36 Facts About JM Synge

Edmund John Millington JM Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival.

JM Synge's best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, which he had co-founded with W B Yeats and Lady Gregory.

JM Synge abandoned this career path in 1894 with a move to Paris where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and then returned to Ireland.

JM Synge 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.

JM Synge was born on 16 April 1871, in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, the youngest of eight children of upper-middle-class Protestant parents.

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JM Synge's father John Hatch Synge was a barrister, and came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow.

JM Synge's paternal grandfather, named John JM Synge, was an evangelical Christian involved in the movement that became the Plymouth Brethren, and his maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, was a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Famine.

JM Synge was a descendant of Edward Synge, Archbishop of Tuam, and Edward's son Nicholas, the Bishop of Killaloe.

JM Synge's nephews included mathematician John Lighton Synge and optical microscopy pioneer Edward Hutchinson Synge.

JM Synge's father died from smallpox in 1872 at the age of 49.

JM Synge's mother moved the family to the house next door to her own mother's house in Rathgar, County Dublin.

JM Synge developed an interest in bird-watching along the banks of the River Dodder, and during family holidays at the seaside resort of Greystones, County Wicklow, and the family estate at Glanmore.

JM Synge was educated at home and at times at schools in Dublin and Bray, and later studied piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

JM Synge travelled to the continent to study music, but changed his mind and decided to focus on literature.

JM Synge was a talented student and won a scholarship in counterpoint in 1891.

JM Synge later developed an interest in Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, and became a member of the Irish League for a year.

JM Synge stayed in Coblenz during 1893 and moved to Wurzburg in January 1894.

JM Synge returned to Ireland in June 1894, and moved to Paris in January 1895 to study literature and languages at the Sorbonne.

JM Synge met Cherrie Matheson during summer breaks with his family in Dublin.

JM Synge proposed to her in 1895 and again the next year, but she turned him down on both occasions because of their differing views on religion.

JM Synge planned on making a career in writing about French authors for the English press.

JM Synge wrote some pieces of literary criticism for Gonne's Irlande Libre and other journals, as well as unpublished poems and prose in a decadent fin de siecle style.

In 1897, JM Synge suffered his first attack of Hodgkin's, after which an enlarged gland was removed from his neck.

JM Synge visited Lady Gregory's home, at Coole Park near Gort, County Galway, where he met Yeats again and Edward Martyn.

JM Synge spent the following five summers there, collecting stories and folklore, perfecting his Irish, but living in Paris for most of the rest of each year.

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JM Synge considered the book "my first serious piece of work".

Lady Gregory read the manuscript and advised JM Synge to remove any direct naming of places and to add more folk stories, but he declined to do either because he wanted to create something more realistic.

JM Synge had written two one-act plays, Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, the previous year.

JM Synge relied on Hiberno-English, the English dialect of Ireland, to reinforce its usefulness as a literary language, partly because he believed that the Irish language could not survive.

Pearse, Arthur Griffith and other conservative-minded Catholics claimed JM Synge had done a disservice to Irish nationalism by not idealising his characters, but later critics have stated he idealised the Irish peasantry too much.

JM Synge differed from Yeats and Lady Gregory on what he believed the Irish theatre should be, as he wrote to Stephen MacKenna:.

JM Synge's widely regarded masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, was first performed on 26 January 1907, at the Abbey Theatre.

JM Synge died from Hodgkin lymphoma at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin on 24 March 1909, aged 37, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin.

John Masefield, who knew JM Synge, wrote that he "gave one from the first the impression of a strange personality".

JM Synge was a political radical, immersed in the socialist literature of William Morris, and in his own words "wanted to change things root and branch".

JM Synge is the subject of Mac Dara O Curraidhin's 1999 documentary film, JM Synge agus an Domhan Thiar .