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Synge's The Shadow of the Glen: Repetition and Allusion NICHOLAS GRENE • IT WOULD BE INACCURATE TO CLAIM that Synge's one-act play The Shadow of the Glen has been neglected. Certainly by comparison with Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World, all of his other work has been relatively neglected; yet The Shadow has had its share of attention - a chapter or half a chapter in every full-length study of Synge, a reference in most essays and articles. Unfortunately, accounts of the play have almost always included extensive discussion of the background to its first production . Was The Shadow based upon the story of the Widow of Ephesus? lor was it an attack on Irish loveless marriages, as 1. B. Yeats suggested?2 The audience reaction to The Shadow is an integral part of the story of Synge's relation with the Irish nationalists, a story which has been re-told ad nauseam. It should be possible to set aside these familiar controversial issues, and to look at the dramatic effect of the play in itself. As a means to that end I want to consider particularly Synge's use of the linked features of repetition and allUSion, and to show the complex structure which he thus achieves. The folk-tale on which The Shadow is based contains as its central device the comic irony of the eavesdropper. The audience enjoys its superior knowledge, that. the old man, supposed dead, is actually listening to the conversation of the "survivors," overhearing guilty admissions or attacks upon himself. Synge adds to the comedy of this situation by having Dan Burke repeat the conversation he has heard when he rises from his death-bed. Dan ridicules the idiotic topics which Nora and the Tramp have been discussing while he has been lying under his sheet: "It's near dead I was wanting to sneeze, and you blathering about the rain, and Darcy (bitterly)the divil choke him - and the towering church" (Plays I p. 43).3 There is no 19 20 NICHOLAS GRENE need to invoke Bergson's concept of the comic nature of repetition to explain why we find this funny. Even more obvious is the instance of Dan's second resurrection. Michael has just been making plans for his marriage to Nora: We'd do right to wait now till himself will be quiet a while in the Seven Churches, and then you'll marry me in the chapel of Rathvanna, and I'll bring the sheep up on the bit of a hill you have in the back mountains, and we won't have anything we'd be afeard to let our minds on when the mist is down. (Plays I p. 51) Dan as he leaps from the bed brandishing his stick throws Michael's words in his teeth: Now you'll not marry her the time I'm rotting below in the Seven Churches and you'll see the thing I'll give you will follow you on the back mountains when the wind is high. (Plays I p. 53) It is the eavesdropper's moment of triumph, and it is his special delight to show those overheard how completely they have been caught out. One small but significant change, however, Dan makes in repeating Michael's words: the euphemistic "quiet" becomes the brutally coarse "rotting." This too might be interpreted as a comic touch - the stripping of shams - but, in the context of the scene that follows, it is suggestive of Dan's frame of mind. The old man's real wrath is reserved for his wife, and he turns on her and repeats words which she has spoken earlier: "There'll be an end now of your fine times and all the talk you have of young men and old men, and of the mist coming up or going down" (Plays I p. 53). The speeches here recalled are those in which Nora expresses her sense of the monotonous , desolation of her life - "Seeing nothing but the mists rolling down the bog, and the mists again, and they rolling up the bog, and hearing nothing but the wind crying...

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