The Playboy of the Western World

The Playboy of the Western World

John Millington Synge

In writing THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD, as in my other plays, I

have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the country

people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the

newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also

from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from

beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to

acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of these fine

people. Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry

will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame

indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside

cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a

collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of

literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the

story-teller’s or the playwright’s hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses

of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took

his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had

just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In

Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege. When

I was writing _The Shadow of the Glen_, some years ago, I got more aid

than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the

old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being

said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think, is of

importance, for 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 to give the

reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and

natural form. In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is

found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books

that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One

has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this literature; and

on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in

joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one

must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has

failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical

comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in

what is superb and wild in reality. In a good play every speech should

be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be

written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on

poetry. In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination

that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish

to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places

where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the

harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.

J. M. S.

_January_ 21_st_, 1907.

CHRISTOPHER MAHON.

OLD MAHON, _his father, a squatter_.

MICHAEL JAMES FLAHERTY (called MICHAEL JAMES), _a publican_.

MARGARET FLAHERTY (called PEGEEN MIKE), _his daughter_.

SHAWN KEOUGH, _her cousin, a young farmer_.

WIDOW QUIN, _a woman of about thirty_.

PHILLY CULLEN and JIMMY FARRELL, _small farmers_.

SARA TANSEY, SUSAN BRADY, and HONOR BLAKE, _village girls_.

A BELLMAN.

SOME PEASANTS.

The action takes place near a village, on a wild coast of Mayo. The

first Act passes on an evening of autumn, the other two Acts on the

following day.