The Playboy of the Western World and Two Other Irish Plays
Riots greeted the first performance of The Playboy of the Western World at Dublin's Abbey Theatre on 26 January 1907. Eggs, potatoes and even a slice of fruit cake were hurled at the actors during subsequent performances, and it seems unlikely that much of the actual play could have been heard in the uproar. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, with the two other plays in this volume, Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (1892) and O'Casey's Cock-a-doodle Dandy (1949), mark vital stages in the rich explosion of Irish drama that first made itself heard at the turn of the century and gathered momentum during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Civil War.
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William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was born in Dublin. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle in London; at the same time he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat…
When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats; Edited with an Introduction by Rob Doggett
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales
Edited and with an Introduction by William Butler Yeats
Modern Classics Selected Poetry
William Butler Yeats; Timothy Webb
John Millington Synge was born in 1871 into an old Anglo-Irish family. Due to ill health he was educated mainly by private tutors before studying at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He went to Germany to continue his musical studies in 1893 and then, turning to literature, moved to Paris in 1895. There he met W. B. Yeats, who suggested he go to the Aran Islands to live with the islanders as one of them and to "express a life that has never found expression." He spent a few weeks on the islands each year from 1898 to 1902. The Aran Islands did not appear until 1907, but it was his experiences in Aran that gave him the…
The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays
J. M. Synge, Edna O'Brien, Robert Welch
The Aran Islands
J. M. SyngeSean O'Casey was born in Dublin in 1880. In 1926 he moved to England. He discouraged any professional performances of his plays in Ireland after the Archbishop of Dublin refused to inaugurate the Dublin festival if O'Casey's play The Drums of Father Ned (1958) was included. O'Casey died in 1964.