John Synge

John Synge (1871-1909), Irish dramatist, who was a leader in the Irish Renaissance. He was born in Rathfarnham (now part of Dublin) of an Anglo-Irish family and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. In Paris in 1896 Synge met W. B. Yeats, who urged him to leave Paris for Ireland. After working as a literary critic in Paris for several more years, he returned to Ireland in 1898 to study the life and customs of his people and to join the movement for the revival of the Irish language and legends. His first two plays, both drawn from the life of the Irish peasantry, In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea, were produced in 1903 and 1904, respectively, by the new Irish National Theatre Society, which became the Abbey Theatre in 1904. When his masterpiece, the comedy The Playboy of the Western World, was produced there in 1907 it caused great disturbances; the Dubliners took as an insult Synge's bitingly humorous treatment of the Irish people's love of boasting and their tendency to glamorize those who flout the law, but the play eventually became a classic and the cornerstone of the Abbey Theatre repertory. Other works by Synge include the play The Well of the Saints (1905), a collection of essays entitled The Aran Islands (1907), and the unfinished play Deirdre of the Sorrows, which was produced in 1910.