The Playboy of the Western World

Christopher Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317271888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

'I'm thinking this night wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in years gone by.' – Christy Mahon

On the first night of J. M. Synge 's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) the audience began protesting in the theatre; by the third night the protests had spilled onto the streets of Dublin. How did one play provoke this? Christopher Collins addresses The Playboy 's satirical treatment of illusion and realism in light of Ireland's struggle for independence, as well as Synge's struggle for artistic expression. By exploring Synge's unpublished diaries, drafts and notebooks, he seeks to understand how and why the play came to be.

This volume invites the reader behind the scenes of this inflammatory play and its first performances, to understand how and why Synge risked everything in the name of art.

1

Context

This chapter places The Playboy in context with Synge’s life; his career as a playwright; and the social, economic and political situation in the Ireland of his time. In order really to get to the heart of the play and understand why it was so provocative, it is important to place the play in three key contexts: attitudes towards religion, class and culture in Synge’s Ireland; Synge’s life in Paris, the Aran Islands and County Mayo; and the importance of the Abbey Theatre. These three contexts will be explored individually but, in the first instance, it is important briefly to summarise Synge’s short life.

Synge’s life

In 1871 Synge was born in Rathfarnham, a suburb south of Dublin. He was the youngest of five children. His family were highly educated and comparably wealthy. His father practised as a lawyer, specialising in the conveyance of land, and his mother raised the children. Synge had a comparably conservative childhood that was plagued by frequent illness. In February 1889 he entered the University of Dublin, Trinity College. He graduated in 1892. Soon after graduating from Trinity he moved to Germany to continue his studies in music. By 1895 Synge had given up his career of being a professional musician and he found himself in Paris taking postgraduate courses in French literature and comparative phonetics and, later, Irish and Homeric civilisation. Synge made a continual return to Paris for the next seven years. His life there runs in tandem with his life on the Aran Islands – three islands off the west coast of Ireland on which he found the ideas for four of his seven plays. Consequently, the impact of life in Paris and life in Aran on Synge’s writing of The Playboy can hardly be overstated. Synge made his final trip to the Aran Islands in 1902, and his final trip to Paris in 1903.

In February 1905 Synge met actor Maire O’Neill, who went by her stage-name of Molly Allgood. Molly’s sister was the actor Sara Allgood, a founding member of the Irish National Theatre Society, which went on to found the Abbey Theatre. The first three directors of the theatre were W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and Synge himself. In 1907 Molly performed the role of Pegeen Mike in The Playboy; the part was written for her. In October 1908, Mrs. Synge died, and just five months later, Synge lay dying of Hodgkin’s disease. With tears in her eyes Molly begged the nurses to do something, anything. There was nothing they could do. The night before he died, Synge toasted a glass of champagne. He would not see the morning, and was buried alongside his mother in Mount Jerome Cemetery in south Dublin on 26 March 1909.

Religion, class and culture

In Synge’s Ireland there was one dominant class: the Catholic middle class. The Catholic middle class had risen to social, economic and political power across a seventy-year period and now, at the dawn of the twentieth century, this class controlled professional and public life. Achieving such social, economic and political power had not been easy. Up until 1829 Irish Catholics were subjected to penal laws that had been put in place in 1607. The penal laws were designed to strengthen Protestant culture in Ireland. In so doing, apartheid was created whereby the Irish Catholic was denied basic human rights. Catholics were not allowed to enter public office and they were fined for not attending Protestant church services. The subjugation of Catholic Ireland meant that from the beginning of the seventeenth century, Protestant Ireland ascended to social, economic and political dominance. This class was known as the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Synge was born into it, and in order really to understand The Playboy it is important to understand the heritage of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.

In 1603 James VI of Scotland united the kingdoms of England and Scotland with Ireland under personal union, receiving the title of James I. A personal union is a one where one monarch rules over two or more countries, but each individual country has its own distinct laws, territorial boundaries and system of governance. James I was a Protestant king who was almost assassinated by the Catholic Gunpowder Plot in 1605. With Catholic Ireland subjected to penal laws, King James I decided to tighten his grip on Ireland by resettling Scottish and English nobility to the province of Ulster in what came to be known as the Plantation of Ulster. Catholic rebellions were numerous but largely unsuccessful, and as the years rolled by the penal laws became increasingly harsh. The Plantation of Ulster marks the beginning of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.

Even though the Ascendancy were a relatively small demographic, they were the dominant class in Ireland throughout the eighteenth century. To be a member of the Ascendancy in eighteenth-century Ireland had nothing to do with being a descendant from a noble or military family, but everything to do with the Ascendancy’s attachment to Anglicanism: the Church of England. Since the sixteenth century the Church of England had been in communion with the Church of Ireland. Anglicanism provided the Ascendancy with a refined English sense of culture and style that had the surface appearance of being aristocratic.

Synge’s family had moved from England to Ireland in the seventeenth century. By the time Synge was born, the Ascendancy had lost its aristocratic aura, but still thought that it belonged to a higher class than the Catholic middle classes. For example, Mrs. Synge was afraid that the family ‘would not be free from fleas’ upon realising that a Catholic family owned their rented holiday accommodation in County Wicklow in the summer of 1895.¹ Synge, however, had a complicated relationship to the Ascendancy and he was keen to foreground his Irish background as opposed to his English background. In a letter to a German translator of his works Synge introduced himself:

my Christian names are John Millington, my family were originally called Millington, and Queen Elizabeth is said to have changed this name to ‘Synge’ they sang so finely. Synge is, of course, pronounced ‘sing’, since then they have been in Ireland for nearly three centuries, so that there is now a good deal of Celtic, or more exactly, Gaelic blood in the family.²

However, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the Ascendancy began a slow decline in power. In 1801 the Act of Union came into effect, which removed the personal union between Ireland and England, and the United Kingdom was formally established. Parliament in Westminster, London, now governed Ireland, which meant that the Ascendancy no longer had administrative governance of Ireland. Some members of the Ascendancy returned to England. Those who remained were left in an awkward, if ironic, position. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy wanted to forget their attachment to England and yet, at the same time, they wanted to hold on to their elevated social status. By 1829 the penal laws were abolished and a liberal attitude towards governance in Ireland was being established. In 1845 the Great Famine decimated Catholic Ireland, leaving vast expanses of land completely barren. What emerged from the Famine was a generation of Catholic farmers who had large farms, known as ‘strong farmers’ because of the strength of their socio-economic position. Money from farming flowed through the country as Catholic middle classes entered professional and public life, but what really defined the Catholic middle classes in Synge’s Ireland was the orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism. From 1850 to 1875 the Irish devotional revolution changed Irish society by enforcing strict codes of religious and social conduct. The archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Paul Cullen, managed the Devotional Revolution, and he neatly summarised the rapid rise of Catholic Ireland: ‘We are the Catholic population of the United Kingdom. A population growing every day in wealth and social importance.’³

The majority of middle-class Catholic Ireland now had its sights firmly set on achieving national independence from the British Empire. The political party that campaigned for national independence was Sinn Féin, founded by Arthur Griffith in 1905. ‘We are firm believers in the freedom of art’, wrote Griffith, but any artist associated with a National Society should ‘pay the price by relinquishing some of that freedom’.⁴ The art that Sinn Féin wanted to see was thinly disguised propaganda for cultural nationalism. Sinn Féin were supported in their campaign for artistic propaganda by the Gaelic League, founded by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill in 1893. In 1892 Hyde gave a famous lecture entitled ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ to the Irish National Literary Society, in which he argued that the Irish language should be preserved and promoted. A year later the League was founded as a means to support cultural nationalism. In 1901 Hyde presented his culturally nationalist play written in Irish: Casadh an tSugáin (The Twisting of the Rope). Performed by members of the League, the play is almost the complete inverse of The Playboy: a community in the west of Ireland expels a stranger named Hanrahan to ensure that the young woman (Oona) whom he is attempting to seduce remains with her fiancé (Sheamus). It is little wonder, then, that the League harshly critiqued The Playboy in their own newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light): ‘[Synge] is using the stage for the propagation of a monstrous gospel of animalism, or revolt against sane and sweet ideals, of bitter contempt for all that is fine and worthy, not merely in Christian morality, but in human nature itself.’⁵ Furthermore, the fact that the play was written by an Anglo-Irishman was not lost on either the League or Sinn Féin. The problem, then, with religion and class in Synge’s Ireland was that it influenced the definition and reception of Irish culture and politics and, ultimately, the reception of The Playboy. The play was considered to be highly offensive towards the Gaelic League’s cultural support for Sinn Féin’s bid for national independence. However, in 1928 Synge’s good friend Stephen MacKenna wrote that while Synge ‘refused to support the Gaelic League’ because of the ‘lying that gathered around the political movement’, he would still ‘die for the theory that Synge was most intensely Nationalist; he habitually spoke with rage and bitter baleful eyes, of the English in Ireland, though he was proud of his own remote Englishry’.⁶ The Playboy may have affected the bid for national independence but ultimately the pain that it caused went much deeper than nationalism; Synge’s satire was carefully aimed at the social practices of middle-class Catholic Ireland.

The Playboy satirises both the stereotype of the middle-class Irish Catholic and the middle-class Irish Catholic’s appreciation of Irish culture. In performance, attitudes towards Ascendancy and Catholic religion, class and culture met head on. After The Playboy was first performed Synge wrote a letter to MacKenna saying that

the scurrility, and ignorance and treachery of some of the attacks upon me have rather disgusted me with the middle class Irish Catholic. As you know I have the wildest admiration for the Irish Peasants, and for Irish men of known or unknown genius – do you bow? – but between the two there’s an ungodly ruck of fat-faced, sweaty-headed, swine. They are in Dublin, and Kingstown, and alas in all country towns – they stink of porter . . . Irish humour is dead, MacKenna, and I’ve got influenza.⁷

Synge’s basic point is that he should be able to satirise Catholic middle-class life freely, but the Catholic middle classes did not appreciate such satire from an Anglo-Irish playwright. As the next chapter will demonstrate, The Playboy provides ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Context
• 2 Play
• 3 Performance
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index