INTRODUCTION

Synge is the most highly esteemed playwright of the Irish literary renaissance, the movement in which such literary figures as William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory made their mark at the turn of the twentieth century. Although he died just short of his thirty-eighth birthday and produced a modest number of works, his writings have made an impact on audiences, writers, and Irish culture.

Efforts have always been made by literary scholars and critics to read the aesthetics of John Millington Synge's drama. However, little attention has been paid to the naturalistic dimension of Synge's plays. This study, therefore, investigates the naturalist aesthetics in Synge's dramaturgy. This is in an attempt to show that individuals' attitudes in certain contexts are conditioned by the forces of the environment they inhabit.

The study adopts the naturalist dramatic theory in order to account for the intricate connection between human beings and nature. Also the study engages aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis to unveil the psychological implications of the actions and reactions of the individuals in Synge's plays. For the purpose of critical analysis, two of Synge's plays are selected - Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World. The study maintains that Synge's dramaturgy is influenced, in fact enriched by his close study of the Irish peasantry in the Aran Island. Both texts selected for this study reveal that Synge recreates and records the contemporary life of the Islanders in a journalist and objective style.

The people's struggle for life in their Darwinian environment is captured in different dramatic forms. While Riders to the Sea presents a tragic vision of life, The Playboy of the Western World perfectly blends the comic with the tragic to present a farcical vision of life. Life in both texts is represented in journey motif. The journey of life in the closed system of the Island presented in Riders to the Sea often results in death and loss, and the journey of life in The Playboy of the Western World is coloured by disappointment, loss, rage, violence, boredom, and failure. The pessimistic and bleak realities of the people's life, in no small measure, affect their psyche and dictate their deeds. This signifies that there is a symbiotic relationship between person and place. Synge's dramaturgy is a stage where art and life in its wild realities co-exist. It is a justifiable fact that such a co-existence maintains a contractual relationship. While the Irish life feeds Synge's dramatic imagination, he gives back to that life by aiming to reform it through his satiric representations.

John Millington Synge (1871-1909), the writer and playwright, epitomises the trend among artists and writers at the turn of the 20th century to look to the west of Ireland for inspiration and for an 'authentically' Irish subject matter. It was a trend that also saw the artist Paul Henry and his painter wife Grace travel to Achill Island in 1909 and, some decades later, was part of the attraction of his Mayo homeland for writer Ernie O'Malley. Both Paul Henry and Ernie O'Malley were readers of JM Synge, as was the English novelist Graham Greene before he travelled to Achill in 1947.

Irish literary Renaissance

Irish literary renaissance,flowering of Irish literary talent at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century that was closely allied with a strong political nationalism and a revival of interest in Irelands Gaelic literary heritage. The renaissance was inspired by the nationalistic pride of the Gaelic revival; by the retelling of ancient heroic legends in books such as the History of Ireland (1880) by Standish OGrady and A Literary History of Ireland (1899) by Douglas Hyde; and by the Gaelic League, which was formed in 1893 to revive the Irish language and culture. The early leaders of the renaissance wrote rich and passionate verse, filled with the grandeur of Irelands past and the music and mysticism of Gaelic poetry. They were mainly members of the privileged class and were adept at English verse forms and familiar with lyric poetry that extolled the simple dignity of the Irish peasant and the natural beauty of Ireland.

The movement developed into a vigorous literary force centred on the poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. Though he contributed to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre, the first Irish national theatre, he wrote only a few plays, which were beautiful but difficult to stage. His chief colleague was Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, who took a leading part in the Abbeys management and wrote many plays. The Irish Literary Theatre, established in 1898, also excelled in the production of peasant plays. The greatest dramatist of the movement was John Millington Synge, who wrote plays of great beauty and power in a stylized peasant dialect. Later, the theatre turned toward realism, mostly rural realism. Lennox Robinson, best known for his political play, The Lost Leader (1918), and his comedy, The Whiteheaded Boy (1916), and T.C. Murray, author of The Briary Gap (1917), were among the early realists. In reaction to peasant realism, Sean OCasey wrote three great dramas of the Dublin slums: The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926).

In poetry, in addition to Yeats, the mystic George Russell (pseudonym AE) composed works of enduring interest. Notable among their younger contemporaries were Padraic Colum, Austin Clarke, Seumas OSullivan (James Sullivan Starkey), F.R. Higgins, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. The Irish Republican movement had its poets in Patrick Henry Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett, all executed in 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising.

The noteworthy prose fiction of the renaissance includes the historical tales of Emily Lawless and Standish James OGrady and, somewhat at a remove, the realist novels of George Moore. James Stephens also wrote stories and poetry.

John Millington Synge

Synge is the most highly esteemed playwright of the Irish literary renaissance, the movement in which such literary figures as William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory made their mark at the turn of the twentieth century. Although he died just short of his thirty-eighth birthday and produced a modest number of works, his writings have made an impact on audiences, writers, and Irish culture.

Born near Dublin on April 16, 1871, Synge was the youngest of five children in an upper-class Protestant family. His father died the following year; the four boys and one girl were raised by their deeply religious mother. Synge attended private schools for four years, beginning at the age of ten, but ill health prevented his regular attendance, and his mother hired a private tutor to instruct him at home. At Trinity College, Dublin, he earned a pass degree in December, 1892. His primary ambition was music, and because of his studies of violin, theory, and composition, he won a scholarship from the Royal Irish Academy of Music for advanced study in counterpoint. At this time Synge had also begun to write poetry.

Synge's early religious skepticism and his unorthodox career aspirations made life difficult for him in his mother's home, where he lived until 1893. In that year he went to Germany to study music, but was dissuaded by his nervousness about performing. In the summer of 1894 he moved to Paris to study language and literature at the Sorbonne. He was writing poems and literary criticism and supporting himself by giving English lessons. In the autumn of 1895 he began studying Italian in Italy, and in December, 1896, he returned to the Sorbonne. These years of travel and study were punctuated by vacation visits to Ireland, during which he pursued Cherry Matheson, a young woman from a devout Protestant family. The issue of religious skepticism intruded once again, and Cherry refused Synge's marriage proposal in 1896.

On December 21, 1896, at the Hotel Corneille in Paris, Synge met poet and dramatist William Yeats. During the meeting, Yeats recommended that Synge leave Paris and move to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. In Yeats' own words, as set forth in his preface to The Well of the Saints, he said, "'Give up Paris. ... Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.'" Eventually Synge did so, with the best possible results. His first stay on the Aran Islands occurred in the spring of 1898; it was repeated at intervals during the next four years. He continued to winter in Paris, but the study of Irish life and literature became central to his work. On the rocky, isolated islands, Synge took photographs and notes. He listened to the speech of the islanders, a musical, old-fashioned, Irish-flavored dialect of English. He conversed with them in Irish and English, listened to stories, and learned the impact that the sounds of words could have apart from their meaning.

The first fruit of Synge's Aran experience was The Aran Islands, written in 1901 but unpublished for the next six years. The Irish writer and teacher Daniel Corkery, in his Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, saw the Aran essays as crucial to Synge's development. "[These papers] are valuable for their own sake as descriptive of the consciousness of the people. They are perhaps more valuable still for the insight they give us into Synge's own consciousness, his fundamentally emotional nature." Corkery also commented, "Sometimes I have the idea that the book on the Aran Islands will outlive all else that came from Synge's pen." Elaborating on the themes of the isolation and simplicity of the islanders' lives and the desolation of their landscape, Synge, according to Robin Skelton's The Writings of J. M. Synge, uncovers the "heroic values" and the "awareness of universal myth" with which the islanders enrich their lives. Skelton also judged that Synge uses the islanders as raw material for the creation of "images and values ... which point towards the importance of reviving, and maintaining, a particular sensibility in order to make sense of the predicament of humanity."

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