Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Plays of (ever) changing Ireland
- 2 Late nineteenth-century Irish theatre: before the Abbey – and beyond
- 3 The ideology of the Abbey Theatre
- 4 The theatre of William Butler Yeats
- 5 Lady Gregory’s Abbey Theatre drama: Ireland real and ideal
- 6 J. M. Synge, ‘national’ drama and the post-Protestant imagination
- 7 On the siting of doors and windows: aesthetics, ideology and Irish stage design
- 8 Oscar Wilde and the politics of style
- 9 George Bernard Shaw and Ireland
- 10 Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: disillusionment to delusion
- 11 Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr
- 12 Samuel Beckett and the countertradition
- 13 Brian Friel’s sense of place
- 14 The Field Day Theatre Company
- 15 Tom Murphy and the children of loss
- 16 Reconstructing history in the Irish history play
- 17 The Abbey Theatre and the Irish state
- 18 Staging contemporary Ireland
- 19 The Revival revised
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
6 - J. M. Synge, ‘national’ drama and the post-Protestant imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Plays of (ever) changing Ireland
- 2 Late nineteenth-century Irish theatre: before the Abbey – and beyond
- 3 The ideology of the Abbey Theatre
- 4 The theatre of William Butler Yeats
- 5 Lady Gregory’s Abbey Theatre drama: Ireland real and ideal
- 6 J. M. Synge, ‘national’ drama and the post-Protestant imagination
- 7 On the siting of doors and windows: aesthetics, ideology and Irish stage design
- 8 Oscar Wilde and the politics of style
- 9 George Bernard Shaw and Ireland
- 10 Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: disillusionment to delusion
- 11 Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr
- 12 Samuel Beckett and the countertradition
- 13 Brian Friel’s sense of place
- 14 The Field Day Theatre Company
- 15 Tom Murphy and the children of loss
- 16 Reconstructing history in the Irish history play
- 17 The Abbey Theatre and the Irish state
- 18 Staging contemporary Ireland
- 19 The Revival revised
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Fogarty: ‘Do you mean to say all art is national? That is an awful queer thing for you to say.’
(Synge, National Drama: A Farce, Collected Works, III, 225)In his biography of J. M. Synge, W. J. McCormack contends that we still view the dramatist 'through a mythology broadcast through Yeats's autobiographies and poems'. This mytho-historiography inserted Synge into the Irish Literary Revival as Celtic Ireland's defence against the filthy modern tide. His 'life' became a variant of Matthew Arnold's artistic Celt, enlisted to serve an Ascendancy motivated by cultural noblesse oblige, facilitating interpretation of the plays as peasant drama conceived by Yeats and delivered through sojourns in the primitive west. This chapter interrogates such authorized versions, tracing certain homologous relationships between the almost always repressed life and the plays. Synge's sensitivity to language as action, to the mediated relationship between gallous story and dirty deed, makes him 'in a way one of the most modern of the moderns'.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Yeats constructed his account of Ireland’s national theatre movement. He and unnamed friends sought a place to perform ‘Irish plays with Irish players’, because Dublin theatres were ‘hired by English companies’.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama , pp. 79 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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