Synge and the Celtic Revival

SYNGE AND THE CELTIC REVIVAL THE EARLY HISTORY of the Irish National Theatre Society-familiar to us as the Abbey Theatre-is full of anomalies. Although it was part of a nationalist movement, it was actually repudiated by most Irish nationalists. Although it was, and still is, the nearest thing in the English-speaking world to what might be called a people's theater, it was privately owned by an English woman, antipathetic to Irish nationalism , and its directors seemed intent upon demonstrating only contempt for the people. Although it glorified the Irish peasant, most Irish people believed that its intention was to ridicule him. Although it was a manifestation of Celtic revivalism, its dramatists wrote in English , and during its first forty years of existence only four plays out of the hundreds performed on its stage were in Irish. The directors of the theater never wavered in their attitudes toward political nationalism or toward their audiences. But they were aware of the inconsistency of a literature in English extolling what was exclusively Irish and produced in an atmosphere in which everyone seemed to be demonstrating his patriotism by learning the rudiments of the native language. The sudden interest in the peasant amazed nobody in Ireland more than the peasant himself. Why the linguists and folklorists came to share his meal of potatoes and milk he came to understand-and to exploit. But I suspect that he could never fathom why people wanted to write plays about him. Professor Daniel Binchy of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin tells about the Kerryman who read the Playboy and commented, "Sure it was only full of the kind of rough talk you'd hear in any public house in the town of Dingle." Synge's language, which has been mimicked by many people including Joyce's Buck Mulligan, has been analyzed by the Celticist A. G. Van Hamel, who claimed that it was typical of the English still spoken in the west of Ireland and that its odd constructions were explained by the fact that when Gaelic began to give way to English in the seventeenth century the people began speaking English by translating Gaelic idioms literally into their new language. Synge's language, he concluded, was "a very realistic and vigorous Western Anglo-Irish." It has also been suggested that the literal translation from Irish to English was done, in part at least, by Synge himself. This is an attractive possibility, which receives support from the fact that Synge did not develop the style which became his hallmark until he went to live among the Irish-speaking people of Inishmaan in the Aran Islands. Synge once described his book The Aran Islands as "my first serious 292 1961 SYNGE AND TIlE CELTIC REvIVAL 293 piece of work. It was written before any of the plays. In writing out the talks of the people and their stories in this book-and in a certain number of articles on Wicklow peasants-I learned to write the peasant dialect and dialogue which I use in my plays." I suspect that a study of the pages of Beloideas, the journal of the Irish Folklore Institute, which publishes literal transcriptions of stories from English-speaking Irish countrymen, might answer the question of whether Synge's language was a fair sample of western Anglo-Irish or a synthetic one of his own creation. Meanwhile one can see why the English critic V. S. Pritchett has described Synge as a dolphin sporting in the riotous ocean of an English language which has the air of a foreign tongue for him. The extent to which the writers of the Irish Literary Revival actually drew from Gaelic sources is still an unanswered question. Since most of them had little or no Irish it has been too often assumed perhaps that their indebtedness was more apparent than real. Synge's notebooks and diaries, which I have studied, indicate that for him at least the discovery of the native tradition was crucial, that his knowledge of it was substantial, and that his initial acquaintance with it may have begun in his native land but received its real stimulus when he was...