‘Mirror up to nation’: Synge and Shakespeare

Abstract

Christopher Murray, Philip Edwards, and Rebecca Steinburger have examined the ways in which the Irish Dramatic Revival drew on the example and plays of Shakespeare. Their emphasis falls on Yeats and O'Casey, both of whom have written extensively on Shakespeare in their prose essays and autobiographies. The allusions to Shakespeare by Synge are much briefer and more cryptic. And yet there is a deep and complex relationship between Shakespeare and Synge, as this essay will indicate. The one writer who has paired the two is James Joyce, in the Library chapter of Ulysses, set in the same year that Ireland's National Theatre was founded. The essay also looks at the neglected fact that Synge, while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, took lectures on Shakespeare from Professor Edward Dowden and made copious extracts from Dowden's Shakespeare: His Mind and Art. The essay goes on to examine Synge's key remarks on Shakespeare in relation to Irish writers and to compare the return of the dead father in The Playboy of the Western World and Hamlet.