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5 results

  • 7 - J. M. Synge: European encounters
  • from Part II - Theorising Synge
  • Edited by P. J. Mathews, University College Dublin
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge
  • Published online: 28 March 2010
  • Print publication: 19 November 2009, pp 77-91
  • View extract

    Summary

    Of all the dramatists of the Irish Revival, John Millington Synge is the most intimately connected to the development of modern drama in Europe. His image of Irishness was focused through a European lens. As Daniel Corkery put it: 'It was Synge's European learning enabled him to look at Irish life without the prejudices of the Ascendency class coming in the way . . . Europe cleared his eyes . . . not entirely of course.' That last cautious caveat goes some way to explain Synge's appeal to modern sensibilities beyond the Ireland he depicted. His later work has an awareness of his problematic complicity in a status quo he wanted to challenge - and one benefit of Synge's continental schooling was a consequently reflexive critique of his own cultural and social predispositions. As a result, his plays' careful calibrations of self and society would in turn become influential interventions in twentieth-century European drama. Not that this process made his work any less Irish. Synge considered that if any purposeful rebellion were to take place in Ireland it required just such a European dimension.