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John Synge and the Drama of His Tilne CLIFFORD LEECH • IN A PLAY WRITTEN RECENTLY for performance in the United Kingdom the dramatist at one point in his text indicates that the actress taking the part of the chief woman-character should utter, repeatedly and with great force, the most indecent exclamation that the Lord Chamberlain of the time would permit an actress to use in a public place. Although the play was written only some eight years ago, it has thus become, in its small way, an historical document. The Lord Chamberlain has abandoned his privilege of keeping playwrights and actors and theatre-managers in order, and any word, any sound, though not yet any action, is available for you on the stages of London and New York if you are indiscriminate in your play-going. But my immediate concern in referring to this mildly obnoxious play is only incidental in relation to its status as an historical document: much more it interests me because of the playwright's attitude to dramatic language and his effectual abdication as a chooser of words, as a maker whose making, whose "thing" in every sense, depends largely on the putting of words together. Of course, anyone with experience of the theatre knows that the language of a play will be subject to modification during the course of rehearsals, during the play's run. In our current study of Shakespeare's text, we are coming back to what Sir Edmund Chambers wittily and sceptically referred to as Dover Wilson's theory of "continuous copY," a theory dependent on the belief that no play's text achieves any sort of stability until it has ceased to be performed.1 But changes made in the theatre, with or without the author's consent, with or without a conscious purpose (for an actor is always likely to substitute a synonym for the word he has been told to memorize, or to paraphrase a whole speech), are changes made because they seem to fit better with the play's total statement, or part of it, or to fit what the particular 223 224 CLIFFORD LEECH player is capable of enunciating. I have had the experience, many years ago, of playing a scene in an Ibsen play, as translated by Archer,along with an actor who was under a compulsion to rephrase his lines every night. I had to listen attentively in order to be sure when his speeches were more or less complete: the idea of the "cue" did not, for that particular actor, exist. Any play, in fact, will always in some measure be getting away from the author.2 But this is a quite different matter from the condition of things when a dramatist says: "Use any obscenity you like: I don't mind." We can imgaine what John Millington Synge would have thought about it. He was a man with a passion for dramatic language, and with something of arrogance in relation to what he rightly saw as his privileged position in the matter. Everyone knows of his statement in the Preface to The Playboy, but I need to quote it because there are things in it I must comment on here: 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 had 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...

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