr. John Fitzgerald, including copies of Hue & Cry for 1850 to 1890; further reports Eamonn Keane's information that the culprit hid in a hole in the ground in Aranmore, where the inhabitants protected him until he could make his way to America he had married three years earlier. Allen also recounts the story of a parricide that Synge heard from Pat Dirane as recounted by Robin Skelton, and gives details of the 1962 film of The Playboy produced by Lord Killanin and shot in Kerry with Siobhán McKenna as Pegeen Mike and Gary Raymond as Christy Mahon.
Irish tutors: The peasant girls from whom Synge began to learn Irish-English speech were Ellen, the cook, and Florence Massey, the maid, both raised in a Protestant orphanage.
League Gaelic: Synge lashed out against ‘the incoherent twaddle passed off as Irish' by the League and its ‘wilful nationalism'. (Quoted in Robin Skelton, ed., The Writings of J. M. Synge, 1971, p.107; cited in by Louis Dieltjens, ‘The Abbey Theatre as a Cultural Formation', in Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature [Conference of 9 April 1986; Costerus Ser. Vol. 71] Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988, pp.47-65; p.48.)
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Portraits: Various portraits by John Butler Yeats: study in oil, held in the Municipal Gallery, Dublin (see Brian O’Doherty, The Irish Imagination 1959-1971 [Rosc Exhib. Cat.], 1971; also Anne Crookshank, Irish Portraits Exhibition, Ulster Mus. 1965); a pencil drawing, signed Jan. 1905, held in the National Gallery of Ireland; pencil sketch of Synge by J. B. Yeats "Synge at Rehearsal". J. M. Synge, oil by James Sleator, copy in collection at Dublin Writers Museum.
1962 Film: The film was produced by Lord Killanin and shot in Kerry with Siobhán McKenna as Pegeen Mike and Gary Raymond as Christy Mahon. (See Gregory Allen in ‘Irishman's Diary', Irish Times, 31 Jan. 1997; Allen recounts the story of a parricide that Synge heard from Pat Dirane as recounted by Robin Skelton.)
Query: Synge called the Playboy a ‘Dionysiac’ extravagance ‘drenched in poteen’, and therefore ‘spirited’ rather than ‘spiritual’ (q.source; ex. Corkery.)
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)