ABSTRACT
John Millington Synge, swarthy as a gypsy, exotic, verging on sinister, is like that Jew-man Pegeen Mike in the play hopes to marry. The connection between Synge's ending and his beginning is mysterious, like the course of that fabulous river, the Arethusa, that rises in one place, goes underground, and surfaces again in another. Synge's plays, like Shakespeare's, turn that around, putting the particular in front of the general. The old multiplex intelligentia, most acute in Shakespeare, stages a comeback in Synge, and entertaining contrary truths, he holds them in suspension. Synge, like William Butler Yeats, beat his way back to solid and substantial things. Better than competent on the violin, Synge hoped to be a concert performer but had to give it up out of shyness. Synge, a target of the terror, hoped to be righteous, and his brother Edward Moore's wringing of the peasantry drove him to protest.
