John Skelton

It must have been on Synge's second visit to the Aran Islands that he had the experience out of which was wrought what many believe to be his greatest play. The scene of Riders to the Sea is laid in a cottage on Inishmaan, the middle and most interesting island of the Aran group. While Synge was on Inishmaan, the story came to him of a man whose body had been washed up on the far away coast of Donegal, and who, by reason of certain peculiarities of dress, was suspected to be from the island.

Martin and Mary Doul are blind and homeless tramps. They beg for a living in a village where the locals have taken a perverse pleasure in making the poor unfortunate couple believe that they are the most beautiful, radiant couple that ever walked the earth. Of course, this is visibly not the case, as they soon discover, when a saint blesses their eyes with water from a holy well, miraculously restoring the blind couple's sight. This new vista gives a terrible insight into their condition, and the cruel face of the world, driving a wedge in their marriage even as their restored sight once again begins to fade.

<p>A young man stumbles into a rural public house in western Ireland claiming to be on the run after having killed his father. He immediately becomes a source of awe and an object of adoration, and even love. But what happens when the inhabitants of this tiny village find out all is not as the stranger claims?</p> <p><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/j-m-synge"><abbr>J. M.</abbr> Synge</a> first presented <i>The Playboy of the Western World</i> at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the 26th of January, 1907. The performance immediately offended Irish nationalists by seemingly insulting the Irish people and language, and the general public, by being an offense against moral order. Before it was even finished, it was disrupted by a riot that soon spread out into the city. When it was performed in 1911 in the <abbr>U.S.</abbr>, the play was again greeted with scorn and the company arrested for an immoral performance.</p> <p>But as Synge himself attempts to explain in the preface to his play, rather than attack Irish Gaelic, he wanted to show the relationship between the imagination of the Irish country people and their speech, which is “rich and living,” and that his use of such language reflects reality in a way missing from other modern drama. He later insisted that his plot was not to be taken as social realism, but died in 1909 before the play finally gained broader appeal in the wider world. Since then the significance of <i>The Playboy of the Western World</i> has been recognized and celebrated both for its characterizations and its rich use of dialect.</p>

In writing THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD, as in my other plays, I have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and balladsingers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of these fine people.