Synge’s Death: The Otherworld

Collins, Christopher

doi:10.1057/978-1-349-94872-7_8

Christopher Collins²

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Abstract

The book concludes by answering this question: did Synge dramatize the residue from pre-Christian Ireland to negotiate the Ascendancy’s anxiety over their Irish heritage, or was it because he had difficulty accepting that the wanton cultural imperialism that was articulated by the Catholic Church and its newly enfranchised bourgeois laity exploited the residue from pre-Christian Ireland? The book answers this question by exploring the final days of Synge’s life and the reaction to his death that was mythologized by W.B. Yeats into a pre-Christian fantasy.

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Notes

1.
J.B. Yeats, Letters To His Son: W.B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922, ed. Joseph Hone (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 109. J.B. Yeats to W.B. Yeats, 1 July, 1908.
2.
Yeats, Letters To His Son, 109. J.B. Yeats to W.B. Yeats, 1 July, 1908.
3.
Yeats, Letters To His Son, 109. J.B. Yeats to W.B. Yeats, 1 July, 1908.
4.
W.B. Yeats, Memoirs (London: Macmillan, 1972), 178.
5.
Maurice Joy, a Kerryman with an English accent, orbited the periphery of the Irish Literary Revival. Yeats certainly thought that Joy’s illness was not as pressing as Synge’s: ‘to be operated on at the same time as Synge struck one as sheer insolence’. See, Yeats, Memoirs, 202–203.
6.
W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), 379.
7.
Yeats, Memoirs, 196.
8.
Yeats, Memoirs, 161.
9.
Yeats, Memoirs, 199.
10.
Yeats, Memoirs, 199.
11.
TCD SSMS: 6197, f.4814.
12.
J.M. Synge, quoted in Maurice Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and The Irish Theatre (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1913), 235. Joseph Holloway accounts for Synge’s comment slightly differently: ‘This is a nice little room and I feel better already in it’ (Joseph Holloway, NLI MS: 1807, 26 March, 1909, f.381).
13.
Joseph Holloway, NLI MS: 1807, 26 March, 1909, f.381. Holloway stipulates that Synge asked this at ‘about one o’clock on Wednesday morning’. This date is probably unreliable; one o’clock in the morning on Wednesday 24 March would be 4 hours before Synge died, which would leave little time for Margaret Huxley to find a clergyman.
14.
McCormack, Fool of the Family, 381.
15.
W.B. Yeats, The Death of Synge and other Passages from an Old Diary (Dublin: Cuala, 1971), 11.
16.
Thomas MacDonagh recalled that the weather in Dublin on that morning was ‘stormy’ and ‘wuthering’. See, Thomas MacDonagh, ‘J.M. Synge: Irish Dramatist, Writer, Poet,’ T.P.’s Weekly, 9 April, 1909, 469.
17.
Yeats, The Death of Synge, 11.
18.
Yeats, The Death of Synge, 12.
19.
Yeats, The Death of Synge, 12.
20.
Yeats, The Death of Synge, 12.
21.
Yeats, The Death of Synge, 12.
22.
J.M. Synge, ‘Anatole Le Braz,’ Daily Express, 28 January, 1899, 3.
23.
For Yeats’s relationship with Leo Africanus see, NLI MS: 30,499.
24.
W.B. Yeats, NLI MS: 30,358. This account from Yeats’s séance with Wreidt is contained in a brown leather notebook that Maud Gonne gave to Yeats for Christmas in 1912. There is no folio number.
25.
Stephen MacKenna, NLI MS: 13,276, f.12.
26.
TCD MS: 4378, f.50r.
27.
Yeats, Memoirs, 195.
28.
NYPL MS: Foster-Murphy Collection. Lily Yeats quoted in John Quinn to F.J. Gregg, 10 April, 1909.
29.
William Butler Yeats to Mabel Dickinson, 11 May 1908. Quoted in R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life: The Apprentice Mage, 1865 – 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 385.
30.
Yeats, Memoirs, 202, 205.
31.
NYPL MS: Berg Collection. Lady Gregory to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, November 2, 1899. Emphasis added.
32.
NYPL MS: Foster-Murphy Collection.
33.
Moran, ‘Protestants and The Irish Nation,’ 343.
34.
TCD SSMS: 6193, f.1663.
35.
NYPL MS: Foster-Murphy Collection.
36.
David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), 65.
37.
CW, vol. 2: 283n.
38.
NLI MS: 4455. F.J. Fay to Joseph Holloway, 14 January, 1905.
39.
TCD MS: 4349, f.34r.
40.
TCD SSMS: 6193, f.1663.
41.
M. O’Riordan, Catholicity and Progress in Ireland (London: Keegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905), 255.
42.
D.P. Moran, ‘Protestants and The Irish Nation,’ Leader, 27 July, 1901, 342.
43.
CW, vol. 2: 283n.
44.
CW, vol. 2: 283n.
45.
CW, vol. 2: 283n.
46.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), 316.
47.
Pádraig Pearse, ‘From a Hermitage,’ Irish Freedom, June, 1913, 2.
48.
Pearse, ‘From a Hermitage,’ 2.
49.
TCD MS: 4371, ff.31r–31v.
50.
TCD MS: 4410, f.35r. The poem is dated 23 November, 1908.
51.
See, for example, Eileen Battersby, ‘A Double Take of Savage Realism,’ Irish Times, 7 February, 2009, 45.

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School of English, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Christopher Collins

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Collins, C. (2016). Synge’s Death: The Otherworld. In: Theatre and Residual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94872-7_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94872-7_8
Published: 26 June 2016
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-94871-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-94872-7
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