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justly speak of him as a portent. Here, by one stroke, to show how he stands apart from all his fellow ascendancy writers, it is but necessary to state, that he, an ascendancy man, went into the huts of the people and lived with them. * * * The playboy of the western world1 I we have now come to The Playboy of the Western World. It is Synge’s most famous piece of work, so famous indeed that one can hardly deal with it without becoming entangled in legend.to grow is of the nature of legend. ‘There were riots in Dublin when this play was first produced,’ and the foreigner, not knowing these for words out of a legend, sees, in his mind’s eye, a tumult-ridden city, with chargings and counter-chargings in its streets and squares. Both inside and outside the abbey Theatre during the first few performances of the play there certainly were squabbles and protestings, but to speak of them as riots is to use the very accents of the playboy himself. Mr. padriac Colum writes of the first performance: I remember well how the play nearly got past the dubiousness of that first-night audience.The third act was near its close when the line that drew the first hiss was spoken, – ‘a drift of the finest women in the County Mayo standing in their shifts around me.’ That hiss was a signal for a riot in the theatre. They had been disconcerted and impatient before this, but the audience, I think, would not have made any interruption if this line had not been spoken. Still, they had been growing hostile to the play from the point where Christy’s father enters. That scene was too representational. There stood a man with horribly-bloodied bandage upon his head, making a figure that took the whole thing out of the atmosphere of high comedy.* Mr. Yeats takes up the tale: Part Two. Representing Ireland 131 * The Road Round Ireland, by padraic Colum.2 on the second performance of The Playboy of the Western World, about forty men who sat in the middle of the pit succeeded in making the play entirely inaudible. Some of them brought tin trumpets, and the noise began immediately on the rise of the curtain. For days articles in the press called for the withdrawal of the play, but we played for the seven nights we had announced; and before the week’s end opinion had turned in our favour. There were, however, nightly disturbances and a good deal of rioting in the surrounding streets. on the last night of the play there were, I believe, five hundred police keeping order in the theatre and its neighbourhood.* The protest made with such heat was two-fold. It was religious. It was nationalistic. and only such outsiders as have lived in countries where an alien ascendancy, for two centuries or more, have been casting ridicule on everything native, can really understand it. Do not psychologists tell us that if an occurrence, which causes us mental pain, is repeated, every repetition brings not only its own particular amount of pain but brings, as well, recollection of our former sufferings from the same cause, that is, brings more than the amount of pain intrinsic in the event. The Playboy incident, then, was not unrelated: it awakened within the national consciousness ancestral disturbances. The new protest was portion of the old. wherever there is an alien ascendancy there is such an attendant protest, perennial, and on occasions quickening into noise and violence. as to its cause and its nature, we may find instruction in these words: If an Irishman of any distinction be found a blackleg, a knave, a traitor or a coward, there arises a certain mirth in the discovery among strangers of all kinds, especially the English, as if they were glad to light upon an example in that nation of what is a pretty general rule in most countries at this time of day. But where they dare joke upon it, the single blot is imputed with great gaiety to that whole people.Thus all Ireland is made answerable for the faults of every one of her children, and every one of these bears the whole weight of the country upon his shoulders.Therefore, the Irishman must, in his own defence, and that of his whole country, be braver and more nice in regard to his reputation than is necessary for any...

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