1046 synge, John Millington
After reading A Modest Proposal, the reader
understands the suffering of the Irish and the
indifference toward that suffering by their English
overlords, and this final question of whether these
innocent children would be better off dead adds
urgency to the essay’s true purpose of working to
end the unjust policies that were starving the Irish
and leaving them dejected and hopeless.
Kelly MacPhail
SyNGE, JoHN miLLiNGToN The
Playboy of the Western World (1907)
John Millington Synge (1871–1909) is best known
for his play The Playboy of the Western World, which
was first performed in 1907. Synge’s dark comedy
blends realism, satire, and myth to examine the lives
of Irish villagers living on the coast of Mayo. The
play opens in a small, filthy public house, where we
see Pegeen Mike and Shawn Keogh sitting and talk-
ing. Although it opens in a realistic enough fashion,
we soon see that the play takes on a mythic and
heroic quality when Christy Mahon arrives with a
tale of murdering his father.
While the tale that Christy spins confers on
him the persona of a hero, it also provides the play’s
comic thrust when his father arrives in act 2. With
the arrival of the father, the audience takes notice
and eagerly awaits the confrontation between father
and son that is sure to come. However, Synge delays
the meeting by having Christy go off to compete
in games. Instead of conflict between father and
son, we hear the shouts of victory from offstage as
Christy wins each match he enters. By his deft use
of dramatic irony, Synge intensifies the meeting
between father and son that occurs in act 3.
The resolution of the play in the third act reveals
Synge’s use of realism, satire, and myth. Christy
fights his father a second time and seemingly kills
him. The village turns against Christy, though,
because they fear the law. While the villagers think
they will be exempt from legal trouble, they hap-
pily embrace Christy; afterward, they attempt to
hang him. It becomes apparent from their actions
that ideals such as heroism and community exist
separately from the real world. In response to the
villagers’ actions, Christy decides to make his way
throughout Ireland to tell his tale and profit from
the myth of his playboy status. Synge’s comic play
celebrates human nature while also displaying its
flaws. Ultimately, The Playboy of the Western World
reveals that the human spirit will triumph whatever
the circumstances presented to it.
Arthur RankincommunIty in The Playboy of the
Western World
Although Irish patriots were bitter about the humor
in John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the West-
ern World, with its biting satire about peasants living
along the western coast of Ireland, the play reveals
that rough-and-ready communities have a powerful
spark of life in them. The characters portrayed in
the play do not fit the romance or the mythic status
of the heroic Celtic past depicted, for example, in
William Butler Yeats’s images of the Celtic twilight.
Nor do they seem to express any overly nationalistic
and republican sentiments. Instead, the people of
the play capture some sense of the reality that Synge
saw while living in the Aran Islands. The commu-
nity described in the play clearly demonstrates the
boundaries typically established by all villages. Some
people are insiders and some are outsiders, but as the
play illustrates, these boundaries can be malleable.
The first members of the community whom we
see are Pegeen and Shawn. They are surrounded by
darkness and appear to be shut in. However, Shawn
has been looking for the arrival of Pegeen’s father,
Michael James Flaherty. He has left his daughter
to watch their pub while he has gone to a local
wake. This wake might appear a somber community
duty to bury the dead decently; we see, though,
that it is truly an opportunity to drink excessively.
Herein lies the essence of Synge’s community: It
is a rough place full of lively and real people, rather
than romanticized versions of peasantry. They are
flesh and blood, with all the faults of people. Part of
his depiction of the play’s characters evolves out of
Synge’s desire to be a realist; another part arises from
his good humor.
The community’s sense of insiders and outsiders
undergoes a change when Christy Mahon arrives
with tales of murdering his father. He becomes
almost instantly a local celebrity and a desirable