“On J. M. Synge”

黃志軒

摘要

Summary: J.M. Synge’s “Preface to The Playboy of the Western World”

     In his Preface to The Playboy of the Western World, John Synge notes that he is “glad to acknowledge how much [he owes] to the folk-imagination” of the fine people “along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin” (453). Partially to open a new chapter for the Irish drama during the Irish Revival, Synge instead blends the naïve reality with imagination, arguing that “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” (454). In this trajectory, we can understand why his play caused riots, for the audiences had been more accustomed to the commercial theatre and thus felt difficult to see themselves through a mirror which the playwright set for them in reality.

Summary: Paige Reynolds’s “The First Playboy”

     In his assessment of the early performances of The Playboys of the Western World, Paige Reynolds points out that this play so “powerfully . . . manipulate[s] its first audiences into a critical self-awareness about their authority in both cultural and national politics” (464). He notes that it is because of Synge’s specific insult to Irish womanhood that aroused so much outrage. People were irritated and felt the need to protest. According to Reynolds, “the week-long run of Playboy was accompanied not only by vociferous remonstrations, but also by a lively debate about its representations of Irish life and its artistic merit and, hence, about its suitability for performance by the self-proclaimed ‘National Theatre Society, Ltd.’” (465).

Summary: Ben Levitas on The Playboy of the Western World 

     In “Censorship and Self-Censure in the Plays of J. M. Synge,” Ben Levitas notes that “Synge’s capacity to unsettle drew power from his capacity to combine direct language, poetic register, and dramatic symbol” (468). He then demonstrates why such junctures of language and the representation of violence on stage incurred so much debate: “Synge’s calculated provocation in The Playboy did more than expose his audiences’ sexual repression and force them to sublimate their own desires as defensive outrage. The language of Synge’s theatricality is always assertive in its resting interplay between the ideal and the real, and always alert to the ambiguous powers of concerted action” (471).

Work Citied

“On J. M. Synge.” Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama. 1991. Ed. John P. Harrington. New York: Norton, 2009. Print.