About The Author
Dr. Ritu Saxena has been working as Professor of English at various colleges in Gujarat since 1995, and teaching English at both U. G. and P.G. levels. Later, in 2008, she was selected as Principal of an undergraduate college at Ahmedabad. She has also worked as a core member in the four-member committee set up by the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education, Govt. of Gujarat, to set up Digital English Language Labs in colleges across Gujarat. In the course of her career she participated in several conferences, seminars and workshops, and presented papers too, and some of her papers have been published in reputed journals. She also organized a state-level U.G.C. sponsored workshop for teachers of English on E. L.T. in 2012.
Introduction
John Millington Synge occupies a unique place among the 20th century dramatists in general and the Irish dramatists in particular. His corpus of writings includes verses, novels and plays. Some of his important poems are Queens, In Kerry, A Wish, The Mergency Man, Danny, On an Island, Epitaph and The Curse. The Aran Islands is Synge's most famous prose work. However, his plays helped him in earning a place of eminence among the creative writers of the world and soared him to the pinnacle of success and popularity. His six plays include The Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), The Playboy of the Western World (1907), The Tinker's Wedding (1909) and Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910). Critical opinion at times tends to consider Synge as a comic dramatist, by excluding the plays Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows. However, if his other plays are closely studied, some other sombre emotions are comprehended like a sense of disillusionment, a keen awareness of the painful contrast between man's dreams and reality surrounding him, a wry acceptance of inevitable disappointment and above all, a desire to escape from crass material values. Thus, these plays, though comedies as they are, but of a different kind that the present study proposes to discuss in detail later. Synge's first play The Shadow of the Glen is a peculiar, cynical little sketch which was produced in 1903. Outwardly it appeared to be a clever amusing sketch but on closer examination it tells us of the deep-lying emotions that really made it a significant dramatic work. Synge takes us into the interior of a lonely little cottage where the supposedly dead body of Daniel Burke lay shrouded in a cot, while his wife, Nora, only too anxious to escape from the humdrum existence, sits with the Tramp chatting, jesting and making plans. Suddenly there is a sneeze from the deathbed, Daniel rises in a rage and sends her out of the house. The play was labeled as a libel against peasant women and was treated with critical hostility. Synge has been accused of trying to besmirch the immaculate greenness of Holy Ireland by writing such a play. But Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh has praised Synge in the following words: It was, in fact, the first of the Irish 'realist' dramas, and the quiet young man who sat unobtrusively in the background while Lady Gregory read aloud his words, was to take his place amongst the greatest dramatist the Irish theatre produced.¹ But here too Synge does not emerge as a novice, for with sure and telling strokes he creates an Irish Nora. It is a one-act mock-heroic portrait of Irish peasant class. The thought that runs throughout the play is-you cannot mate youth with age, you cannot cage beauty. One of Synge's plays, which, for sure, defies the category of comedy, is Riders of the Sea. It was also one of the earliest plays, which was produced in 1904. It is a realistic tragedy. It was triggered off after Synge had spent a considerable time on the Aran Islands. There he found himself amidst the barren stretches of moorland and mountains. He found himself to be seized by nature's might and he listened of the intonations of the lonely peasants inhabiting the region. Out of this experience grew Riders to the Sea, a play grand in its extreme simplicity. The story is set in a lonely cottage by the sea-side, with the ocean flowing with all its power outside, ready to devour human beings. Inside the cottage, the lady of the house, Maurya, bitterly remembers how she lost her four sons, their father and has recently lost the remaining two sons as well. She bears her loss stoically with dignity and calm resignation saying.
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