The Playboy of the Western World

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE was bom in 1871, of Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning stock. He graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, and then spent a few years wandering on the Continent. Synge went to the Aran Islands in 1898, subsequently revisited them several times. In the Shadow of the Glen andRiders to the Sea were both completed in the summer of 1902, and both were from material he had collected on the islands. The Playboy of the Western World, published in 1907, aroused a prolonged and bitter controversy, which lasted until his death in 1909. His other works include a few poems, two books and The Aran Islands, and Deirdre of the Sorrows, published posthumously.