SYNGE, JOHN MILLINGTON ( ,1_ 71-1909) , Irish dram atist, was born at Rathfarnham near Dublin April 16, 1871. Educated at Trinity college, Dublin, he travelled for some years on the Continent, spending much of his time in Paris. He returned in 1898 to the Aran Isles. Here he wrote a number of sketches dealing with the life of the islanders, which were later collected in The Aran Islands (19o7). In these and other sketches of the same period he had not quite shaken off the obsession of stylism, and still had a wish "to do for the west of Ireland what Pierre Loti had done for the Bretons." Gradually, however, Ireland took hold of him, and, turning to the dramatization of incidents in the life he now knew intimately, he began to elaborate, partly from his notebooks and partly from the writings of Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, that richly imaginative Anglo-Irish dialect which he used with such complete success. When, in 1904, he became a director of the newly opened Abbey Theatre, Dublin, he had already produced two one-act plays, The Shadow of the Glen (1903) and Riders to the Sea (1904), published in one volume (19o5). The Well of the Saints, a beautiful three-act play
produced in 1905, was regarded by some as an affront to Irish morals, and when The Playboy of the Western World appeared in Jan. 1907, it was interrupted every night for a week by an organised disturbance. When the real merits of the play became known, it contributed largely to the fame of the Abbey Theatre. Time has shown how deeply Synge penetrated into the soul of the Irish peasant. The richness of the dialogue and the suggestion which it conveys of a permanent human enigma combine to make it a masterpiece. Synge's latest volumes were a collection of his poetical works entitled Poems and Translations (1909), and an other play, Deirdre of the Sorrows (I o) which he all but com pleted before his death. Synge's greatest work is probably The Playboy, though some critics give pride of place to Deirdre. Synge died in Dublin March 24, 1909.