BORN INTO an affluent family of Anglo-Irish Dublin Protestants, John Millington Synge (1871-1909) was educated at Trinity College and spent his youth traveling the Continent in straitened circumstances. At the urging of countryman William Butler Yeats, whom he met in Paris in the late 1890s, Synge returned to Ireland and spent time among the impoverished residents of the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway. The author’s experiences there provided material for his early plays (Riders to the Sea was his second) and for his celebrated book The Aran Islands (1907).
Synge’s literary efforts found a ready audience in the increasingly nationalistic cultural climate of turn-of-the-century Ireland, and his plays were produced at Yeats’s newly opened Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It was there that The Playboy of the Western World was premiered in 1907, inciting riots: the work’s unromanticized, satiric treatment of the Irish peasantry—considered sacrosanct to many nationalists—and its (for the time) shocking language provoked controversies that continued after the authors early death.
Despite these controversies, Synge’s plays were admired for their craftsmanship and linguistic sensitivity during his lifetime, and were enormously influential both in Irish literary circles and upon the theater in general. For this edition, dialect terms that may be unfamiliar to the general reader have been glossed at the back of the book.