J. M. Synge Add a review

Edmund John Millington Synge (; 16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909), popularly known as J. M. Synge, was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. He is regarded among the greatest dramatists of the early 20th century, and by several of his peers, including W. B. Yeats, as the most prolific dramatist in Irish literature. His plays were known for their realistic depiction of Irish societies, and included themes, landscapes, and settings from places he visited during his travels.

His 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World, one of his best-known works, was initially poorly received, due to its bleak ending, crude depiction of Irish peasants, and the idealisation of patricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and street riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Tinker's Wedding (1909).

Synge, from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background, mainly wrote about working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and what he saw as the essential paganism of their worldview. Owing to his ill health, he was schooled at home. His early interest was in music, leading to a scholarship and degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music. In 1894, he moved to Paris where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and returned to Ireland.

Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease. He died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered by some as his masterpiece, though unfinished during his lifetime. His relatively few works are widely regarded as of high cultural significance.