Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, prose and travel writer. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World caused riots in Dublin during its opening run. Synge developed Hodgkin’s disease, a metastatic cancer that was then untreatable.
About John Millington Synge in brief
Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, prose and travel writer. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World caused riots in Dublin during its opening run. Synge developed Hodgkin’s disease, a metastatic cancer that was then untreatable. He died several weeks short of his 38th birthday as he was trying to complete his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows. His writings mainly concern working class Catholics in rural Ireland, and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. His parents were members of the Protestant upper middle class; his father was a barrister, and came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow. His paternal grandfather, also named John Synge, was an evangelical Christian involved in the movement that became the Plymouth Brethren. His maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, had been a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Famine. His great, great grandfather was the archdeacon of Killala. He later developed an interest in Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, and became a member of the Irish League for a year. In 1893 he published his first known work, a poem influenced by Wordsworth, A College Miscellany. After graduating, Synge went to Germany to study music and moved to Würzburg in January 1894.
During summer 1894 he fell in love with Cherrie Matheson, a friend of one of his cousins of the PlymouthBrethren. He moved to Paris in January 1895 to study literature and languages at Sorbonne. He returned to Ireland in June 1894, and moved to Paris to pursue his literary interests and pursue his love of folklore. In January 1895 he moved to London to study English and literature at the University of London. He went on to become a prominent writer and playwright in Dublin and elsewhere in the UK. His last known work was a play, The Playboy Of The Western World, which he wrote in the early 1930s and which caused riots during its run at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. He also wrote a book about the history of Ireland, which was published in 1947. He is survived by his wife, Mary, and two children, Mary and John. The couple had a son, John, who was born in 1871 and a daughter, Mary Ann, who is now a writer and a playwright. The family moved to the suburb of Kingstown, County Dublin, in 1888, and Synge entered Trinity College, Dublin the following year. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1892, having studied Irish and Hebrew, as well as continuing his music studies and playing with the Academy Orchestra in the Antient Concert Rooms. He joined the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club and read the works of Charles Darwin.
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