THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD
a comedy in three acts by John Millington Synge
First performed in 1907
The following analysis of The Playboy of the Western World was originally published in The British and American Drama of
Today. Barrett H. Clark. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. pp. 194-7.
- In the preface to The Playboy of the Western World, John Millington Synge wrote: "...
in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich
and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the
same time give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and
natural form.
- " This play is the living embodiment of Synge's ideas on the combination of reality
and poetry in the drama. The Playboy of the Western World -- indeed, all of Synge's
plays -- is outside the realm of literary "movements" and coteries.
- His plays are not plays of ideas. Theses and problems die. Ideas are for a
generation, or for a few generations. Again the dramatist expounds (in the preface to
The Tinker's Wedding): "The drama is made serious -- in the French sense of the
word -- not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in
themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to
define, on which our imaginations live.... The drama, like the symphony, does not
teach or prove anything...."
- In his travel-book, The Aran Islands, we find the following passage: "... He often tells
me about a Connaught man who killed his father with a blow of a spade when he was
in a passion, and then fled to this island and threw himself on the mercy of some of
the natives.... They hid him in a hole ... and kept him safe for weeks, though the
police came and searched for him, and he could hear their boots grinding on the
stones over his head. In spite of a reward which was offered, the island was
incorruptible, and after much trouble the man was safely shipped to America.
- "This impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the west. It seems partly due to the
association between justice and the hated English jurisdiction, but more directly to the
primitive feeling of these people, who are never criminals yet always capable of
crime, that a man will not do wrong unless he is under the influence of a passion
which is as irresistible as a storm on the sea. If a man has killed his father, and is
already sick and broken with remorse, they can see no reason why he should be
dragged away and killed by the law.
- "Such a man, they say, will be quiet all the rest of his life, and if you suggest that
punishment is needed as an example, they ask, 'Would any one kill his father if he
was able to help it?'"
- Out of his sympathy and enthusiasm for life, its humor, its bite, its contradictions, its
exhilaration, Synge wrote this play. The dramatist's end was "reality" and "joy." He
was little concerned with technique, he had no purpose but that of allowing his living
creatures to revel in life, to revel in rich idioms. Still, this apparently spontaneous
comedy was the result of arduous labor: George Moore relates that the last act was
rewritten thirteen times.
- Many plays, of all ages and periods, have contained first acts with very little in them
but the exposition of a few facts and the creation of the environment or milieu: The
opening of The Playboy of the Western World is full of atmosphere, and strikes the
keynote of the action which is to follow; but there is no such conscious preparation :
Pegeen Mike, in Synge's play, opens the act with: "Six yards of stuff for to make a
yellow gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyes. A hat
is suited for a wedding-day. A fine tooth comb. To be sent with three barrels of porter
in Jimmy Farrell's creel cart on the evening of the coming Fair to Mister Michael
James Flaherty. With the best compliments of this season. Margaret Flaherty."
- Throughout the play the development of the plot, such as it is, goes hand in hand with
the development of Christy's character. Beginning with Christy's "I had it in my mind it
was a different word and bigger" (just after his entrance in the first act), trace, by
reference to his speeches, how, in his own estimation and in that of his audience, he
grows from "a slight young man ... very tired and frightened and dirty" to a "likely
gaffer in the end of all." There is a certain similarity between the growth of Hamlet's
character and Christy's.The Playboy of the Western World is literary in the dramatic
sense of the word.
