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The Shadow of the Glen and The Widow of Ephesus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

David H. Greene
David H. Greene*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

John Millington Synge's first play is in many respects one of his most important works. It embodies that “dialectical synthesis of the naturalistic tradition and the symbolistic reaction” which, as Mr. Harry Levin has recently pointed out, Synge stated as being the great problem to be solved by the artist of his time. Criticism of The Shadow of the Glen has been mostly concerned with proving that its Irishness is spurious. Very few critics have seen that the most interesting thing about the play is Synge's happy facility in combining the realistic with the symbolistic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , March 1947 , pp. 233 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947

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References

1 James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 12.

2 Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (New York, 1931), p. 125.

3 The Works of John M. Synge (Dublin, 1910), iv, 11-12; 6.

4 Maurice Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (Dublin, 1913), p. 151, denies that the tramp is a symbol but insists that he “may be taken as expressive of the poetic revolt against settled existence, as the free escape into some ideal dreamworld… . All this poetic longing … is to be detected in the tramp he presents in this first one-act play.”

5 An editorial in The United Irishman, October 17, 1903. Griffith's attack was an invitation to others to participate in the assault on Synge's play, and The United Irishman devoted much of its space to letters on both sides of the question. “One of the nastiest little plays I have ever seen. An evil compound of Ibsen and Boucicault,” wrote one irate correspondent.

6 Griffith slyly neglected to publish Synge's letter until Yeats forced him to it. Synge wrote, “I beg to enclose the story of an unfaithful wife which was told to me by an old man on the middle island of Aran in 1898, and which I have since used in a modified form in The Shadow of the Glen. It differs essentially from any version of the story of the Widow of Ephesus with which I am acquainted.” The United Irishman, January 11, 1905.

7 The Works of John M. Synge, iii, 42-46.

8 W. G. Fay, The Pays of the Abbey Theatre (New York, 1935), p. 140.

9 Irish Folklore Commission, clxxxii, 804-809.