Riders to the Sea

Irish playwright and poet Edmund John Millington Synge (known usually as John Millington Synge) was an important figure in both the Irish Literary Revival and Irish literary history more broadly. His most well-known works include the plays The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Riders to the Sea (1904), and In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and his published journal The Aran Islands (1907). Synge was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre, a major establishment and contributor to the Irish Literary Revival, alongside W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

Synge was born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family; he studied at Trinity College Dublin and spent time in Germany to study music in 1893. After his stint in Germany, however, he gave up his intended music career and began learning about poetry and literary criticism in Paris. Despite Synge’s upper-class, Protestant upbringing, most of his works focused on working-class, rural Catholics. Upon the urging of W. B. Yeats, Synge decided to live among the working class for a time; he lived on the Aran Islands, one of the parts of Ireland where the Irish language survived alongside the Hiberno-English (or Irish-influenced English) dialect. He learned Irish, developed an knack for re-creating the Hiberno-English dialect in his plays, and he detected the ancient pagan beliefs that survived underneath the Christianity imposed on the Irish.