Echo Sign: J.M. Synge and Naturalist Theatricality

The Irish playwright J.M. Synge's earliest dramatic experiments and first produced play, The Shadow of the Glen (1903), blend a critique of theatricality with a Darwinian picture of language and emotion. Focusing on symptoms of linguistic disorders that Darwin calls "the echo sign," this article explores how Synge accounts for the emergence of theatrical affects as a telling condition of modern life in rural Ireland. In Shadow, the rapid development of any gesture, any affect, or any talk into a definitive sign of the presence or absence of love is a comical premise, but this quality – of being fated to expression – would become the devastating centre of Synge's later, longer work.