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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
One of the greatest difficulties which faced the dramatists of the Irish Renaissance was how to write heroic plays in peasant dialect. Although the language of the Irish countryman was ideal for the little farces which mirrored the living Ireland, it turned out to be the severest of limitations when used to exploit the ancient Ireland of the sagas. “But Grania is a King's daughter”, protested George Moore when Yeats insisted that Diarmuid and Grania be written in peasant dialect. And if we are to believe the story that Moore tells in Hail and Farewell, Yeats even went so far as to ask Moore, who knew not a word of dialect, to write the play in French. Lady Gregory would then turn it into English, an Irish translator would render it in Irish, and Lady Gregory would then turn the Irish literally into English. Although Yeats never got a peasant Grania from Moore, he very nearly realized his ideal when he induced Synge, the acknowledged master of peasant dialect, to attempt a peasant Deirdre. Synge, like Moore, might well have protested against the difficult task his master had set him. “I am not sure whether I shall be able to make a satisfactory play out of it”, he wrote to an American friend. But he plunged on, creating his Deirdre in the image of a Wicklow peasant girl. We can surmise that she gave him considerable trouble, for he rewrote the play more than fifteen times, working on it more energetically than on any other of his plays. We have Moore's testimony that Synge finally began to feel that peasant speech was impossible and started to weed it out of his play. However, the mass of MSS which represent Synge's work on the play up to his death indicate that no such weeding process had begun.
1 Ave (New York, 1924), p. 376: “… only by printing my French of Stratford atte Bowe can I hope to convince the reader that two such literary lunatics as Yeats and myself existed, contemporaneously, and in Ireland, too, a country not distinguished for its love of letters.”
2 Letter to John Quinn, dated January 4,1908, in the New York Public Library.
3 Hail and Farewell, Vale (New York, 1920), p. 216.
3a The Deirdres of Yeats, Lady Gregory, Stephens, and A. E. were probably based on a well known 15th century version of the story. See Myles Dillon, Early Irish Literature (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 16. But Synge's source was the work of an 18th century poet, Audrey MacCurten of Co. Clare, whose work was unpublished until 1898.
4 Preface to Deirdre of IheSorrows (New York, 1910), privately printed by John Quinn.
5 The earliest extant draft of Synge's play was lettered B and dated 1907, in accordance with his life-long habit of lettering and dating successive drafts of his work. The other revisions of Deirdre are dated at intervals which continue up to the time of his death. If the original source of Deirdre is The Fate of the Children of Uisneach, as it apparently is, then Synge got the initial inspiration for writing the play as early as 1898. This is remarkable, since we know that The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy are both based on incidents in the first trip to Aran in 1898; that Riders to the Sea was the result of his third visit to Aran in 1900; that The Tinker's Wedding, on the basis of Synge's own testimony in its preface, was written during the same period as The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea, and that the date assigned to The Well of the Saints is earlier than 1902. If all these dates are correct, and they assuredly are, then all six of Synge's plays originated during the first four years of his writing career.
6 John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (Dublin, 1913), p. 216.
7 Yeats printed this letter in the preface to J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time (Dublin, 1911) with a lacuna where Mackenna's name occurs. The original letter is at present in Dublin in the possession of Mr. Joseph Hone, the biographer of Yeats.
8 Masefield writes, “He handed me a typewritten copy of a ballad, and asked me what I thought of it. I told him that I felt the want of an explanatory stanza near the beginning. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I can't take your advice, because then it would not be quite my own.’” John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections with Biographical Notes (New York, 1915), pp. 21–22.
9 Lady Gregory printed the letter in Our Irish Theatre (New York, 1913), p. 137.
10 Yeats says that he and Lady Gregory, in response to Synge's request, attempted to give the final touches to the play. But “after writing in a passage we were little satisfied and thought it better to have the play performed, as it is printed here, with no word of ours.” Preface to Deirdre of the Sorrows (New York, 1910), privately printed by John Quinn.
11 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1931), pp. 50 ff., comments on Synge's effective use of the storm. It motivates Naisi's entrance, he says, for he comes seeking shelter. It gives a classical coloring because it makes the day an unusual one, fitted to great events. It gives unity of isolation to the scene, because it is difficult to get there. It gives several interpretations to Conchubor's arrival. Deirdre is therefore opposed not only to fate but by the elements. “For the storm to mean so much it must receive particular attention, and it is assured of this. … We compare the storm with the plot and are surprised into a pathetic fallacy.”