The Playboy of the Western World | Author Biography

J. M. Synge was born on April 16, 1871, in the Dublin suburb of Newton Little, to John Hatch and Kathleen Traill Synge. After his father died a year later, Synge, his three brothers, and one sister were raised in a comfortable, upper-class home by their devoutly religious mother. Synge suffered from poor health during his youth, which eventually prompted his mother to have him tutored at home. He began his studies in music theory and Irish history and language at Trinity College in Dublin when he was seventeen and completed a bachelor's degree in 1892. Synge began to write poetry during his years at Trinity as well as at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he completed graduate work in music theory.

J. M. Synge
J. M. Synge

Synge left Ireland in 1893 to study music in Germany, but his stage fright caused him to reconsider his career choice. A year later, Synge began language and literature studies at the Sorbonne. During his time in Paris, Synge met William Butler Yeats who would have a dramatic effect on the rest of his life. Yeats inspired Synge to go to the Aran Islands, off the coast of Ireland and, as Yeats notes in his preface to The Well of the Saints, encouraged him to "live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.'' For four years, Synge studied Irish life on the islands as he took photographs of the islanders and careful notes on their speech and habits.

In 1901, he turned his notes into a collection of essays, The Aran Islands, and wrote his first play, When the Moon Has Set. Two verse plays followed in 1902, but Synge would not develop his mature style until later that year when he penned three plays: Riders to the Sea, In the Shadow of the Glen, and The Tinker's Wedding. On October 8, 1903, In the Shadow of the Glen was the first play shown by the Irish National Theatre Society, run by Yeats and Lady Gregory. Though the play initially received a mixed reaction, due to its honest depiction of Irish life, it later gained success during its run in Dublin and England. Riders to the Sea earned positive reviews in Ireland and England.

While writing his next play, The Playboy of the Western World, Synge became ill with Hodgkin's disease, which delayed the play's opening. The Playboy of the Western World became the most controversial production of the Irish National Theatre. Theatergoers rioted during initial performances in response to what they deemed to be a degrading portrait of Irish life. Controversy followed productions of the play for years. However, by the later part of the twentieth century, it came to be recognized as Synge's masterwork.

Synge drafted Deirdre of the Sorrows during hospital visits as he battled his increasingly debilitating illness. He died on March 24,1909, in Dublin without having had time to revise it.