Synge and the Ireland of his Time by W.B. Yeats

On Saturday, January 26th, 1907, I was lecturing in Aberdeen, and when / my lecture was over I was given a telegram which said, 'Play great / success. ' It had been sent from Dublin after the second Act of 'The / Playboy of the Western World,' then being performed for the first time. / After one in the morning, my host brought to my bedroom this second / telegram, 'Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift. ' I knew no / more until I got the Dublin papers on my way from Belfast to Dublin on / Tuesday morning. On the Monday night no word of the play had been / heard. About forty young men had sat on the front seats of the pit, and / stamped and shouted and blown trumpets from the rise to the fall of the / curtain. On the Tuesday night also the forty young men were there. They / wished to silence what they considered a slander upon Ireland's / womanhood. Irish women would never sleep under the same roof with a / young man without a chaperon, nor admire a murderer, nor use a word / like 'shift; ' nor could anyone recognise the country men and women of / Davis and Kickham in these poetical, violent, grotesque persons, who / used the name of God so freely, and spoke of all things that hit their / fancy.

A patriotic journalism which had seen in Synge's capricious imagination / the enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years / prepared for this hour, by that which is at once the greatest and most / ignoble power of journalism, the art of repeating a name again and / again with some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had / begun after the first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's / first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in / dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from / his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was / admitted to possess, but 'from a writer of the Roman decadence. ' Some / spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like his can but / slowly, amid what it has of harsh and strange, set forth the nobility / of its beauty, and the depth of its compassion; but the frenzy that / would have silenced his master-work was, like most violent things / artificial, the defence of virtue by those that have but little, which / is the pomp and gallantry of journalism and its right to govern the / world.

As I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a / school of patriotism that held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood / beside me, and said, 'A young doctor has just told me that he can / hardly keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that / howling mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.'