Synge Read Free

of the literary movement. I tried to create a picture of a class or group in Irish society that has almost vanished.
    If a writer were in the business of murdering his family, then the Synges, with their sense of an exalted and lost heritage and a strict adherence to religious doctrine added to a very great dullness, would have been a godsend. Synge’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Grene tells us
owned not only Glanmore [in County Wicklow], with its fifteen hundred acres of demesne including the Devil’s Glen, but Roundwood Park as well, an estate of over four thousand acres.
    His grandfather, however, managed to lose most of this property, a portion only of which was bought back by his uncle. Synge’s father, who became a barrister, died when Synge was one year old. He left a widow, four sons, a daughter and four hundred pounds a year. The first three sons were solid citizens, becoming a land agent, an engineer and a medical missionary to China. The daughter married a solicitor. The youngest, it was presumed, despite his solitary nature and regular illnesses, would find eventually a profession to suit his family, if not his temperament.
    In his book Letters to my Daughter , written in 1932, Synge’s brother Samuel, the missionary, wrote:
There is little use in trying to say what if our father had lived might have happened different to what did happen. But I think two things are fairly clear. One is that as your Uncle John grew up and met questions that he did not know how to answer, a father’s word of advice and instruction would have made a very great difference to him. The other thing is that probably our father would have arranged something for your Uncle John to do besides his favourite reading, something that would not have been too much for him but would have brought in some remuneration at an earlier date than his writings did.
    This was to consign Synge’s mother Kathleen to dust, to suggest a sort of powerlessness for her. She was, in fact, a very powerful person. Synge’s mother was born Kathleen Traill in 1838. Her father was a clergyman of whom Edward Stephens wrote:
He spent his life, as he put it, waging war against popery in its thousand forms of wickedness, which did not always endear him to his ecclesiastical superiors.
    Finally he became rector of Schull in County Cork where he died in 1847 from a fever caught from the people among whom he worked. His widow, who had been brought up in Drumboe Castle in County Donegal, moved to the southern suburbs of Dublin. From here in 1856, her daughter married John Hatch Synge, the playwright’s father. They lived in Hatch Street in the centre of Dublin in the early years of their marriage, later moving to Rathfarnam where John Millington Synge was born. Later, after her husband’s death, Kathleen Synge moved her family to Orwell Park in Rathgar.
    Synge’s paternal grandfather and his uncle Francis, who had bought back some of the family estates in County Wicklow, were members of the Plymouth Brethren. Mrs Synge’s father had held strong evangelical views, which his daughter also shared. She brought up her children according to strict religious principles, and her social life, such as it was, seemed to include only people who were of a like mind and background. Edward Stephens wrote:
Mrs Synge conducted her household by a rule as strict as that of a religious order and supposed that her children would acquiesce without question. She was very well versed in the doctrine to which she adhered and she could support every tenet by citing scriptural authority. She believed the whole Bible to be inspired and its meaning to be clear to anyone who read with an open mind and faith in the Holy Ghost.
    In an autobiographical essay written in his mid-twenties, Synge wrote:
I was painfully timid, and while still young the idea of Hell took a fearful hold on me. One night I thought I was irretrievably damned and cried myself to sleep in vain yet terrified efforts to form a