The first description audiences receive of Christy Mahon, the dubious hero of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, is one well suited to, but not often associated with, epic heroism. Entering his fiancee's house from the "great darkness" of an Irish night, the cowardly Shawn Keogh describes a figure he passed on the road, "a kind of fellow above in the furzy ditch, groaning wicked like a maddening dog". The image should be a familiar one to modern readers, and would be no less so to Synge's audience; a lone figure lying in a ditch in the Irish countryside, moaning to the point of being subhuman is one of the most commonly used symbols of the Great Famine. The connection between Synge's hero and the Famine, perhaps the most significant and signified period in Irish history, is no accident. Rather, it is the opening move in a carefully wrought satire of Irish nationalism as formulated by the Gaelic Revival. By using Famine imagery in a peasant comedy, Synge brings together two well-worn but mutually exclusive representations of Ireland: the bastion of a vital and heroic culture and the land stricken with eternal suffering. Throughout Playboy, Synge plays these two models of Ireland against each other to demonstrate that the perpetuation of both models in the rhetoric of the Gaelic Revival undermines the very premise of revolutionary nationalism.