Author: John Millington SyngePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aran Islands
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
The Aran Islands
Author: John Millington SyngePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aran Islands
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
Letters to Molly
Author: John Millington SyngePublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674528345
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
When John Millington Synge and Molly Allgood fell in love, he was thirty-five, she nineteen. Neither knew that he had Hodgkin's disease, of which he was to die in three years. Synge had already achieved recognition as a playwright--translations of two of his plays had been performed in Berlin and Prague--and he was codirector, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, of the Irish National Theatre Society. Molly had started her acting career the year before, in the newly opened Abbey Theatre, with a walk-on part in Synge's Well of the Saints. She had been promoted from crowd scenes to bit parts to lead roles in Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen. She was still only a member of the company, however, while Synge was a director, whose codirectors disapproved of fraternization. Synge and Molly also faced the disapproval of two widowed mothers. Barring an occasional holiday trip or company road tour, they could seldom be alone together, except on secret afternoon meetings for long walks in the country. Hence their hundreds of letters. Molly's letters do not survive; they apparently were destroyed when Synge died. But his letters convey her mercurial charm, her openness, her love of life, her impulsiveness, and her temper--as violent as his own. What they convey of him (when he is not reproving her or remonstrating with her, as he does in the early months of their relationship) is the love of nature, the poetic language, the bittersweet irony, the elemental quality of emotion, that we know from the plays. His concern for his craft is seen as he struggles with The Playboy. ("Parts of it are not structurally strong or good. I have been all this time trying to get over weak situations by strong writing, but now I find it won't do, and I am at my wit's end.") Synge was quite unperturbed by the violent outrage and near-riots the play provoked. ("Now we'll be talked about. We're an event in the history of the Irish stage," he wrote cheerily.) As his illness progresses, following operations in 1907 and 1908, there is great poignancy in the gradual abating of references to marriage plans and in the shift of salutation from "Dearest Changeling" to "My dearest child." After Synge's death his friends and biographers discreetly avoided mention of Molly, who under her stage name of Maire O'Neill became one of the leading actresses of the Irish theater and lived until 1952. His letters to her have not been published before, except for the few quoted in Greene and Stephens' 1959 biography. A primary source for the study of Synge and the Irish theater movement, the letters include poems inspired by Molly and extensive information about Abbey Theatre business. In addition to a biographical introduction, Ann Saddlemyer has included a map of the Wicklow and Dublin areas and numerous photographs of both Synge and Molly.
The Playboy of the Western World
Author: J. M. SyngePublisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 68
Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Playboy of the Western World" (A Comedy in Three Acts) by J. M. Synge. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
In the Shadow of the Glen
Author: John Millington SyngePublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 52
Book Description
J. M. Synge
Author: Seán HewittPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198862091
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
A thorough re-assessment of one of Ireland's major playwrights, J.M. Synge (1871-1909). Using much previously-undiscussed archival material, the book takes each of Synge's plays and prose works, tracing his journey from an early Romanticism to a later, more combative modernism.
Riders to the Sea
Author: John Millington SyngePublisher: Copia Editions
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52
Book Description
The Complete Plays
Author: John M. SyngePublisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307783960
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
This volume includes the complete texts of all the plays by J.M. Synge. Produced at the Abbey Theater which Synge founded. Represents one of the major dramatic achievements of the 20th century.
A Monk Swimming
Author: Malachy McCourtPublisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504093445
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
In this “irresistible memoir that’s equal parts pathos and belly laughs,” the Irish American writer and actor shares stories from his first decade in the US (People). Malachy McCourt left behind a childhood of poverty and painful memories of his father and mother in Limerick, Ireland, when he followed his brother, Frank, to America in 1952. In A Monk Swimming, McCourt recounts the decade that followed. With not much to his name other than his sharp wit and knack for storytelling, McCourt was unsure what he would do after arriving in New York City. He worked as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks, became the first celebrity bartender in a Manhattan saloon, performed on stage with the Irish Players, and told tales to Jack Paar on The Tonight Show. Although McCourt gained success, money, women, and, eventually, children of his own, he still carried memories of the past with him. So, he fled again. He found himself in the Manhattan Detention Complex, otherwise known as the Tombs. He was arrested several times: poolside in Beverly Hills, in Zurich with gold-smugglers, and again in Calcutta with sex workers. McCourt’s journey also took him to Paris, Rome, and even Limerick again, until finally he was forced to grapple with his past. “[A] funny, oddly winning book.” —The New York Times “A rollicking good read that, as the Irish say, would make a dead man laugh.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “A triumphant tale. . . . You will find yourself laughing through the tears.” —Newsday “Howlingly funny.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Build[s] on the story of the McCourts’ early life so dazzlingly told in Angela’s Ashes by his brother Frank.” —Thomas Keneally, author of the international bestseller Schindler’s List
John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre
Author: Maurice BourgeoisPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
The life & works of the 20th century playwright. Bibliography of his works, translations & unpublished manuscripts. " The book is an excellent corrective of all the personal stories & memoirs, autobiographies & impressions of those who themselves were actors in the tale. Here we get perspective into the story & justice. His book will be the starting place for all who write hereafter of Synge & desire a solid base on which to build their conception. But the book is more than that. It is itself full of good criticism & alive with understanding."--SATURDAY REVIEW. Illus.
Riders to the Sea
Author: John Millington SyngePublisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781523433780
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 24
Book Description
Riders to the Sea A Play in One Act By J. M. Synge Riders to the Sea is a play written by Irish Literary Renaissance playwright John Millington Synge. It was first performed on 25 February 1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theater Society. A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Island, Inishmaan, and like all of Synge's plays it is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland. The plot is based not on the traditional conflict of human wills but on the hopeless struggle of a people against the impersonal but relentless cruelty of the sea. It must have been on Synge's second visit to the Aran Islands that he had the experience out of which was wrought what many believe to be his greatest play. The scene of "Riders to the Sea" is laid in a cottage on Inishmaan, the middle and most interesting island of the Aran group. While Synge was on Inishmaan, the story came to him of a man whose body had been washed up on the far away coast of Donegal, and who, by reason of certain peculiarities of dress, was suspected to be from the island. In due course, he was recognised as a native of Inishmaan, in exactly the manner described in the play, and perhaps one of the most poignantly vivid passages in Synge's book on "The Aran Islands" relates the incident of his burial. The other element in the story which Synge introduces into the play is equally true. Many tales of "second sight" are to be heard among Celtic races. In fact, they are so common as to arouse little or no wonder in the minds of the people. It is just such a tale, which there seems no valid reason for doubting, that Synge heard, and that gave the title, "Riders to the Sea", to his play. It is the dramatist's high distinction that he has simply taken the materials which lay ready to his hand, and by the power of sympathy woven them, with little modification, into a tragedy which, for dramatic irony and noble pity, has no equal among its contemporaries. Great tragedy, it is frequently claimed with some show of justice, has perforce departed with the advance of modern life and its complicated tangle of interests and creature comforts. A highly developed civilisation, with its attendant specialisation of culture, tends ever to lose sight of those elemental forces, those primal emotions, naked to wind and sky, which are the stuff from which great drama is wrought by the artist, but which, as it would seem, are rapidly departing from us. It is only in the far places, where solitary communion may be had with the elements, that this dynamic life is still to be found continuously, and it is accordingly thither that the dramatist, who would deal with spiritual life disengaged from the environment of an intellectual maze, must go for that experience which will beget in him inspiration for his art. The Aran Islands from which Synge gained his inspiration are rapidly losing that sense of isolation and self-dependence, which has hitherto been their rare distinction, and which furnished the motivation for Synge's masterpiece. Whether or not Synge finds a successor, it is none the less true that in English dramatic literature "Riders to the Sea" has an historic value which it would be difficult to over-estimate in its accomplishment and its possibilities. A writer in The Manchester Guardian shortly after Synge's death phrased it rightly when he wrote that it is "the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has been played in Europe from Galway to Prague, it has made the word tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the spirit than it did."