Contents
Introduction _______________________________________ 4
Chapter 1: Identity
I) An ambiguous Irish identity___________________________ 8
1) Culture and nation in Ireland ______________________________ 8
a) Representation and identity ______________________________________ 9
b) Crushing Gaelic culture ________________________________________ 10
c) Nation as a system of cultural signification __________________________ 12
2) The inexorable death of Gaelic _____________________________ 14
a) Facts and figures ____________________________________________ 14
b) Linguistic confusion? _________________________________________ 16
c) Synge’s Aran Islands as a snapshot of a dying society ____________________ 17
3) “Collective behaviour” __________________________________ 19
a) Definition _________________________________________________ 20
b) An ambiguous position ________________________________________ 23
II) Creating the Irish – romantic nationalism ? ______________ 25
1) Deanglicizing? _______________________________________ 26
a) Reviving Irish? ______________________________________________ 26
b) A “spent force”? _____________________________________________ 28
2) Authenticity and creation ________________________________ 30
a) Creating HE _______________________________________________ 31
1
b) Synge and his literary tradition ___________________________________ 33
3) The speech of the people _________________________________ 35
a) Romanticism? _______________________________________________ 35
b) Hiberno English as a symbol for unity ______________________________ 38
Chapter 2: Translating
I) Translating syntax: Gaelic structure of thoughts ____________ 42
1) A different temporality __________________________________ 42
a) Habitual tenses – Form, functions and frequencies of periphrastic do and be ____ 42
b) Perfects ___________________________________________________ 45
c) Translating thoughts __________________________________________ 49
2) Emphasis and structure _________________________________ 50
a) “It’s the truth they’re saying” – Focusing devices ______________________ 51
b) Pronominal emphasis – Reflexive pronouns ___________________________ 53
c) Definite article______________________________________________ 54
3) “And” _____________________________________________ 57
a) “And I a proven hero in the end of all” (The Playboy of the Western World, p.163) 57
b) Enumerations _______________________________________________ 59
c) Merging traditions and beliefs____________________________________ 60
II) A polyphonic conception of vocabulary__________________ 62
1) The power of lexicon ___________________________________ 63
a) Lexicon and culture___________________________________________ 63
b) Gaelic and lexicon ____________________________________________ 65
2) A sense of place and time ________________________________ 65
a) Language history ____________________________________________ 66
2
b) Direct historical references ______________________________________ 68
c) Traditions and sayings _________________________________________ 71
3) “Gibberish” __________________________________________ 73
a) Gibberish and the genesis of Hiberno-English _________________________ 74
b) Nonsense and lying ___________________________________________ 76
III) A Gaelic tradition endlessly open _____________________ 77
1) Re-narrating the sagas __________________________________ 78
a) Sagas and folklore ____________________________________________ 78
b) Mirror images _______________________________________________ 80
2) Myth in idiom ________________________________________ 81
a) The tales of the folk___________________________________________ 81
b) A return to traditions _________________________________________ 83
c) Towards universality __________________________________________ 84
Chapter 3: Free Speech
I) Misrepresentation? ________________________________ 87
1) Synge and Lady Gregory _________________________________ 88
a) Features and occurrences _______________________________________ 88
b) Representations _____________________________________________ 93
2) Pronunciation ________________________________________ 95
a) Synge and Sean O’Casey________________________________________ 95
b) A different sense of time and place ________________________________ 96
3) Representing and transforming ____________________________ 97
a) Representation and art ________________________________________ 97
b) Dialect and language __________________________________________ 98
3
II) Exploiting gaps _________________________________ 99
1) Debunking stereotypes and ideals __________________________ 101
a) The Stage Irishman and English traditions __________________________ 102
b) “Cuchulainoid” theatre _______________________________________ 104
2) Celtic roughness and Victorian chastity______________________ 107
a) Obscenity (analysis of “shift”) ___________________________________ 107
b) Blasphemy and violence _______________________________________ 110
c) Gallous stories and dirty deeds __________________________________ 112
3) The inefficiency of the “backward look”? _____________________ 113
Conclusion ______________________________________ 115
Documents _______________________________________120
Bibliography _____________________________________ 140
4
Introduction
“Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we’re astray in Erris, when Good Friday’s by, drinking a sup
from a well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap of sunshine, with
yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the flowers of the earth.” (Synge, J.M. (1999; 155))
Christie Mahon’s words to Pegeen Mike, taken from the third act of the Playboy of the
Western World, are a perfect illustration of the very unique language used by John Millington
Synge’s characters in his 6 plays, (Riders to the Sea, The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker’s
Wedding, The Well of the Saints, The Playboy of the Western World, and Deirdre of the
Sorrows). He endows them with an incredible richness of speech; they all seem to be gifted
with an ear for rhythm and poetry. Françoise Morvan, one of the most skilful translators of
Synge’s plays into French, writes about “des scansions, des modulations d’air”. According to her,
Synge’s characters “vivent dans un air immense, sans fin ni fond des îles, et ils lui résistent par la parole,
qui les portent parfois dans un élan de jubilation, avant de les restituer à l’angoisse du vide.” (Synge,
J.M. (1996; 25))
Indeed, all the characters in Synge’s plays, from old Maurya to the queen Deirdre, speak in a
very interesting variety of English infused with Gaelic syntax, contaminated by Irish
vocabulary. It is a version of Hiberno-English, made of English words and Irish thoughts. In
his introduction to the Playboy of the Western World, Synge asserts that the idiom of his
characters is a realistic representation of the speech of Irish peasants:
“In writing the Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I have used one or two words only
that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read
the newspapers.” (Synge, J.M. (1999; 111))
However, for a long time, the author of the Playboy was taxed of being nothing more than a
“faker of peasant speech” (St John Ervine), with everything this criticism can imply –
misrepresentation of Irish people, mockery and lack of national feelings. These remarks
triggered out an actual controversy about Synge, his plays and his language: was it realistic or
not? Was it respectful of Irish people and their traditions or not?
5
This debate is all the more interesting as it started at a period when Ireland was writing a
major part of its history. The Ireland of the time was standing at the threshold of
independence. O’Connell, Parnell, and many others had infused the minds of the people with
new ideas about self determination, Irish State and Home Rule.
Irishmen were willing to show the world their ability and their right to rule themselves
without the British; in other words, they wanted the world to see Ireland as a nation of its
own. But how where they supposed to define this new Ireland? What would be their idea of a
nation?
Clearly, there are both political and cultural sides to this question. Indeed, culture,
literature and language are inherent parts of the national identity of a country, and as far as
Ireland is concerned, cultural nationalism was very powerful during the period leading to
independence. Language-wise, people were wondering how it was possible to keep on using
English for communication and literature, for it was first and foremost the language of the
coloniser. How could this alien idiom be the ambassador of a culture which was expected to
define Ireland as an independent nation?
However, how would people react to another language shift, more artificial than the first one,
which would impose the use of Irish again, on the grounds that it was the language of the
nation’s ancestors?
Perhaps Synge’s representation of Hiberno-English could be considered as one plausible
alternative to Irish people’s dilemma. He tried to translate this precious Irish legacy into the
English language, and thus to mix two antagonistic traditions; his use of language in his plays
is quite symbolic of the conception of a national identity which would be all the richer as it
would not be based on sectarianism. Nonetheless, the controversy about the validity of
Synge’s claim to realism and faithful representation, as well as the lack of legitimacy for
Hiberno-English in Ireland – at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also nowadays –
call for a closer analysis of the dialect itself, as well as of Synge’s literary representation of it,
to decide to what extend it can be described as a realistic and valid contribution to the national
longing for identity.
Indeed, considering Synge’s literary use of Hiberno-English as an attempt at
representing the very spirit of Irish life in the English language, it would be interesting to
study what was the relation between this hybrid and poetic idiom and the theories of cultural
nationalism at the time. Was it an illustration of a main stream of thoughts, or was it quite
marginal in the general reflection on cultural identity and language?
6
First of all, the language in Synge’s plays illustrates the nationalistic and cultural
concerns of Irish nationalists: how to create a new Irish identity? Should there be a national
language, and which one should it be? What would be the repercussions on the concept of a
national literature? Thus it can be said to be fully inscribed in its time.
But are Synge and the idiom he uses really part of the national movement?
It is true that this language owes a lot to what I would call Romantic nationalism, because of
the close relation it has with Ireland’s past, in terms of its structure and its vocabulary, as well
as of the images it conjures up.
However, Synge’s idiom does not only aim at creating a unity among Irish people; it is also
exploiting the clashes between two antagonistic cultures (British and Irish cultures). In this
respect especially, it can be seen as illustrating another conception of nationalism – post
colonial nationalism – and thus this language is not so much a way of looking back
nostalgically, as a means for Ireland to look forward and to face its own future as a nation
7
Chapter 1
Identity
At the time Synge wrote his plays, Irish people could be seen as coming back home
after the longest exile they ever went through: colonisation. Indeed at the beginning of the
20th century1, Ireland had almost reached independence, and its shores had started
experiencing the waves of nationalism, which had been invading Europe for almost a century.
The question was to find a new definition of Ireland, a definition which would be fit for a new
sovereign nation. Ireland had to build and make legitimate its independent identity.
But how was this possible? What image were they going to create, and how?
Ireland’s situation is a very clear testimony of the fact that creating a nation is not only a
matter of land and politics. Indeed, culture – from language to literature and arts – is one of
the most important component of a stable national identity, as is a willing act of imagination
on the part of all the members of the community. As Benedict Anderson said, nations are
mostly imagined communities and cultural artefacts.
It will be interesting to study how much language, cultural identity and the definition of a
nation were closely related as far as Ireland’s situation was concerned.
I) An ambiguous Irish identity
1) Culture and
nation in Ireland
It would be illusory to think that Ireland’s identity was totally independent from
England’s, after such a long period of colonisation. Although the relations between these two
countries were made of tension, violence and distrust in the 1900’s, each nation seemed to
need the other to define itself. Hence Declan Kiberd in his book Inventing Ireland is entirely
right when he starts his attempt at defining Ireland by analysing its relations to England.
(Kiberd, D. (1995)) It is also a proof that Irish identity could not be created without taking
the English legacy into account.
1
Ireland actually became a free state in 1921 and a republic in 1949.
8
a) Representation and identity
National identity – as well as personal identity to some extent – is always built in
relation with an idea of representation and exposure to others. Both Yeats’s Samhain articles
and Rushdie’s essays in Imaginary Homelands have come to the conclusion that a nation
could only achieve consciousness if it exposed itself to others. (Kiberd, D. (1995)) And
indeed, the idea of the national movements at Synge’s period was to present the world with a
new country and a legitimate nation.
However, for a long period of time, the main representation of the Irish emanated from
England; “If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it” (Kiberd, D. (1995; 9))
Ireland was not granted with an existence of its own, but merely defined as nonEngland, one island being the exact antithesis of the other. This Manichean analysis of the
situation was mainly due to the supremacy of the ruler’s force. Nonetheless, it left the Irish
with nothing more than a succession of rough stereotypes to define themselves in the face of
the world, and especially of the British world. They were pictured as rude, hot-headed and
nomadic, whereas the English liked to see themselves as controlled, refined and rooted. As for
Ireland itself, it was imagined as a fantasy land in which one could meet fairies and monsters.
This was all the more efficient as this representation was made in the English language, on the
English stage for example. The English, coming from the stronger society at the time, also
considered themselves as “lords of the language”. Thus, the typical Irish character, to which
we will come back later, was either a threatening vainglorious soldier, or a reassuringly stupid
servant2.
Moreover, this negative representation was not so much a definition of Ireland as an
attempt at reassuring and re-establishing English identity. This is what the Irish philosopher
Edmund Burke argued for. He even attacked the misrepresentation of Ireland in the works of
English historians, underlining the fact that the Irish were not only the rebellious foils the
English thought they were : “But there is an interior History of Ireland – the genuine voice of its
records and monuments - , which speaks a very different language from these histories from Temple and
Clarendon… [and says] that these rebellions were not produced by tolerations but by persecution”.
(Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1995; 19))
2
This Irish character was often known as « Paddy », and it is still the name given to the Irish in jokes, pub names or
tourist attractions for instance.
9
According to him, English stereotypes of the Irish were not based on an Irish reality, but they
were merely projections of the elements the English rejected in their own society. Ireland was
then to be seen as part of English identity.
But whatever the actual signification of this non representation, it was true that Ireland did not
have an international representation of its own for a very long time, which also means that it
could hardly be seen as a potential nation, especially by the British.
Shakespeare’s character called Captain Macmorris in Henry the Fifth is a perfect example of
this idea that the British presented Ireland as lacking identity.
“FLAUELLEN: Captain Macmorris I thinke, looke you, under your correction, there is not many of your
Nation –
MACMORRIS: Of my Nation? What ish my Nation? Ish a Villaine, and a Bastard, and a Knave, an a
Rascal. What is my Nation? Who talks of my Nation?”
(Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1995; 12)
Of course one can easily trace in these lines the characteristics of what would later be called
the Stage Irishman, (pugnacity, ethnic pride..), but what is most interesting is that this
character is basically saying that there is no Irish nation. And indeed, if the only
representation of Irishmen available was the one created by the coloniser, an Irish nation was
inconceivable.
As a consequence, it was necessary for the Irish to rediscover, or even invent, a representation
of themselves which would enable them to proclaim the existence of their own nation to the
face of the world. Without this identity, this representation, they would be caught in this nonexistence which was so convenient for the English at the time of their rule.
b) Crushing Gaelic culture
The English had understood the importance of culture and traditions in the building of
a nation. Thus their aim was to infuse the minds of the Irish with the idea that they had to look
up to English culture, and discard ancient Gaelic traditions. After suppressing political
freedom and depriving the people from their civil rights, it seemed necessary to deprive them
on the cultural and spiritual level as well (P.L. Henry (1977)).
The British did in Ireland as they had done in India, that is they encouraged the
ambitious natives to abandon their own culture and to think of it only in terms of mythical and
backward narratives. The project of the Board of Education was, as Lord Macaulay said about
10
India, to “make them look to this country with that veneration which the youthful student feels for the
classical soul of Greece” (Kiberd, D. (1995; 148))
Indeed, it became obvious that trying to crush Gaelic culture was one of the best ways
to prevent any nationalist feeling, as well as any claim for independence, even if it was not
directly a political move. Spencer, for example, had clearly understood the inherent power of
poets and poetry in Ireland3. He was convinced that they were encouraging resistance, and he
was so impressed as well as worried by their works that he called for their death. Furthermore,
when he was in Munster, many ancient Gaelic manuscripts were used to cover Englishspeaking school books circulating among Irish children at the time. (Kiberd, D. (1995)) Of
course this was his way to show his spite for anything that was genuinely Irish, and probably
a demonstration of the power of the ruler, but it was also a clear sign that he felt the English
rule was threatened by any sign of a different culture among colonised populations. He was
right, especially about Ireland, for in the ancient political pecking-order, poets were the most
important members of society after their chiefs. They had always been considered as
interpreters of the political situation: they imagined their monarch as wedded to the land, a
beautiful woman, whose health and fertility determined whether his rule was righteous or not.
(Kiberd, D. (1995))
So, as a matter of fact, English colonisers felt the necessity of crushing Irish culture if
they ever wanted to get complete political obedience from these people. They had to
undermine their independent identity if they wanted to get rid of their political rebellions. “We
must change their course of government, clothing, customs, manner of holding land, language and habit of
life, it will otherwise be impossible to set them to obedience.” (William Parson, quoted from Kiberd,
D. (1995; 10))
All the same, in his View of the present state in Ireland, Spencer claims that the only way of
getting obedience from the Gaels is to cut their hair, convert their mantles and make them
speak the English tongue.
Once again, it is very interesting to notice that language played a central role in this
process. It was almost considered as a mirror of the whole Irish culture, and for Spencer, as
long as Irish people spoke Irish, it would be impossible to make them accept and adopt
English domination and traditions. “The speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish”. (quoted
from Kiberd, D. (1995; 10))
3
In the Playboy of the Western World, Christie Mahon is told by Pegeen Mike that he is the true descendent of the
poets of the ancient times ; “and I’ve heard all times it’s the poets are your like – fine, fiery fellows with great rages
when their temper’s roused.” (Synge, J.M.(1999). Collected Plays and Poems and the Aran Islands. Everyman
paperbacks, 125)
11
In fact, this emphasis on language dated back from the twelfth century4. After French had died
out and English had become the medium of law and education in England, a law was passed
by the London government which prevented colonisers in Ireland from using the Irish
language. Likewise, in 1336, the English parliament declared that “all Englishmen and the Irish
dwelling upon them must use English surnames and follow English customs. If any Englishman, or
Irishman dwelling among the English, use Irish speech, he shall be attained and his lands go to his lord till
he undertake to adopt and use English.” (O’Fiach, quoted from Sullivan, J.P. (1976)).
Irish language could obviously influence national feelings among Irish people, but apparently,
it was also threatening to contaminate English colonisers in Ireland, and deprive them of their
Englishness. And indeed, this happened for some time during the sixteenth century, before the
Cromwellian dispersion of the clans, and his complete destruction of Gaelic traditions and
cultural ethos. When Elizabethan officials started visiting Irish towns, they discovered that
many an English dignitary had adopted Irish culture. They were obstinate papists, spoke the
Irish language, which they preferred to English, wore Irish dress and had Irish habits. In other
words it seems that they had almost forgotten their old nationality, insofar as they had adopted
most of the characteristics of Irish culture, of which language, in Ireland as well as in most
countries, is probably the most important. There was no longer anything in their appearance
or behaviour which could have hinted at their original nationality. Thus, this is a true
testimony of how closely culture and national feelings can be linked. So, for the English, one
of the most efficient means of obtaining independence from the Irish was to crush their
culture and traditions, and try to reduce them to a stereotypical representation.
c) Nation as a system of cultural signification
To some extent, one could say that the means used by the English to subdue the Irish
population during their rule can help us define the concept of nation more clearly.
Particularly, it gives us a hint of how the Irish nation could be imagined.
First of all, it seems obvious now that a nation is neither only a politically independent
formation nor a geographical entity. Although these are important in the definition, they are
not sufficient to define a nation. Otherwise it would have been superfluous for the English to
waste so much energy trying to make the ancient Irish culture disappear.
When English, Norman French and Gaelic became the “three rivals for linguistic supremacy in medieval Ireland”
(Curtis, quoted from Sullivan, J.P. (1976))
4
12
The idea of a nation is closely related to its past and its culture. “If the nation states are widely
considered to be new and historical, the nation states to which they give political expression always loom
out of an immemorial past and […] glide into a limitless future. […] Nationalism has to be understood by
aligning not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it,
out of which, as well as against which, it came into being.” (Anderson, B. (1983)) In this quotation,
Benedict Anderson underlines the fact that nations are more spiritual than factual; for him,
they can be defined as imagined communities, which means that most members of the nation
will never know his fellow-members, but that they all have a sense of community. A nation
can indeed be understood as a soul, a spiritual principle, and not only geographical
boundaries. It is based on the idea that its members have a rich legacy of memories in
common, as well as the desire to live together and to perpetuate the value of this heritage. But
there can be no precise scientific definition of what a nation is; with its almost mythical
aspects, it seems that it is an inherently ambiguous and evolving notion.
If culture and a sense of community among the people are so important in a nation, it seems
most natural that language plays a central role in this analysis. And this is also why it is so
interesting to study the evolution of language in Ireland, as well as the way Synge wanted to
represent it.
If we look back at ancient classical communities, such as Greece, or China, they were all
convinced of their cosmic centrality, and thus their sacred language was logically believed to
be linked to a super terrestrial order of power. Chinese ideograms were thought to be
emanations of divine reality, and the Qumran was untranslatable for a very long time because
people believed in the necessity of using the unsubstitutable true signs of written Arabic;
indeed, the Qumran is literally the word of the Prophet, and it would therefore be sacrilege to
attempt at translating it.
Of course, from the late Middle Ages on, sacred languages lost their powers and importance,
and one began to see vernaculars as worthy of study. Language was no longer sacred as far as
a divine communication was concerned, but to some extent, it remained central to the
definition of a community, and thus a nation. “Language became less of a continuity between an
outside power and the human speaker than an internal field created and accomplished by language users
among themselves.” (Said, Orientalism, quoted from Anderson, B. (1983))
So, as far as Ireland is concerned, trying to prevent people from using the Irish language was
an attempt at severing them from their own ancient culture, and to some extent depriving
them of any nationness. But it also suggests that an Irish nation would necessarily need this
13
immemorial Celtic past to define itself. However, what was to become of the Irish language,
the medium through which all these traditions had been kept alive?
2) The inexorable death of Gaelic
a) Facts and figures
Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Irish culture was all the more in danger
as the Irish language seemed to be dying all around Ireland. People were keener and keener on
using English, and a great proportion of the population wasn’t even fluent in Irish anymore.
The analysis of different figures will help us understand the general shift that was taking place
in Ireland. Unfortunately, it is impossible to deny the progressive decline of the Irish language
throughout Ireland, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards.
The first data I was able to find date back to the middle of the 17th century (Sullivan, J.P.
(1976)). In this census, 82.5% of the population are recorded as Irish speaking, and there are
only 17.5% of English speakers.5Although it is necessary to question the validity and the
accuracy of a 17th century census, it seems that, despite the rule of Cromwell and his
ransacking of Irish traditions, English had not yet become a means of communication for the
masses, although it must already have been rather popular among urban classes. At the time,
English started to be seen as a means of social ascent, and it became clear that an adequate
knowledge of English would be necessary as far as public life was concerned.
According to De Fréine (in O’Muirithe, D. (ed.) (1977)), it may be said that in 1800, about
one and a half million of the population6 spoke English only. Around two million people
spoke Irish only, and some one and a half million were bilingual. Clearly the balance between
the two languages was starting to change at the time.
These figures are evidently in relation with the fact that during the seventeenth and the
eighteenth centuries, language policies and historical events progressively killed Irish at the
top of the social scale and inevitably weakened its position in the whole society.
The figures of the next census, dating from 1851, are very telling in this respect, although they
cannot be entirely reliable. According to it, the total Irish-speaking population was one and a
half million, that is 23.3% of the population of the country7, whereas 76.7% of the population
were English speakers. The census also showed that 77% of Irishmen where unable to speak
5
If one excludes the Ulster plantations, the figures change to 88.5% of Irish speakers versus only 11.5% of English
speakers.
6
That is less than a third of the total population.
7
But 32.7% if the Ulster plantations are not taken into account.
14
Gaelic, whereas only 5% were said unable to speak English. Thus, it is undeniable that most
of the Gaelic speakers were described as being bilingual, which was not necessarily the case
for the English speaking population. A very significant shift towards the use of English as the
main means of communication had taken place, and it was probably mainly due to the Famine
years of the 1840’s. However, according to many testimonies in the 1840’s, some figures in
this particular census either need qualification, or are an amazingly acute testimony of the
violence of exile and death during the Great Famine. For example, the Irish speaking
population of County Louth was given as 19,000 people, out of a population of more than
120,000. Only 51 persons in the county were said to be unable to speak English. And yet in
1842, a German traveller named Kohl described Drogheda as a very Irish town, and said he
met lots of people who were not able to speak English with ease or fluency. Moreover, around
the same time, the officials of the Ordnance Survey were able to record the names of all the
streets, alleys and gates in Drogheda in Irish.
But even if once again, there is a need to take these figures with a pinch of salt, they are very
significant in terms of the general trend. They may exaggerate the degree of anglicisation of
the people, but they are definitely pointing in the direction they were going.
And indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was nothing truer than this dramatic
cultural upheaval. In 1881, 85% of the population were recorded as unable to speak Irish,
whereas only 1% of the population was unable to speak English.
In the Aran Islands, JM Synge gives us an account of this situation and the result of this shift,
when he describes his companion Michael reading bilingual stories sent over from Dublin:
“In most stories we read, where the English and the Irish are printed side by side, I see him looking across
the English in passages that are a little obscure, though he is indignant if I say that he knows English
better than Irish.” (Synge, J.M.(1999; 329)). In this extract we can sense that the younger
generations tended to know English more generally, and most of the time much better than
they knew Irish. They could be considered as bilingual, but their knowledge of the two
languages was obviously not the same.
By the end of the nineteenth century then, the shift was almost completed, and it became more
and more difficult to consider the Irish language as a mirror reflecting the culture of all the
people. This may be one of the reasons why Synge chose to write his plays in HibernoEnglish and not in Irish, though he was a quite a scholar in this language. He wanted to
translate Irish life into his language, and to do so he had to find a new mirror.
15
b) Linguistic confusion?
In his book In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, written in 1902, J.M. Synge records
the words of an old countryman, commenting on all the changes he had seen Ireland go
through in the course of his own life : “Now all this country is gone lonesome and bewildered and
there’s no man knows what ails it.”.
This statement could simply be seen as a testimony of the disillusion about life brought along
by old age, but there is much more in it. In terms of language, Ireland had indeed undergone
several transformations in the course of the nineteenth century, as we have just seen it. But, as
language is so closely related to cultural and national identity, especially at this period of
time, one can assume that this literal shift from one language to another also resulted in a
great amount of social and cultural disorientation.
It was first and foremost to be noticed among the younger generations; these children
were born during the linguistic transition from Irish to English. One may think that it was a
chance for them, just as for children who are born in a family where the two parents speak
different languages; but in fact, some children were not even aware of the existence in their
culture of two languages. Douglas Hyde, the founder of the Gaelic League, in his book Ideals
on Ireland, where he talks about Connacht, an Irish county which was very well known to
him, gives many examples of this loss of cultural landmarks. (Kiberd, D. (1995))
For instance, he tells that in many families, parents spoke only in Irish to their children, who
would only answer in English. When Hyde himself asked one of the children: “Nach labhrann
tu Gaeilge?”8, the answer he got was: “And isn’t it Irish that I’m speaking ?”. But this situation
could also be reversed. It was the case at school in many Gaeltacht9 classrooms, where
schoolteachers spoke only in English to pupils who only spoke Irish. Although he was wrong
to think that Ireland was the only country in the world where such a situation could be found,
he was completely right when he criticized the absurdity of such teaching methods, for
sometimes schoolteachers actually taught children who could not properly understand them,
and vice and versa.
Such illogism was there to prove how confusing a linguistic shift could be for a whole
population, in terms of language, basically, but also in terms of culture. If some people were
no longer aware of the co existence of two different languages, how would they be able to
define their cultural and national identity? Not that the mixing of these two antagonistic
8
9
Don’t you speak Irish?
Area in the West of Ireland where the influence of Gaelic is still very strong.
16
cultures was to be criticized in itself; on the contrary, theoretically, it was a very interesting
phenomenon. What was dangerous was to get them mixed up in the minds of the people, to
the point of complete confusion. Moreover, the bilingual society of the end of the nineteenth
century was only a stage in the shift, before the Irish language almost disappeared. Thus, what
was to become of Irish culture in the twentieth century, and then, how would Irish identity be
defined, if it ran the risk of losing its culture and language?
c) Synge’s Aran Islands as a snapshot of a dying society
However, change seemed inevitable, and almost necessary in the Irish society. Even in
Synge’s Aran Islands, even on “Inishmaan, where Gaelic is more generally used, and the life is perhaps
the most primitive that is left in Europe”, these forces of evolution are at work. It is true that this is
a book and not only a picture of the life on these islands, and yet it reads like a rather faithful
traveller’s account of it, and it is also one of Synge’s most famous achievements.
This is what one of the first inhabitants of the islands told him on his first visit, “in curiously
simple yet dignified language”: “This island is not the same at all from what it was. It is little good I
can get from the people who are in it now, and anything I have to give them they don’t care to have.” (AA
p.259). It is obviously an account of a conflict between different generations, but one can also
sense the idea that the whole world of this man is undergoing a thorough transformation, for
not only the people, but also the island is said to be different. Somehow, Synge knew that the
beauty that enchanted him among the people of Aran was due to the dying quality of the very
society he was describing. He was not deploring it, for he also knew that the primitive
character of the islands resulted from its deplorable state of penury, which could not possibly
last forever. He was not a folklorist, and Declan Kiberd goes as far as calling him a radical
socialist, who described himself as “someone who wanted to change things root and
branch”.(Kiberd, D.(1993; preface)) In a way, his own presence on the islands was a factor of
change, bringing the first alarm-clock (along with the notion of clock time) to the people and
taking pictures of them with his camera.
Throughout his several trips to the islands, Synge was clearly interested in the speech of the
people he was meeting; for him, describing their language seemed to be one of the most
efficient ways of describing the people themselves. On one of his trips to the south island for
example, he is first interested in the way the men he meets speak, and focuses on their clothes
and habits only later on:
“I was anxious to compare their language and temperament with what I knew of the other island.
17
The language seems to be identical, though some of these men speak rather more distinctly than any
Irish speakers I have yet heard. In physical type, dress and general character, however, there seems to be a
considerable difference…” (AA, p.336)
Thus, according to the importance of the linguistic issue in this book, one can assume that
studying the attitudes of these people towards their languages (English and Irish more
particularly of course) may be a good way of analysing this inevitable process of cultural
change.
Of course, Gaelic was all but dead in the Aran Islands at the time Synge wrote his book. In
fact, there are many passages in which he wonders at this highly poetic and musical language,
and his life can easily be seen as constantly surrounded by what he calls a “continual drone of
Gaelic” (AA, p.262). Nonetheless, he has to give an account of the state of bilingualism in
which many people on the islands are; it is a rather positive account, for there is no sign of the
cultural and linguistic confusion we studied earlier on. Indeed, he is surprised by the quality
of English of the pupils at the boys’ school:
“In the boys’ school, where I sometimes look in, the children surprise me by their knowledge of English,
though they always speak in Irish among themselves.” (AA, p.315)
He also considers bilingualism quite fecund in terms of images and vocabulary: “A few of the
men have a curiously full vocabulary, others know only the commonest words in English, and a driven to
ingenious devices to express their meaning.” (AA, p. 264)
But if English was spoken even in these remote places of Ireland, was it not also a sign that
Gaelic is slowly but fatally losing ground? Was it not this ephemeral state of bilingualism that
highlighted the beauty of the portrait Synge was drawing for us?
Indeed, there are some clear signs of the decline of Gaelic in this book; they are perhaps more
noticeable in the second half of the narration, probably because some of the magic of novelty
had lost its power to the ear of the author, only for him to realise the dying quality of the
sounds he cherished.
At some point during his visit, he describes himself and his companions: “For the greater part of
the afternoon, we sat on the tops of empty barrels in the public-house, talking of the destiny of Gaelic.”
(AA, p300). It is very telling that the barrels on which they are sitting are empty, and then it
becomes less surprising to read nothing about the destiny of Gaelic in the following lines. It is
as if there was nothing certain about it, or maybe even no destiny at all, as there are no words
to talk about it.
18
Later in the book, almost at the end, Synge is having a conversation with two old men about
the Irish language and the books written in it: “I asked him about the future of the language on these
islands.
‘It can never die out’, said he, ‘because there’s no family in the place can live without a bit of a field for
potatoes, and they have only the Irish words for all that they do in the fields. […] It can never die out, and
when the people begin to see it fallen very low, it will rise up again like the phoenix from its own ashes.’”
(AA, p. 345)
Of course, the Irish language being represented by the image of the phoenix, this quotation
may at first seem reassuring, but on second thoughts, the man is linking Irish language with
agriculture, and says that the language won’t die because the people don’t know the
equivalent words in English. This doesn’t imply that they wouldn’t use them if they knew
them. And he seems to recognize it himself, not necessarily on purpose, when he continues by
saying: “‘There’s not a soul in Aran can count up to nine hundred and ninety-nine without using an
English word but myself.’” So in a way, if the people know the English words, they definitely
have a tendency to use them. Even a virulent speech in favour of Gaelic has to acknowledge
this bilingual situation, attesting of the decline of the Irish language, without necessarily
understanding why it had to be that way.
But how come that even the people who were the most conscious and proud of their own
traditions and culture were caught in the process of replacing Irish by English? Was there
someone to blame? Who had initiated this process, and where would it lead Ireland?
3) “Collective behaviour”
If we have a look at what the Irish thought of their colonisers at the beginning of the
twentieth century, it could be easy to believe that all their problems and miseries were due to
the English and their rule. In some ways, they were right. Ireland was used by the English as
a kind of laboratory where they could put new ideas about government and new policies into
practice before using them in England. This may have seemed a good thing, for Ireland was
then less backwards and more innovative than what might have been commonly thought of it;
it was in Ireland that the British experienced their new postal system. But these practices also
meant that Ireland had to cope with British liberal ideas, which were developed much more
extremely in Ireland; “laissez-faire” was the common economic policy at the time. Thus,
during the Famine, they stuck to it and did not even stop ships that carried large quantities of
grain from the starving island. (Of course, the behaviour of the landlords could vary from
19
callousness to heroic generosity). But there was a sense that this was the final betrayal by
England, as this peasant saying can suggest: “God sent the potato-blight, but the English caused
the Famine.” (Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1995; 21))
All the same, there was another popular saying which reflected the view of many Irishmen
about the English; it warned the children against three things: “the horns of a bull, the hoof of a
horse, and the smile of an Englishman.” (Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1995; 22))Thus, it seemed very
easy to accuse the English of all the evils existing in Ireland; if they considered themselves as
the lords of language and were so strongly opposed to people speaking Irish, why could they
not also be responsible for its disappearance in favour of English? It sounded quite logical to
do so, but maybe all too simple to be true.
a) Definition
In fact, the English were not the only ones to blame for the disappearance of Irish; apparently,
Irish people were willing to be the main actors in the shift from Irish to English. The earlier
shifts of language in Ireland were basically due to natural processes of social development,
going along with literacy and literary activities, the growth of trade, better communications
and greater mobility. But the phenomenon starting in the middle of the nineteenth century was
far too important to be entirely explained in terms of social mobility. (XXX(1977)) There
were many different reasons to it, and especially the fact that the reduced economic situation
of the people and the dreadful disasters of the nineteenth century had ravaged the people
physically and spiritually. They were flying from their land, their country and their language.
De Fréine calls this phenomenon “collective behaviour”. In other words, it is a “behaviour
which is engaged in collectively by people and which is at variance with their traditional ways of doing
things.” (De Fréine, S. (1977; 82))
He adds that it often includes panic, hysteria or/and utopianism. And it can be relevant to note
that this behaviour is most likely to occur in periods of cultural strain, as the second half of
the nineteenth century was in Ireland. Finally, collective behaviour is said to represent “an
irrational hope of relieving the strain by trying to escape from the limitations of an intolerable reality.” 10
Nineteenth century Ireland produced its number of utopias as well; here is for example a
speech on the Repeal of the Penal Laws11 by O’Connell himself, which is quite utopian and
10
It can take the form of a reliance on magic, as for American Indian tribes with the Sun Dance and the Ghost Dance.
11
The Penal Laws is the name given to the code of laws passed by the Protestant Parliament of Ireland in the late
17th century. Also called “Popery Laws”, their declared purpose was to disenfranchise the native majority from
all power, both political and economic, and their ideal was to entice the colonised Irish into wholesale
20
simplifies the problems and their solutions to the extreme: “There is but one mean for the complete
rescue of Ireland, and that is Repeal; but one thing on which the welfare all depends – Repeal. With
Repeal you will be happy, with Repeal you will become rich, with Repeal you will obtain all you deserve
and strive for.” (Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1995)) The Liberator probably did not believe in his
simplified message, but he knew that it would appeal to most people in his audience. He was
playing on all the aspirations created by the perspective of the post penal age among people
who had suffered on many levels, and this is why they were all convinced that his words were
true.
So in a way, being in a harsh and almost desperate economical situation during the nineteenth
century, Irish people needed to hope for a straightforward solution to their problems; the fact
of abandoning Irish seemed to be the answer to most wrongs. Instead of working to make up
for the centuries of neglect, it seemed easier and more sensible to adopt English as a new
language, which would provide the people with an efficient means of social ascent.
It is not enough to say that Irish was disappearing because it had been excluded from the
national schools; and anyway, far from wanting the language at school, most Irish parents and
teachers saw school as one of the best means of suppressing the language.
In the Aran Islands, J. M. Synge gives a lively account of this situation, when he describes the
attitudes of the elder generation towards Irish and English. (The Aran Islands, in Synge,
J.M.(1999). Collected Plays and Poems and the Aran Islands. Everyman paperbacks)
“In the older generation […] I do not see any particular affection for Gaelic. Whenever they are able, they
speak English to their children, to render them more capable of making their way in life. Even the young
men sometimes say to me –
‘There’s very hard English on you, and I wish to God that I had the like of it’”. (AA, p. 314)
From this quotation it seems evident that the English were not directly responsible for this
point of view, although the way the situation developed in Ireland was exactly what they were
expecting.12Irish people had decided that it would be much more profitable for them to be
fluent in English than in Irish, the language of the coloniser already being that of politics,
public services, commerce and education. They had yielded to the viewpoint that Irish was a
backward language, and that the people who spoke it would have fewer opportunities of social
conversion to Protestantism. By these laws Catholics were deprived of all civil life, reduced to ignorance and
dissociated with the soil. Catholic schoolmasters and priests became hunted men and women, and an unfaithful
wife could take everything a man owned by switching to the Protestant religion. For instance, the Penal Laws
forbid Catholics from exercising their religion, receiving a Catholic education, entering a profession, voting,
buying or leasing land, etc…
They remained in the books and were still legally binding until Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
12
Cf I) 1) b) ; especially the quotation of Lord Macaulay
21
progress. And it was especially the case in the older generations (the parents towards their
children), because language associations such as the Gaelic league had less power on them,
and also because they had probably gone through much more suffering and wanted to protect
their children from such a life. It is worth noting that they did not only favour the acquisition
of English, but that they actively tried to suppress any knowledge of Irish, as the poet John
Montague accurately illustrates in the following lines (quoted from De Fréine (1977)):
Dumb,
Bloodied, the severed
Head now chokes to
Speak another tongue…
To slur and stumble
In shame
The altered syllables
Of your own name;
To stray sadly home
And find
The turf-cured width
Of your parents’ hearth
Growing slowly alien:
In cabin
And field, they still
Speak the old tongue.
You may greet no one.
In these lines you can sense the distress of the younger generation in the constant use
of run on lines and of words such as “choke” “sadly” or the conceit of the “severed head”.
The image of the hearth growing alien is very accurate as it underlines the increasing gap
between generations, as well as a feeling of exile from a language and a culture which was
quite paradoxical, for there was no question of any actual geographical exile what so ever at
that point. But the poem also underlines the violent attitudes of the parents and the older
generations towards Irish. At the time, the most horrifying means of suppressing Irish among
22
the children were not the products of laws or official regulations, but of a social movement
generated by the people themselves; there were many examples, such as tally sticks (called
bata scoir)13, wooden gags14 (called priaslach), humiliation and mockery.
15
All these were
invented by the Irish themselves.
This pronounced inferiority complex symbolised the state of doubt in which the Irish were:
would they survive as a community? (P.L. Henry(1977)) Later on the question would be to
know whether they would survive as a nation; at first the solution seemed “to be on the winning
side, and as ambivalent as possible” (Henry).
Finally, the Great Famine was a landmark in the linguistic history of Ireland. It resulted in the
death of over one million people16, and the flight of another million. But it also left the people
with a “fear of recurrence” (De Fréine (1977; 86)), that is the parents wanted their children to
be able to defend themselves better in case something of the kind happened again. In this
respect, English also became the key to the golden door of America, where their children
would lead a better life than in the Irish country. Thus, after symbolising social climbing for
most people, linguistic exile had also become the first step towards geographical exile, and a
new life full of promises and dreams on another continent.
b) An ambiguous position
So Ireland was in a very ambiguous position regarding culture and language at the beginning
of the twentieth century; it was looking forward to independence from the English, but at the
same time, English had become part of their life. It was actually the language of most people
in Ireland17.
13
The tally stick was later to be cited as a weapon of British cultural terror although it was designed by the Irish
themselves, as Sir William Wilde (the father of Oscar) observed in a Galway schoolhouse in the middle of the
nineteenth century : “The man called the child to him, said nothing, but drawing forth from its dress a little stick,
commonly called a scoreen or tally, which was suspended by a string round the neck, put an additional notch in it
with its pencil knife. Upon our enquiry on the cause of these proceedings, we were told that it was done to prevent
the child from speaking Irish; for every time he attempted to do so a new nick was put on his tally, and, when these
amounted to a certain number, summary punishment was inflicted on him by the schoolmaster”. (quoted from Kiberd,
D. (1995; 143)
14
This was an alternative to the tally stick, and the child was supposed to stand in the corner of the classroom holding
the wooden gag between his teeth.
15
More than often children were encouraged to spy on their brothers and sisters, or on the children of neighbouring
townlands.
16
Many people died of hunger and of diseases related to it. As a matter of fact, it was among the sections of the
population most affected by death and exile that the Irish language had been the strongest.
23
We have already seen that English had become necessary to succeed in life, in terms
of economy as well as education. But it seemed almost as impossible to be involved in politics
without speaking English. Even two popular leaders such as O’Connell and Parnell did not
use Irish in their meetings. O’Connell was fluent in it, but he didn’t sigh over the gradual
disuse of this language, and advocated for the “superior utility” of English as far as business
and politics were concerned (Kiberd, D. (1995)). He had even chosen to use English at his
mass meetings attended by many Irish speakers, for he knew that they were already
supporting him and the cause he was defending, whereas he still had to convince the English
readers of his words in the next morning’s newspapers. All the same, Parnell, the “uncrowned
king of Ireland”, as he was called, was a Protestant gentleman educated in Cambridge, and he
never had an occasion to learn Irish. The nationalist case in Ireland was paradoxically made in
English most of the time. Even the rebels who wanted to defend themselves at court or the
agitators who wrote threatening letters to their landlords could not achieve their goals without
a certain knowledge of English.
What’s more, as far as the idea of nation and politics were concerned, a written culture was
necessary to think the Irish nation. Indeed, we have already seen how Benedict Anderson
describes the nation as an “imagined community”, where most members will never know each
other physically and personally, but where each person is linked to the other thanks to a sense
of belonging; this is only possible if the culture of the community is a written culture. “Print
language is what invents nationalism, and not a particular language per sé” (Anderson, B. (1983))
Thanks to newspapers and books, the members discover new modes of apprehending the
world, so that it is indeed possible to think the nation. Because of the written culture on which
the community is based, there is a sense of “simultaneity in homogenous empty time”, which
means that each member of the community knows that he is related to all the others by a
“steady anonymous simultaneous activity”. Everybody is doing something at the same time in
the imagined space and time of the community that is the nation. Thus, as far as Ireland was
concerned, English was more likely than Irish to advocate for nationalism, however
paradoxical this might seem, for, unlike Irish, it was actually the medium of most newspapers,
tracts, books, etc…
But then what was to become of Irish identity? English had become the medium of public and
private life, and it seemed almost inevitable that if politicians, writers and artists wanted to
invent an Irish nation, they would have to do so in the language of the coloniser. The image
people had of Ireland was indeed in jeopardy at the beginning of the twentieth century, and
24
the closer to independence the country wanted to get, the more essential it was to get rid of
ambiguities and uncertainties about Irish identity.
II) Creating the Irish – romantic nationalism ?
At the very beginning of the 1900’s, Ireland was in a very “romantic mood”, in the
pessimist sense of the word. Indeed, disillusion was on every Irishman’s lips. People had to
stop believing in their glorious past if they wanted to climb the English social ladder, and all
the hopes they had in their “uncrowned king” had disappeared. Parnell died in 1891 after he
had been disgraced by his party18 for marrying Kitty O’Shea, the ex-wife of one of his
collaborators19. Most people stopped believing in independence after the disappearance of
the man who personified all their hopes and longings. There was nothing left there than a
political vacuum waiting to be filled by a new generation of intellectuals. Those who wanted
to reinvent Ireland decided to abandon the parliamentary ways and to turn back to culture,
for it seemed that the best solution to Ireland’s identity problems was to make Ireland
interesting again to the Irish, and maybe go as far as recreating the people themselves. As
W.B. Yeats said: “Does not the greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it?”
But before trying to build an Irish nation, the people had to regain interest in an Irish culture,
which would naturally lead them to long for a nation of their own. A nation can only come
into being as a system of cultural signification (Anderson, B. (1983)), which has been actually
created20 by the people; a nation needs stability as well as legitimacy, and they can both be
achieved by the invention of traditions and the creation of a national past and its narrative. In
his article “Literature – Nationalism’s Other? The Case for Revision” (in Bhabha,
H.(ed.)(1990)), Simon During even goes as far as saying that cultures are even more worth
fighting for than nations, because nations belong to history and politics, whereas cultures
seem to fix identities – and this was exactly what Ireland was looking for at the time.
Furthermore, as far as the creation of a coherent Irish culture was concerned, the ambiguous
problem of language was one of the first and most important issues to be dealt with. Indeed, if
the people had no longer any hope or pride their own language, it would be impossible to
entice them to praise a renewed Irish culture. This was in direct relation with the conception
Parnell’s party split “amid terrible rancour” (Kiberd, D.(1995; 25)) after this quarrel.
He had nonetheless been cited as a co-respondent during the divorce. As a result, Gladstone abandoned him an he
was denounced as a public sinner unfit for leadership by the Catholic church.
20
“nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self consciousness : it invents nations where they do not exist.”
(Ernest Gellner, quoted from Bhabha, H. (1990))
18
19
25
of nationness which came into being during the Romantic period, in nineteenth century
Europe. As Johan Gottfried von Herder21 said: “Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine nationale
Bildung wie seine Sprache.”22 Nationness is here clearly defined with regards to a “private
property language” (Anderson, B. (1983))
So if Ireland was to become a nation, what was to be its national language?
1) Deanglicizing?
a) Reviving Irish?
At first sight, what could seem more natural than an attempt at reviving the Irish
language, which was the historical language of Ireland, though it had been so neglected and
despised for many years? Indeed, it was the very first link between Gaelic traditions and the
people who believed in them. To sum up, it was a major part of the Ireland people were trying
to bring back to life.
This was exactly what Douglas Hyde was aiming at in 1893 when he founded the
Gaelic League, a language society whose goal was to revive the Irish language and to make it
the official language of the Irish nation to be. The energy of the members of the league was
obviously concentrated on giving Irish the ability of becoming a national language – they
wanted the language to evolve and eventually to give Irish culture a written and literate
dimension. They wanted people to rediscover the potentials of their language. In 1893, there
were only 6 books written in Irish, and most Irish speakers in the countryside were illiterate.
In one single year, according to W.B. Yeats, the League sold 50,000 textbooks, and thousands
of people were registered in their language classes around the country23. (Kiberd, D. (1995))
A civil rights agitation was even mounted; people started to address letters and parcels in
Irish, to the great confusion of the postal authorities.
Synge was an early supporter of the League24, although their opinions diverged later on and
he became more and more sceptical about its influence. However, even in the Aran Islands, it
is possible to sense the presence of the League, especially among the younger generations, not
without a proud disdain from older people. At some point, he writes about girls going to one
1744 – 1803
Thus each community is a nation; it has its own national culture as well as its own language”
23
In 1906, the League had secured the use of Irish in Gaeltacht schools, and by 1909 Irish had been made compulsory
for matriculation at the National University; this was just one year after Hyde’s appointment to professorship there..
(Kiberd, D. (1995; 147))
24
His writings were a great support during the 1906 campaign to secure the use of Irish in Gaeltacht schools as a
subject in itself and as the usual language of instruction.
21
22
26
of the language classes created by the members of the League: “A branch of the Gaelic League has
been started here since my last visit, and every Sunday afternoon three little girls walk through the village
ringing a shrill hand-bell […] Soon afterwards bands of girls – of all ages from five to twenty-five – begin
to troop down to the schoolhouse in their reddest petticoats.” According to their age, one can assume
that these girls grew up during the period of decline of the Irish language. The influence of the
League was quite important on that portion of the population: “It is remarkable that these young
women are willing to spend their one afternoon of freedom in laborious studies of orthography for no reason
but a vague reverence for the Gaelic” (AA p.313-314)
But apparently, the impact of the linguistic revival on the older minds was not the
same: “In the older generation that did not come under the influence of the recent language movement, I
do not see any particular affection for Gaelic.” (AA p.314). There it becomes clearer that the action
of the League also helped people – and especially young people – to realise they could be
proud of their language. For instance, one of the League’s goals was to destroy the prejudices
existing against the use of Irish (cf I) 3)). But this was no easy job, for Hyde himself25 was
mostly made fun of by the higher classes of society. For example, ladies meeting him for the
first time would tell their friends that he “cannot be a gentleman because he speaks Irish” (quoted
from Kiberd, D. (1995; 138)) This is one simple and yet telling example of the many
misconstrued ideas the league had planned to fight – Irish was not considered as a language of
the high society.26
On the contrary, Hyde thought that Irish, far from being the “badge of a beaten race”
(Matthew Arnold), should be spoken with self respect and pride.
According to him and to his lecture on “The Necessity for Deanglicizing Ireland”27 – which
could be seen as one Irish cultural declaration of independence – there was nothing provincial
or derogatory about speaking Irish. On the contrary, what he and W.B. Yeats described as
provincialism were the attitudes of some Irish people, who had decided to cease to be Irish
without becoming English altogether, but whose only aim was to copy England, the far away
centre, in most cultural and ethical matters. He was not blaming the English for the current
situation in Ireland, but he was deploring the loss of traditions and culture among Irish people,
and he did fear that being neither Irish nor English, the people might end up in a kind of
25
Who once said to one of his fellow students at Trinity College Dublin that he dreamt in Irish.
Such prejudices were even present among people who were considered to have more sympathy for the League and
its linguistic project. George Moore, for example, once said that when Hyde used his “incoherent brand of English”, it
was more than easy to figure out why he wanted Irish to become the national language. Once again, this was a very
common idea about Irish, that it was only used by illiterate people, and especially by those Irish people who could not
speak English. (Kiberd, D. (1995))
27
This lecture was given in November 1892 to the Irish Literary Society.
26
27
vacuum between two remarkable traditions. And if the people had not become completely
English at that point, why would they not become Irish instead? This meant of course that the
people had to build an identity of their own, which would be based on something more
concrete than their relations to England (be it hate or envy) – and speaking Irish seemed to be
the first step towards this independent representation.
b) A “spent force”?28
These were all very relevant theoretical remarks about the linguistic situation in
Ireland, but when put into practice, it turned out that it was not as simple as Hyde had put it.
Perhaps reviving Irish was not the right solution.
First of all, it seems that Irish was far too different from what the people had become
used to speaking to be revived to the point of fluency in such a short period of time29, neither
to make it the national language, nor to create a national culture – and especially a national
literature – in Irish. If thousands of students had enrolled in the classes set up by the Gaelic
League, very few of them had managed to go any further than a few token phrases. Synge
himself attests of the difficulty of learning the Irish language in the Aran Islands. And yet, he
could truly be considered as a scholar in the language. Up until he was 27, he had studied
purely academic and literary Irish, without any cultural motivation whatsoever at first, but
merely because it was part of the curriculum for the undergraduates who wanted to become
ministers of the Church. It was only in May 1898 that he decided to go to the Aran Islands to
learn proper Irish30, and although he had already acquired a decent knowledge of Irish before
his trips, he could hardly understand a word of what most people had to say to him when he
first arrived on the islands. All through his book, we can see his progression in the knowledge
of the language, and how from a shy intruder he almost became an active member of the
society. But this evolution cost him a lot of work, and many months of linguistic solitude.
You can sense it in the first part of the book, each time someone tries to share poetry or
stories with him. For instance, he said of old Mourteen that “he began to recite Old Irish poetry,
with an exquisite poetry of intonation that brought tears to my eyes though I understood but little of the
meaning.” (AA, p.260). Of his hostess he writes: “The courtesy of the old woman of the house is
This title was taken from a quotation by Pearse in 1913: “The Gaelic League, as the Gaelic League, is a spent force.”
Basically, Irish has does not come from the same family of languages as English; Irish has Celtic origins, whereas
English has Germanic origins. This means that the two languages are very different in terms of structure, as well as
vocabulary and pronunciation.
30
In an account of his life written in 1905 for his German translator, he wrote: “ In 1898 I went to the Aran Islands to
28
29
learn Gaelic and lived with the peasants. Ever since then I have spent part of my year among the Irish-speaking
peasantry, in various localities, as I am doing now once more.” (Kiberd, D.(1993))
28
singularly attractive, and though I could not understand much of what she said – she has no English – …”
(p.264) In these extracts of his book it seems that he has difficulty understanding the very
meaning of the words31, but in spite of this, he is able to sense the spirit of Irish, its beauty and
musical quality. However, there were times when he felt much lonelier because of the barrier
of language, and was really conscious of the complicated nature of Irish, of how much work it
would require to master it. At some point he describes the cries of birds on a cliff facing
Galway Bay: “Their language is easier than Gaelic, and I seem to understand the greater part of their
cries though I am not able to answer.” (AA, p. 278 – 279) He is either being desperate or ironic
about his linguistic capacity, but it is a very clear account of what it must take to become
fluent in Irish – definitely more than one hour on Sundays.
Thus one can easily understand why Synge thought that it was illusory to try to create a
national literature in Irish, for it would take decades, if not centuries to happen; the people
would first have to master their language before becoming creative in it again: “Leinster and
Ulster would take several centuries to assimilate Irish perfectly enough to make it a fit mode of expression
for the finer emotions which now occupy literature.” (Quoted from Kiberd, D.(1993)) Thus,
although he supported it at the very beginning, Synge turned against the Gaelic League with a
true content for their policy: “The Gaelic League is made up of a doctrine that is founded on ignorance,
fraud and hypocrisy. Irish as a living language is dying out year by year – the day the last old man or
woman who can speak Irish only dies in Connacht or Munster – a day that is coming near – will mark a
station in the Irish decline that will be final a few years later…” (Quoted from Kiberd, D.(1993;
222))32. For him, Irish could definitely not become again the spoken language of Ireland, and
thus there was no way the national literature could be spelt in Irish.33
Furthermore, because of the great difference between Irish and other European
languages, the extended use of it might prevent Ireland from remaining connected to the rest
of Europe. Would it be possible to do without any sense of cosmopolitanism? As Stopord
Brooke said, a national culture, and all the more so a national literature should “be able to
become not only Irish but also alive to the interests and passions of universal humanity.” (Quoted from
Kiberd, D. (1995; 156)) So to some extent, wouldn’t the use of English instead of Irish allow
the power and influence of Irish culture to spread throughout Europe? But then, using the
31
Here is one other example, which occurred when a friend of his was telling him the story of an unfaithful wife:
“Unfortunately it was carried so rapidly in Gaelic that I lost most of the points.” (AA, p.275)
32
This extract was taken from a vitriolic letter written to the Gaelic League which was subtitled “ Can we go back into
our mother’s womb?”
33 All the more so as he was very doubtful as to the quality of Irish taught in the League’s classes. He said it was
nothing more than an “incoherent twaddle passed off as Irish.” (quoted from Kiberd, D.(1993; 223))
29
language of their coloniser, would the people be able to gather as a cultural community? This
was the question Yeats asked in 1892: “Is there then no hope for the de-anglicizing of our people? Can
we not build a national literature which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in
language?” (Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1995; 155)) Analysing the works of writers such as Walt
Whitman for example, he wondered: “if one says a National Literature must be in the language of the
country, there are many difficulties. Should it be written in the language that one’s country does speak or
the language it ought to speak?” (Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1995; 164))
Perhaps we can go as far as interpreting this situation as typical of romanticism; a man
struggling between his desire to reach his ideal and the fact that he is human, and thus limited.
Likewise, Irish people were trying to bridge an unbridgeable gap between an ideal identity
spelt in Irish they were trying to reach, and the reality of their world inevitably filled with
English words and memories.
2) Authenticity and creation
In fact, even if there were divisions among the intellectuals who took part in the
cultural revival of Ireland, especially on linguistic matters, most of them seemed to agree on
the general idea they had of the Ireland they wanted to revive.
According to Douglas Hyde, political leaders had fought for Irish nationalism against
England, but they had forgotten what they were actually fighting for – a distinctive culture of
folktales, dances, sports, costumes, all this bound with the Irish language.
And this is exactly what W.B. Yeats meant when he talked about places in Ireland where
people “live according to a tradition of life that existed before commercialism, and the vulgarity founded
upon it […]” (Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1995; 139)). As far as this quotation is concerned,
Yeats gives his interpretation of the essence of irishness – that is uncorrupted country life –
most likely in the West of the country – emerging from a long Gaelic past and tradition.
There was a pervading idea of getting closer to the people and their life. Hyde’s problem was
that he thought Irish could still be considered as the language of the people; on the contrary,
Yeats, Synge and their followers were increasingly advocating for the use of English, but of
an English which would be brightened by a Celtic note, “that English idiom of the Irish-thinking
people of the west…the only good English spoken by any large numbers of Irish people today.” (Quoted
from Kiberd, D. (1995; 162)) Although Yeats is obviously exaggerating the linguistic
situation, he is right in so far as he underlines the fact that Irish people had already created a
30
new language of their own, and that there was no use trying to make them go back to their old
Irish again.
a) Creating HE
Indeed, the linguistic situation in Ireland was very specific and original in many
respects; the Irish people had not only become the actors of a shift from one language to
another, but the state of bilingualism they had reached at the end of the nineteenth century
also helped transforming them into creators of a new brand of English – Hiberno-English.
The fact that they were not only learning and imitating but also imagining and creating may
be due to the fact that bilingualism in Ireland did not go along with a state of diglossia34. Irish
was not the “low language” in comparison with English as a “high language”. Instead of
severing the two languages and conferring them strictly separate functions, people had a
tendency to mingle them in animated conversations. This was especially true as far as female
speakers were concerned; for instance, P.L. Henry observed this situation in the Kerry
Gaeltacht, where women usually “tend to move over and back or in and out of the two languages
alternatively.” (Henry, P.L. (1977; 23)). However, most people can also differentiate the two
languages when they wish to do so; sometimes, you could even hear people saying twice the
same sentence, once in Irish, and then in English. In his article, P.L. Henry gave the example
of a man surveying the “damp wintry landscape before breakfast from his bedroom window
may vent to his depression”. He could easily say: “What’s it all for, no cad chuige é ar ao’ chor?”35
It is as if each part of the sentence were adding a rhetorical and semantic nuance to the
statement he wishes to make. It may be interesting to keep in mind that this mode of
expression is exactly the one which was used in the macaronic songs and ballads36, which
were obviously products of nineteenth century Ireland. In those pieces of poetry, the narrative
theme is developed with equal importance in Irish and in English, just as in the speech of
some Irish people.
This all shows that the language the Irish use is not the product of an imperfect learning of
English, but a conscious creation of a new variety, based on bilingualism37.
Diglossia is a phenomenon in which bilingual people make the difference in their use of language between « a high
language, on the one hand, utilized in conjunction with religion, education and other aspects of high culture, and a
low language on the other hand, utilized in conjunction with everyday pursuits of hearth, home and work. »
34
(Fishman, 1967 / quoted from genesis of he)
35
The word “no”, which is used as a transition, means “or” in Irish.
36
Carrigfergus, for exemple.
37
To some extent, it also contradicts the description Hyde gave of the Irish countrymen being completely confused
between two languages and two cultures; however, this is understandable because P.L. Henry was scientifically
31
We have already come across the fact that the Irish did not become fluent in English without
difficulty, and it is through the many attempts at mastering this foreign language that HibernoEnglish, this “home-made hewn variety” (Henry, P.L. (1977)), came to be created. The people
were basically using fragments of English there had heard here and there and consciously
organising them in an Irish fashion – that is the structures of most sentences were based on the
speakers’ knowledge of Irish syntax. We can use the example of a County Clare man
answering his boy, who is complaining because he wants more milk for breakfast: “Drink
what’s in your noggin, you bacach, and you’ll get more while ago when you’ll drink what’s that.” (Henry,
P.L. (1977; 24)) This is a typical example of a parent wishing to speak English to his children
because he is convinced it will help them survive and even succeed in life, although his
mother tongue is originally Irish. It reads more or less like an improvisation, based on
fragments picked up on different occasions. We can see that he misuses the phrase “a while
ago”, whereas he obviously means “in a little while”. Likewise, the way he uses “what’s that”
underlines the fact that his interpretation of English demonstrative is quite unusual. His
sentences seem to bear Irish constructions, as well as Irish vocabulary, such as “noggin” or
“bacach”.
As far as the imprint of Irish on the speech of these people is concerned, this language is
nothing like an awkward imitation of British English. On the contrary, one has to be very
careful about the terms chosen to describe the relation that Hiberno-English bears to English.
Along with P.L. Henry, it is more precise and interesting to analyse Hiberno-English as a
deliberate act of creation; Irish people were indeed forging their new means of personal
expression, and not just trying to use the one of the English. They went way further than what
one could have expected them to go in the linguistic shift from Irish to English: “What the Irish
people set out to do was to learn English; what they managed by 1900 was to create Anglo-Irish.”38
Naturally, no one in official Ireland wanted to realize that the people had created an
idiom which was not even taken into account in linguistic policies. On the contrary, Yeats,
Lady Gregory, Synge and their followers noticed the importance as well as the literary
potential of Hiberno-English; all the more so as it made the idea of a national literature in
analysing facts, whereas Hyde’s observations those of a theorist who was giving out a lecture meant to convince the
people to change their ways of life.
38
Kallen, in his lecture on “New directions in Irish-English: Hiberno-English in a post-modern world” (Trinity College
Dublin, October 2002), makes the distinction between Irish-English, Hiberno-English and Anglo-Irish on historical,
sociological , nationalistic and geographical grounds. One could summarize the distinctions as follows:
Irish English is the most general term used to describe the English language spoken in Ireland. Anglo-Irish is more
precisely describing the English spoken during colonisation, and Hiberno-English is mostly symbol of Irishness.
However, Kallen underlines the existence of confusion in the terminology, and remarks that there is no linguistic
evidence of any sort which would justify the use of one of these terms over the others.
32
English look rather feasible, “by translating and retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable
Irish quality of rhythm and style, all that is best in the ancient literature.” (W.B.Yeats, quoted from
Kiberd, D. (1995; 155)). Yeats even went as far as suggesting to the Intermediate Board of
Education a way of improving the written English of Irish pupils: “Let every child in Ireland be
set to turn first a leading article, then a piece of what is called excellent English, written perhaps by some
distinguished member of the Board, into the idiom of his own countryside.” (Quoted from Kiberd, D.
(1995; 163))39 According to him and his friends, it seemed natural for Hiberno-English to
become the idiom used for church sermons, newspaper editorials, or university lectures.
However this was not even debated on an official level and it was up to the literary movement
to heighten the status of this new-born idiom.
b) Synge and his literary tradition
Paradoxically enough, even the greatest supporter of the revival of Irish was taken in
this process of adopting Hiberno-English as a literary mode of expression and a symbol for
the ambivalent identity of Ireland. In 1893, Douglas Hyde published a book called Love Songs
of Connacht, which became quite famous among the Irish literary community and even
further in Ireland40. In the book he printed the Irish version on one side of the page and the
translation in dialect on the other side. However, his success was less due to the actual songs
than to Hyde’s own translations in what could be considered as Hiberno-English, and
especially the ones that were in prose and not in verse. For example, in the Playboy of the
Western World, Christie Mahon literally quotes from the book in his game of seduction with
Pegeen. To his luck, Hyde’s purpose had been entirely misunderstood; he had only decided to
put the translations in order to help the understanding of some poems, but for him the main
achievement was the revival of the original pieces of poetry. Thus not only was he the leader
of the Gaelic League, but also the unwilling starter of the Anglo-Irish41 literary movement,
providing Yeats and his contemporaries with a brand new medium of expression. They were
all in favour of a national literature in English, but they had sensed the necessity of justifying
their choice. And using Hiberno-English was the perfect way to do so.
One can notice the precision given when standard English is alluded to: Yeats doesn’t merely say “excellent
English”, but he says “what is called excellent English”. This clearly means that he was aware of the many prejudices
associated with non-standard varieties, and that he wanted to underline the relativity of the opinion people usually have
about standard English as opposed to all the other varieties of English.
40
In the Aran Islands, Synge is given a copy of the book by a young man on the island (AA, p.311) and Michael, one
of Synge’s friends on the island, is reading Hyde’s Beside the fire(AA, p.329).
39
41
See previous page for terminology.
33
Before Synge, some other writers tried to exploit this great opportunity, but without as
much genius and recognition. This is what Yeats means when he describes the works of
writers and poets such as Thomas Davis42 and Young Ireland: “Their work was never wholly
satisfactory, for what was Irish in it looked ungainly in an Irish garb, and what was English was never
perfectly mastered, never wholly absorbed into their beings.” For him those works were nothing but
“imitations of fourth-rate English poetry and nineteenth century novels.”43 (Quoted from Kiberd, D.
(1995; 137))
Synge on the contrary, managed to achieve an actual artistic representation of this
language with more skill and success than anybody else. What Hyde discovered and people
like Lady Gregory refined, he brought to the status of actual art form and coherent
representation. This was made possible because he was one of the most learned scholars in
Irish at that period, and he knew it was the historical language of Ireland. However, he was
realistic about the future of that language, especially as it was not his mother tongue spoken
from the cradle. He knew he would appeal to many more people if he wrote in English, but
this was not enough and he decided to write “with an eye as much on English as on Irish”. This
was his contribution to the search for a national identity in Ireland at the time, but also the
agent of his international fame. George Moore once mischievously said that Synge had
fortunately discovered that when you literally translated Irish into English, the result you got
was poetry. (Kiberd, D. (1995))
This was surely underrating the process of creation in Synge’s work, but it was not entirely
wrong, for one can assume that had he decided to write in Standard English, the author of the
Playboy would never have been that successful. What is particularly amazing about his works
is how he genuinely managed to keep this fragile balance between two languages, two
cultures, and how this research on language led him to acknowledge the artistic and national
potential of a dialect44. He was definitely the most successful writer of his period to write in
an English as Irish as possible, “an English into which toxins of the Gaelic mode of speech and syntax
had been injected” (Kiberd, D. (1993; 199)). He had understood the inner principle of a faithful
42
Thomas Davis was a son of the Protestant Ascendancy, and thus he knew very little Irish. (Kiberd, D. (1995; 196)
Nonetheless, Yeats’s attempts at rendering the Irish spirit were not more successful. In his Wanderings of Oisin, he
wanted to recreate a Gaelic golden age, but he was working on the version of a version, and hardly attained the “Celtic
colouring of a late nineteenth century poem”. (Kiberd, D. (1993))
44
As far as artistic potential of dialect is concerned, he was also very influenced by the writings of people such as Guy
de Maupassant, George Sand and Anatole France. Furthermore, he had learnt from his Parisian lecturer in phonetics
that a dialect could indeed have a literary as well as a philological value.
43
34
translation, which on his part was not only that from a language to another one, but truly the
translation of a whole culture:
“To translate well is to ‘invent’ the text (vocabulary, syntax and style) that the translated author would
have written if his native language had been that of the translator, not his own.” ( O’Tuama, S. (1971))
J.M. Synge was not the first man in his period to explore the potential of the new-born dialect
that was Hiberno-English, but in this short literary tradition he was the one who gave it an
actual artistic status and underlined its potential national dimension as far as cultural identity
was concerned.
3) The speech of the people
a) Romanticism?
Behind the reflection of many writers and intellectuals involved in the revival
movement, there was this idea that you had to go back to the people, their culture and their
language to become authentic and creative again. This was why Hiberno-English became so
praised; especially for Synge, it was not a language used by people who were not educated
enough to speak English properly. In 1902 he wrote that “the linguistic atmosphere in Ireland has
become definitely English enough, for the first time, to allow work to be done in English that is perfectly
Irish in essence.” For him, Hiberno-English was first and foremost a language full of life and
poetry, as well as a language which would enable writers and poets to spread the Irish
traditions as much as possible, especially among the people who were not Irish speakers45. It
was deeply believed that common speech could be a valid basis for a literary language, for the
“spoken language of living people” (Kiberd, D.(1993; 203)) in Ireland allowed for both realism
and poetry in literature. For many different reasons, it is possible to call this attempt at
translating an immemorial culture into what had become the language of the people “romantic
nationalism”.
Indeed, where did these ideas come from if not from the romantic period? It is exactly what
Wordsworth and Coleridge advocated for in their preface to the Lyrical Ballads, often
analysed as the manifesto of English romanticism: “It is the honourable characteristic of poetry that
its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The majority of the
following poems […] were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in
the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasures. […] It contains a
45
In Ireland as well as in the rest of Europe.
35
natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents.” For these poets, Man
was necessarily central in their literary project. But they did not only allude to literate upperclass scholars, who would rejoice in deciphering an intricate piece of poetry; for them poetry
could not be separated from the masses, and thus, poets had to use common language as their
means of expression, instead of delightfully writing with extremely complicated words and
metaphors. They wanted to go back to the language of the lower classes to exalt the poetry
which was naturally inherent to it. It is clear in these lines that the two English poets
considered common language as one of the best means to create a new kind of poetry, which
they thought to be the only true poetry – that is popular poetry, poetry relying on the people,
and appealing to the people because of the universality of its themes.
It may be interesting to compare this point of view with the one expressed in the Preface to
the Playboy of the Western World, where Synge also attempts at defining his conception of
poetry and at justifying his use of language. (The Playboy of the Western World, in Synge,
J.M. (1999))
The main relation between 1900 Ireland writers and English romantics may be their ideal of
inspiration lying in common people. For Wordsworth and Coleridge it is described as the life
and language of the lower classes – a division of society which is typical of the English
system. As for Synge, he writes about the rural population of the West of Ireland:
“fishermen”, “Irish peasantry”, and so on. They both have this idea of going back to the
people to discover artistic truth: “I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of
these fine people. […] All art is collaboration.” (PWW, p. 111) One may even suggest that the
argument that writers should get their main inspiration from the language of their fellow
countrymen is another hint at the definition of what an Irish national literature and culture
should become.
Moreover, as was the case during the Romantic period in England, he clearly establishes a
distinction between city and countryside, suggesting the purity of the latter as opposed to the
corruption of industrialised towns: “in the modern literature of towns…”(PWW, p.112) This is
particularly noticeable in the last few lines of his preface: “those of us who wish to write start
with a chance which is not given to writers in places where the springtime of local life has been forgotten,
and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.” Here he basically
underlines the privileged situation of Irish writers, who still live in a rural enough society to
be surrounded by poetry, just as he was living in a “constant drone of Gaelic” in the Aran
Islands. For him as for Wordsworth and his followers, countryside and nature seem to be an
36
ideal place for man, because of their natural poetic quality, and the pastoral-like purity and
innocence going along with it. Urbanisation and industrialisation are clearly defined as the
winter of the mind, where imagination inevitably becomes frozen and sterile. On the contrary,
life closer to nature seems to be associated with fecundity and richness of imagination, where
every speech can be “as fully flavoured as a nut or apple”: “In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a
popular imagination that is fiery, and magnificent, and tender.” (PWW, p.112)
So basically, it becomes more and more obvious why Hiberno-English was to be used in
Ireland. If popular imagination was to be the new muse of the poets in the country, nothing
must have been more natural for them than to use the language which was born thanks to this
very same rich and fine spirit46. The people in Ireland had just created a new variety which
seemed to suit their inner identity, so using Hiberno-English in literature was the best way of
remaining faithful to the spirit of Ireland.
However, Synge feels the need to explain why he chose to write in Hiberno-English, just as
Wordsworth and Coleridge had to underline their conviction that common speech has a
natural poetic quality. In both cases, authors were seeking linguistic legitimacy. Synge insists
on underlining the realistic character of the idiom he has his characters speak: “I have used one
word or two only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery
before I could read the newspapers.” (PWW, p.111)This could at first be analysed as a major
difference between the Irish writer and the English romantics, who were placing the power of
imagination above everything else in the theory of creation. Nonetheless, by realism, Synge
doesn’t mean utilitarian use of realistic language, as was often the case in the theatre of that
period; indeed, at Synge’s time, realism had become an actual art form, and was usually
sought for in a play. On the contrary, the linguistic reality in Ireland at the beginning of the
twentieth century was so complicated and original that it gave birth to a language which was
indeed too poetic to be real: “the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed, compared with
the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin…”
Thus, Synge’s aim was not to be “joyless and pallid”, but to be faithful to the reality of Irish
life, carried along with this new language the people were using. In a way, the realism Synge
was aiming at could be nothing else than a paradoxical “poetic realism”, which would enable
him to show Hiberno-English as conductive of joy and richness, and to give a stylised
representation of the inner essence of Irish life. As Moredecar Gorelik said: “If you really wish
46
See II) 2) a)
37
to give us an illusion of life, you must seize upon the essence of life. Forget the body; give us the soul.”
(Quoted from Deane, S. (1971))
Finally, the poetic quality inherent to Hiberno-English is so hardly deniable that one can
definitely say there are many similarities between the ideals of the English romantics and the
intellectuals working for a cultural revolution in Ireland in the 1900’s. Thus, the use of
Hiberno-English as the medium for spreading the idea of a nation and a new identity can be
associated with romanticism, on a purely literary and poetic level as well as on a more
ideological and cultural level47.
b) Hiberno English as a symbol for unity
Somehow, this incredibly colourful and musical language was a very efficient means
of bridging gaps. On a purely literary level, Synge was using Hiberno-English for it enabled
him to reconcile two important characteristics of drama for him; he wanted to go against
conventions and show that realism could be rich and imaginative48, just as the English
romantics aimed at demonstrating that poetry could be poetry even if it was not only using
complicated words and obscure images. As far as the reflection on national identity and Irish
culture and literature was concerned, Synge’s idiom was also bridging a gap between two
opposite cultures; he was translating Irish life and culture into another language, thus keeping
a perfect balance between Irish and English and suggesting a possible unity where there
usually were rivalries and contradictions.
In fact, this was one of the main goals of the literary movement in which Synge took part:
creating a new unity among all Irish people, not by political means, but by cultural
innovations. It becomes clearer if we have a look at an extract taken from the Irish Literary
Theatre Manifesto (1897)49. “We propose to have performed in Dublin in the spring of every year
certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high
ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an
uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our
desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant
welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in the theatres of England, and without
which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of
47
cf II Introduction
Synge was convinced that at his time, these two characteristics could never be found together : “One has, on one
side, Mallarme and Huysmans producing this [rich and imaginative] literature; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola,
dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid works.” (PWW, p.112)
49
The Irish Literary Theatre is also well known as the Abbey Theatre.
48
38
buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are
confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work
that is outside all political questions that divide us.” (Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre)
Clearly here, we can find some ideas already expressed throughout this chapter, such as the
will to create an actual cultural representation of Irish in which all Irish people would
recognize themselves and unite to form the Irish nation. To do so, they wanted to rely on the
poetry and dignity which they thought was inherent to Ireland (“an uncorrupted and
imaginative audience”; “the home of an ancient idealism”), and to fight the misrepresentation
of Ireland, especially in English plays (“Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy
sentiment”)50. There is a sense that culture and cultural identity stand above all political and
religious problems, and thus maybe culture was the first means of solving Ireland’s problems
with identity and nationality: “carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions
that divide us”51. The fact that politics was not the ground on which they wanted to fight
helped them to talk of an achievable unity, although it might also be seen as an idealistic way
of avoiding thorny issues.
Of course, not all the plays staged at the Abbey had been written in Hiberno-English. This
was especially true of the plays which were called “peasant dramas”52. Yeats, for example,
was more inclined towards poetic drama, where he was trying to stage the transfiguration of
the new Ireland; in Cathleen na Houlihan for instance, he writes about an old woman, the
personification of Ireland, who is transformed into a young girl with the walk of a queen by
the end of the play. However, most of the playwrights were aiming at building a common
image for all the people in Ireland, and to some extent, Hiberno-English – being a language
created by the people, but also a bridge between two rival cultures – could be understood as a
symbol for the idealistic definition of a nation as unity, as a community infused with a certain
mythical spirit.
We have seen that J.M. Synge and his plays could easily be said to belong to this tradition of
romantic nationalism. Thus it will be interesting to study the structure of his idiom and the
use he makes of it in his plays, to understand how he put this ideal into practice.
50
cf I) 1) a)
All the founding members of the Irish Literary Theatre came from protestant upper classes, and thus they had to
justify their will to appeal to all the people in Ireland.
52
The most famous ones were written by Synge and Lady Gregory, although these two writers have different ways of
staging language.
51
39
Chapter 2.
Translating
Synge’s idiom is representative of “romantic nationalism” in Ireland, for the syntax
and vocabulary he uses are very much inspired by Gaelic, but also very telling as to the life of
the people he stages in his plays, their traditions and their past. Thus, by using this language
in his plays, he underlines the fact that Irish culture and traditions can be expressed through
a non-Celtic language, and suggests that Hiberno-English has become the new language of
the people of Ireland, “who have [not] shut their lips to poetry.”
It will be interesting to study how this translation of Irish culture into a specific brand of
English works, and how it can definitely be seen as a bridge between two cultures, rather than
a radical opposition of England and Ireland. To do so, I will concentrate on two of his plays:
The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows. First, these plays both have
special characteristics which make them more interesting to study. The first staging of the
Playboy generated such an agitation that it is still well know for its scandalous aspect, but it
is although Synge’s most famous play, mostly because of his incredibly clever use of
language. As for Deirdre, Synge did not finish it, but it is extremely interesting because it
deals with on of the greatest Irish myths and thus it stages kings and queens speaking
Hiberno-English.
Furthermore, the Playboy and Deirdre are the last two plays that Synge ever wrote, so they
are more elaborate, especially as far as language is concerned. Indeed, most of the
inconsistencies which Alan J. Bliss noted in his article (Bliss, A.J.(1971)) were found in
Synge’s first two plays, Riders to the sea and the Shadow of the Glen. However, I will not
restrict my examples to the two plays I want to concentrate on, for very relevant examples can
be found in the whole of Synge’s works.
In Chapter 1, we have seen that language can be considered as a mirror of the culture
of a nation. To my mind, this is how Synge reacted towards Hiberno-English. He saw it as the
best way to express Irish life, and by using it in his plays, he did all but try to bury and forget
the Irish language. For him, Hiberno-English was a new means of saving what was most
precious about Gaelic – all the symbols and traditions it had been carrying along for
40
centuries – without destroying the long process of linguistic adaptation Irish people had been
going through since their colonisation.1
Indeed, most of the characteristic linguistic features of Hiberno-English have two main
origins: the Irish language (called substratum in this case, because it is the “prior” language
which influences another which comes to dominate. In the case of Irish, it was largely
abandoned during the linguistic shift) and Elizabethan English(and English is called
superstratum, because it is the language people decided to adopt instead of Irish). Thus, using
Hiberno-English does not mean forgetting Irish and everything this language stands for. On
the contrary, as far as Hiberno-English is concerned, some of the main features of the Irish
language have been transposed into the system of English language – that is its lexicon, and
its word-order2.
According to Sean O’Tuama, culture is “a community’s design for living, handed from generation to
generation, but always with a certain structural permanency” and that language, “as a part of the
design, reflects and transmits a particular and evolving network of feelings, thinking and behaving”
(O’Tuama, S. (1971))
So, if Hiberno-English had become to some extent the new mirror of Irish culture, the
characteristic syntax used by the speakers of this variety of English could be rather telling as
to Irish philosophy of life, and Irish structure of thoughts itself. Indeed, syntax is the structure
of the language itself, and in this case, it is often relying on a direct translation of many
components of Irish thoughts and beliefs. All the same, characteristic words in the HibernoEnglish lexicon are actual historical and cultural testimonies, and allow writers such as
Synge to give a particular sense of time and place to his plays and settings.
As a consequence, we can try to go into details as far as Synge’s representation of HibernoEnglish is concerned, to see how far he proves able to translate Irish thoughts into English
words.
To some extent, Synge’s visits to the Aran Islands, and the brilliant book he wrote of it, are actual proofs that the
merging between English and Irish cultures could successfully work. Indeed, Synge came from a traditional middleclass family, and had a very formal education at university in Dublin. On the contrary, the islanders he visited and got
acknowledged to were mostly rural, catholic and tentacularly rooted people whose education had mostly been achieved
by oral learning. However, these incredibly different people managed to get to know each other and to coexist on the
Aran Islands. (O’ Tuama, S. (1971))
2
English is a SVO language. (Subject – Verb – Object), whereas Irish is a VSO language.
1
41
I) Translating syntax: Gaelic structure of thoughts
The study of Hiberno-English syntax can be very interesting in so far as it will help us
understand how Synge managed to remain faithful to Irish life through his use of English
words. Indeed, the non-standard features of Hiberno-English owe a lot to the Irish language,
and thus, one can deduce that it is pregnant with elements of Irish thinking and philosophy of
life.
1) A different temporality
Some nuances of meaning in the verb phrase are very particular to Hiberno-English, and can
scarcely be achieved in a standard translation.
a) Habitual tenses – Form, functions and frequencies of periphrastic do and be
“It’s a queer thing the way the likes of me do be telling the truth, and the wise are lying al times.” (Deirdre
of the Sorrows, p.180)
In this extract of Deirdre, Lavarcham, Deirdre’s nurse, is complaining about her incapability
of preventing the fatal events to happen, for nobody ever listens to her. To express the circular
power of fate, and this recurrent feeling of helplessness, she uses the grammatical structure:
“do + be + V_ing”.
This feature is used quite often in the texts of Synge’s plays, and it may be interesting to focus
on this characteristic verbal form.
In Hiberno-English, there are three different forms of the present tense which are used to
express a habitual or generic aspect; they have no direct equivalent in Standard English.
-
Inflected do, which is not to be confused with the emphatic use of do.
Ex: Me ma does tell me I’m livin on my nerves.
-
Inflected be
Ex: There bees no partition between the cows.
-
Inflected do + uninflected be3. This form favours recurrent events (as in the first
example) and plural subjects showing generic qualities (as in the second example).
Ex: He does be weighing things out for me for when I’m on me own.
3
Do + be + verb_ing is often considered as a characteristic of HE, but it is hardly to be found in contemporary
language. (It was much more frequent at Synge’s time, as we will see later on.)
42
Those pancakes do be gorgeous.
These features are by no means a sign of an imperfect mastery of Standard English grammar.
On the contrary, they add a nuance which is not structurally existent in Standard English, but
which is both a unique and extensively applied feature of Irish. Indeed, the Irish verb “to be”
has two forms of the present tense, tá and bíonn. The second one is called habitual (generic),
or consuetudinal, and would be roughly rendered in Standard English by expressions such as
“always is”, or “is regularly”. It is no wonder then that Irish people, during the years of
bilingualism, felt the need of using a similar tense in English. The use of “bees” or “does be”
is the illustration of this necessity for Irish people to carry over Irish aspectual distinctions
into Hiberno-English.
Joyce himself noticed the expression of these aspects in Hiberno-English:
“The Irish peasantry seem to feel the want of these two tenses when they are speaking English; and they
often, in fact, attempt to import them into the English language, even in districts where no Irish has been
spoken for generations; thus they will say ‘I do be reading a book while you do be writing,’ ‘I used to be
walking every day when I lived in the countryside,’” (Joyce, P. W. (1910; 58))
So it becomes clearer now that Synge’s use of “does be” is directly motivated by its
grammatical relation to Irish, and by the fact that most Irish people (especially most Englishspeaking Irish people), would feel the need to express this conception of time in their new
language. We can analyse two different passages from the Playboy of the Western World, and
Deirdre of the Sorrows, to give these structures an actual context.
“NELLY:
Are you thinking them’s his boots?
SARAH:
[taking them up] If they are, there should be his father’s track on them. Did you never read
in the papers the way murdered men do bleed and drip?
SUSAN:
Is that blood there, Sarah Tansey?” (The Playboy of the Western World, p.132)
This is the beginning of second act in the Playboy. Christy Mahon has already started telling
everyone about the murder of his father with a shovel, and is progressively becoming a
wonder in the small Mayo village. A group of young women from the village have “destroyed
themselves” climbing up the hill to Pegeen’s shebeen4 to see “the man killed his father”
(p.133). At that moment, they have seen a pair of boots and are wondering whether they
belong to the murderer or not.
4
A country public house.
43
To do so, Sarah tries to rely on what she knows about murders. The information she gives is a
generalisation from what she has read in the papers. As it has been said that murdered people
leave some of their blood on their aggressor, she deduces that if the boots the girls see are
indeed that of Christie, they should necessarily be able to notice some blood stains on them.
She is not trying to emphasize the fact that it is true that murdered men bleed (as opposed to
an argument suggesting they do not bleed:
“I’m not really sure that murdered men bleed and drip.
-
But I’m telling you, I read it in the paper, they do bleed and drip !”)
She wants to underline the fact that murdered men always bleed and drip, without even
questioning the overall existence of bleeding as far as murdered men are concerned. As a
consequence, the do she uses is definitely an occurrence of generic present.
If she had only used the simple present (“the way murdered men bleed and drip”), or even
added an adverb (“the way murdered men always bleed and drip”), her argument may have
had less impact on her Irish companions. Generic present helps her express the necessary
relation between a murderer and the blood of his victim in the very structure of her sentence –
the papers always talk of blood stains in case of a murder – and thus make her friends agree
with her. (“Is that blood there, Sarah Tansey?”)
“DEIRDRE: And yet I’m in dread leaving this place, where I have lived always. Won’t I be lonesome
and I thinking on the little hills beyond, and the apple-trees, do be budding in the springtime by the post of
the door? [A little shaken by what has past] Won’t I be in great dread to bring you to destruction, Naisi,
and you so happy and young?” (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p.190)
This extract is taken from the first act of the play, when Deirdre is still in Lavarcham’s house
on Slieve Fuadh. She has been living most of her life among nature, without any claim to
become a queen whatsoever. At that moment, she has seduced Naisi and they have almost
decided to elope to Scotland to prevent Conchubor from taking Deirdre to Emain Macha on
the next day. However, Deirdre is already incredibly conscious of the threat time and fate
represent for her and for her love for Naisi. She means to underline the discrepancy between
the lives of all the natural beings she is used to and her own tragic human life. She aims at
differentiating between two conceptions of time: nature’s cyclical time (when “apples trees do
be budding in the springtime”), and human linear time (when Deirdre will eventually bring
Naisi to destruction). If she had used a mere simple present, (“the apples trees bud in the
springtime”), one would have been less likely to sense all the tragic implications of this
remark; the opposition between nature’s cycle and Man’s fate would have been harder to
44
grasp, basically because the latter is only alluded to in this extract. It is definitely the use of
consuetudinal present which allows her to make her distinction even more accurate. This is all
the more so as this non standard feature is a reminiscence of Irish syntax, and thus in some
respects a reminder of Irish culture, of which the Sagas5 are such an important component.
Finally, if most of Synge’s characters make the distinction between simple and
consuetudinal present, it is because they feel the need to underline in their own version of the
English language aspectual differences which are more natural to an Irish speaker, who would
use a particular grammatical feature to be precise and convincing enough.
b) Perfects
“I never married with one, let alone with a couple or three.”(The Playboy of the Western World, p.120)
“And I’ll have your words from this day filling my ears, and that look is come upon you meeting my two
eyes, and I watching you loafing around in the warm sun, or rinsing your ankles when the night’s
come.”(The Playboy of the Western World, p.139)
“Amn’t I after seeing the star of knowledge shining from her brow, and hearing words would put you
thinking on the holy Brigit speaking to the infant saints…”(The Playboy of the Western World, p.146)
Christie Mahon, the “playboy of the western world”, is probably one of the most
colourful heroes of Synge’s plays, but he also grows into a master of language in the course of
the play. He plays with words and his fight with Hiberno-English syntax is close to heroism.
Thus, one cannot possibly put down the above non-standard quotes to lack of proficiency in
language.
A Standard English speaker would have expected to find a perfect tense, or a structure such as
“have just + past participle”, or instead of “he is come”, “I never married” and “you’re after
making”. However, these are probably some of the most famous features of Hiberno-English.
Irish people, as well as many characters in Synge’s plays, have a very particular way of
expressing their relation to time; they use five different verbal constructions where a standardEnglish speaker would have basically used the preterit and the present perfect. (Kallen, J.
“Some major features of Irish English”. Lecture given at Trinity College Dublin, 16 July
“Deirdre is the beautiful, tragic heroin of the legend of the Fate of the Sons of Usna, found in its earlier form in the
twelfth century Book of Leinster. Deirdre was the daughter of Fedlimid, who was Conchubor’s harper and
storyteller. At her birth Cathbad the Druid foretold that she would bring tragedy and death to kings and heroes. She
was chosen to be the wife of Conchubor, the wise warrior king of Ulster who had the right to choose any bride in the
land, and he had her removed and brought up in solitude in the country. But one day she caught sight of the sons of
Usna, fell in love with Naisi, and they planned elopement. Deirdre, Naisi and his brothers fled to Scotland. They
lived there until they were tricked into returning to Ireland by Conchubor, feigning to relent. Conchubor then had the
brothers summarily and treacherously put to death. The heartbroken Deirdre killed herself.” (Note from Deirdre of the
5
Sorrows, in Synge, J.M.(1999; 217-218))
45
2001) This can be partially explained6 by the fact that Celtic languages have no specific
lexical entries for the verb “to have” and thus Irish has no tense corresponding to the English
perfect tenses. (Sullivan, J.P. (1976)). Thus Hiberno-English speakers kept a lot of these Irish
structures in their speech, without totally suppressing Standard English structures, though.
Here are the five different forms expressing the perfect tense in Hiberno-English:
-
Perfect with after7.
This form is usually constructed as follows: be + after + verb_ing. The structure be + after can
also be followed by a nouns in some cases.
Exs8: > I’m just after sending a lady up that way.
> You’re after our tea
It is basically used to describe an event that has happened in the more or less recent past but
whose effect still last in the present. Jeffrey Kallen argues that most of those structures
involve a notion of recentness, or of completion. However, the time of speaking and the time
of occurrence of the event can be more remote from each other than what Harris suggests
when he calls this feature “hot news perfect”. (Filpulla, Markku (1999)) It is in very close
relation with an Irish structure once again, which is: “tá + taréis + verbal noun”. It is also used
only in reference to actions which have been concluded very recently.
The Standard English equivalent of this form would be the perfect tense with the addition of
“just”. (“He has just finished”) (Sullivan, J.P. (1976))
-
“Extended-now” perfect
In Hiberno-English, simple tenses are usually used with verbs followed by a time adverbial,
such as since, how long, etc… 9
Exs: > The system of this country is all wrong since 1922.
> How long are you here ?
-
Medial-object perfect10
Indeed, one can form a perfective with other features than “have” or one of its equivalents. French offers a
good counterexample with its use of the verb “être”. So Sullivan’s assumption is only one possible explanation
of the phenomenon described.
7
I will go into more details for this construction because it is the one of the famous ones in the grammar of HibernoEnglish, as well as the most widely used one in Synge’s plays.
8
Most of the examples are taken from the handout of a lecture by Jeffrey Kallen called “Some major features of Irish
English”, which he gave at Trinity College Dublin on the 16th of July 2001.
9
Filpulla argues that both the present and the past tenses can be used in this case, whereas Kallen explains that there is
a predominance of the use of the present tense – he calls it “extended-present” perfect.
6
46
This is a form of perfect where the object comes before the past participle. It often has a
resultative meaning – that is it focuses more on the result of the action than on the action
itself. It is important that this structure never has a causative meaning; it is in no way a
“indirect passive” (Harris) such as in “the pilot had a leg broken” for example. The subject is
always the agent of the activity expressed by the verb phrase, and the object is in some way or
other affected by the action. The verbs used are transitive and dynamic most of the time.
Exs: > I have the grass now cut.
 I asked whether he had the music got.
-
Perfect with be
In this structure, which has sometimes been considered as the intransitive counterpart of the
“medial-object” perfect, HE speakers use the auxiliary be instead of have in their construction
of the perfect. It means that the speaker is focusing on the end point of a prior action.
However, its use is lexically restricted to some verbs such as leave, change, die or go, and it is
much less common than some of the other perfect forms in HE.
Exs: > Esther is just gone asleep about two minutes ago.
> He’ll probably be back at Christmas, but they’re broken up.
-
‘Standard’ perfect with have
This is the standard version of the perfect tense, which is of course also used in HE.
We will know try to analyse two examples taken from Synge’s plays, to see how he
manages to convey the subtle differences of meaning between these forms, and how this is
once again a sign that he is indeed trying to be as faithful as possible to Irish culture and what
he considered to be the Irish way of understanding the world.
“PEGEEN: And you shot him dead?
CHRISTY: [shaking his head] I never used weapons. I’ve no licence, and I’m a law-fearing man.” (PWW,
p.121)
This extract is taken from the beginning of the first act of the Playboy. Christie has just
arrived in the shebeen, and “is after telling” Pegeen and her father about his parricide.
However, he remains rather mysterious about the circumstances of the murder, and thus, the
characters start a game of questions and answers which almost sounds like a catechism.
See Harris’s article “The Hiberno-English ‘I’ve it eaten’ construction: What is it and where does it come
from?”
10
47
Christie does not tell more than what he has to, but answers all the questions about his “dirty
deed” with good will and honesty. Here he denies Pegeen’s suggestion that he may have
killed his father by shooting him, on the grounds that he has never used a weapon.
To express this idea, he uses a preterit, along with an adverb of time (“never”). A Standard
English speaker would have expected him to use a perfect here, because of the structure of the
sentence. (“I have never used weapons”). Indeed, it sounds like the situation of Christie never
having touched a weapon in his life has not been affected by the murder of his father.
However, if he had used a perfect, Christie would have put the emphasis on the duration of
the situation – that is on the fact that he has never touched a weapon in his life and that this is
still true of him in the present of his speech. On the contrary, here it seems more important to
him to deny the action Pegeen is associating him with. He does not want people to believe
that he shot his father, although it sounds rather ironic that a “law-fearing man” should be
more worried by the fact of owning a weapon than by the murder of his father. Anyway, this
is why he uses what we have called an “extended-now” perfect, in order to emphasize the
negation of the action rather than the duration of time suggested by a perfect tense.
“CHRISTIE: Shut your yelling, for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a
lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome it’s worse, maybe, go mixing with the
fools of earth.” (The Playboy of the Western World, p.162)
This extract is taken from the very end of the Playboy. The villagers have discovered that
Christie was lying about the murder of his father, and even Pegeen is now rejecting him.
However, Christie, who has built himself a new self-confident image, begins to show some
signs of disdain for his former worshippers. He is basically telling them how much they have
to do with their own deceiving; they have made him into the “proven hero”(p.163) they are
now rejecting.
In order to underline this process, he uses this very Hiberno-English structure: “to be after +
V_ing”. If he had used a standard perfect, (“you have made a mighty man of me by the power
of a lie”), his audience’s attention would have been drawn towards the whole process of
transformation Christie has been going through during his day spent among them (from a
“poor fellow [who] would get drunk at the smell of a pint” (p.144) to the “wonder of the
western world” (p.152)). Furthermore, the idea of recentness given by the term “this day”
would be missing from the structure of the verb. But the standard expression “you have just
made a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie” sounds a bit dodgy in this situation.
It must be because “to have just + past participle” is more exclusively referring to “hot news”
48
than the Hiberno-English expression is. Indeed, “you have just made” is still an occurrence of
the standard perfect, and thus it still alludes to duration – in this case a very short one – more
than to completion. On the contrary, “You’re after making a mighty man of me” clearly
suggests that the action has been completed a little while ago – thus accounting for “this day”
– but it first and foremost aims at attesting of the actual completion of the action; Christie is
now a mighty man, even though this has been achieved by the power of a lie.
c) Translating thoughts
Now that we have put these two characteristic features of Hiberno-English into context,
it may be easier to determine why they are not only representative of Irish language, but also
of what could be called Irish philosophy of life. Here by Irish I mean the Ireland about which
Synge was writing and which was an important element in the construction of Irish identity at
the beginning of the twentieth century.
As well as the expression “be after + V_ing” clearly states that people in Ireland have a
tendency to give more importance to the concrete completion of an action rather than to the
temporal link between past and present, if we look back at what we have said about habitual
present, this may give some clue to imagine the way of life people had in Ireland in Synge’s
time. Indeed, this verbal form is a very accurate means of differentiating between circular
time, recurrent actions, and linear time. In the Aran Islands as well as in most of his plays,
Synge skilfully manages to represent these two conceptions of time in terms of language as
well as thematically.
First, the idea of cyclical time can easily be linked with the relation of Irish people to nature.
In the Playboy, there are many references to people working in the fields, and obviously
agriculture is a very cyclical occupation. Christie alludes to the fact that when he was living
with his father he kept on “toiling, moiling, digging, dogging”(p.126), and then he rejoices
because he thinks he won’t have to do this again if he marries Pegeen:
“And I’ll be growing fine from this day, the way I’ll have a soft lovely skin on me and won’t be the like of
the clumsy young fellows do be ploughing all times in the earth and dung.”(p.131)
Likewise, in the Aran Islands, Synge underlines quite accurately how close the islanders are
to the nature surrounding them:
“The curaghs and spinning wheels, the tiny wooden barrels […], the home-made cradles, churns and
baskets, are full of individuality, and being made from materials that are common here, yet to some extent
49
peculiar to the island, they seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about
them.” (Aran Islands, p.263)
But paradoxically enough, the characters of Synge’s writings are also incredibly
conscious of their mortal existence; in a way, the fact of having a specific means of
expressing habitual time may also help to put the emphasis on the inevitability of death when
this tense is not used.
Indeed, death is a very recurrent theme in his writings. Many of his heroines are literally overconscious of it. Maurya in Riders to the Sea, as well as Deirdre11 try to lead their life with as
much dignity as possible knowing time is eventually going to take everything away.
In the Aran Islands as well, death seems to be the other pole around which many lives are
revolving, if only because the main occupation of men on the islands is fishing, which was
extremely dangerous at the time, especially in the Atlantic Ocean. For instance, Synge’s
description of the funeral of an eighty-year-old woman on the island is very impressive and
accounts for the idea of an actual community facing this event:
“The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to
contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.” (AA, p.280)
However, these two poles of life are intricately intertwined in reality as well as in a mere
grammatical structure, as this extract shows it:
“In Inishmaan one is forced to believe in a sympathy between man and nature, and at this moment when
the thunder sounded a death-peal of extraordinary grandeur above the voices of the women, I could see the
faces near me stiff and drawn with emotion.” (AA, p.280)
Eventually, we can say that Synge’s use of non-standard means of expressing time allows him
to translate into English not only Irish syntactic features, but also a very characteristic
conception of time and life.
2) Emphasis and structure
Hiberno-English has been described as probably “the most flexible and the most
expressive” of all varieties of English. (Bliss, A.J.(1971; 49)). By this phrase, Alan J. Bliss
Deirdre’s conscience of death is almost ironic, for she is the heroine of a mythic tragedy, but at the same time she
acts as if she had already seen her life played on stage. There are constant references throughout the play of a “story
being told”, and she is the one who names herself after the title of the play:
“Naisi! Do not leave me, Naisi. I am Deirdre of the Sorrows.” (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p.188)
11
50
means that most nuances and emphasis effects are integrated in the structure of the sentence,
instead of mostly relying on appropriate stress and intonation in standard English12.
This is indeed one of the great differences between Standard English and Hiberno-English,
and it is once again mostly due to the fact that emphasis is included in sentence structure in
Irish as well. 13So in this section it will be interesting to focus on the Irish origins of many HE
grammatical structures related to emphasis. It will enable us to understand the importance
Synge gave to the “substratum” of Hiberno-English – that is the Irish language and its
syntactic structure.
a) “It’s the truth they’re saying” – Focusing devices
Topicalisation is one of the most frequent features to be found in Synge’s plays.
However, this way of focusing on certain elements is very different from the standard
idiomatic turns of expressions which do not allow an alternative order of elements, such as:
Here he is.
Up jumped the rabbit.
The only standard equivalent to this Hiberno-English way of topicalising an element of the
sentence would be an intonational emphasis, but by no means a change in the organisation of
the sentence itself.
What happens is that a clause-element goes from a neutral position in the verb phrase to a
marked position at the very beginning of a clause, but the syntactic relations in the clause
remains unchanged. However, the rest of the clause is “thrown into relative form” (Christian
Brothers (1902), quoted from Sullivan, J.P. (1976)) It can be used to specify an element in the
clause, but also to underline the contrastiveness of this element, or to confirm or reassert
something. Emphatic topicalisation is also possible, but it is less common.
Hiberno-English speakers, and all the more so Synge’s characters, would be able to highlight
almost any element of the sentence with this structural possibility.
From the viewpoint of Standard English, the Hiberno-English phenomenon may be expressed
as:
12
As far as emphasis is concerned, this extract from a translation by Synge himself seems to be self explanatory:
“It’s the like of that that we old hags do be thinking” (quoted from Bliss, A.J.(1971; 49)). Here the most
important element of the sentence is placed at the beginning and is preceded by an introductory expression. It
helps recording a special emphasis even in the written form; this would only have been achievable in Standard
English in the oral form, with the use of a special stress.
13
In this section I will try to focus on the Irish origins of the grammatical structures, in order to show that Synge was
definitely conscious of the great influence of the Irish language on the creation of Hiberno-English.
51
Intonational Emphasis (English)  N1 + V1 + X + S (Hiberno-English),
Where N1  “it”
V1  “is”
X  (unit to receive emphasis)
S  (relativized form of the utterance)
Here are several different examples taken from the Playboy of the Western World:
Is it yourself is fearing the polis? – Emphasis on the subject / Are you fearing the polis?
It’s your own the fault is. – Emphasis on the attribute / The fault is yours.
I’m told, in the big world, it’s bloody knives they use. – Emphasis on the direct object / they use
bloody knives.
It’s making game of me you were. – Emphasis on the verb / You were making game of me.
Isn’t it long the nights are now? – Emphasis on the adjective / Are the nights long now?
It’s there yourself and me will have great times whispering and hugging. – Emphasis on adverbial
phrases / You and I will have great times whispering and hugging there.
Is it often the polis do be coming into this place, master of the house? / Do the polis come often into
this place?
It was with a loy the like of that I killed my father. – Emphasis on the prepositional phrase / I killed
my father with a loy the like of that.
This feature can basically be considered as a direct translation from Irish. Indeed, Irish always
“expresses emphasis by grammatical means rather than by intonation” (Greene (1966), quoted
from Sullivan, J.P. (1976)). We have already seen that Irish is a VSO language, which means
that the position of the verb in the Irish sentence is at the very beginning. Thus, when a
different unit of the sentence needs to be emphasized, it is placed immediately after an
unemphatic impersonal verb – the Gaelic verb “is” – and the rest of the sentence takes up a
relative form. The Christian Brothers grammar (Quoted from Sullivan, J.P. (1976)) lists the
various possible emphatic forms of the Irish sentence “Chuaigh Seán go Doire inné” (John went
to Derry yesterday), and we can easily see how close to these structures (“is” + emphasized
unit + relativized form of S) Hiberno-English gets.
Is é Seán a chuaigh go Doire inné. / It was John who went to Derry yesterday.
Is go Doire a chuaigh Seán inné. / It was to Derry that John went yesterday.
Nach inné a chuaigh Seán go Doire. / Was it not yesterday that John went to Derry?
52
b) Pronominal emphasis – Reflexive pronouns
But this idea of using syntactic means rather than intonation to express emphasis is not
restricted to what we have just seen about focusing devices. A similar process takes place
when it comes to pronominal emphasis. Indeed, in Hiberno-English, reflexive and emphatic
pronouns are totally identified, whereas they are not in Standard English.
In Standard English, a reflexive pronoun is used when there is another nominal
element in the same clause or sentence with which it stands in coreferential relation. Filpulla
calls these pronouns “bound reflexive pronouns”; because they can’t refer to themselves, there
has to be an anaphoric relation in the sentence for it to be grammatically correct. Moreover,
both elements have to be governed by the same verb in the sentence.14
Ex: Poirot believes himself to be the best. In this sentence, “Poirot” is the antecedent of “himself”,
and these two elements are both governed by the main verb of the sentence.
In Hiberno-English, on the contrary, reflexive pronouns can be “unbound” – that is they can
be used on their own, without any reference to an antecedent in the same sentence:
(emphasized) personal pronoun (English)  reflexive pronouns (Hiberno-English)
Ex: Poirot believes that himself is the best. In this case, “himself” is not governed by “believe”; it has
no antecedent and thus can be said to be unbound. We can note that this construction put the emphasis on
the subordinate clause.
This kind of construction is often used with reference to the persons who are the topics of the
conversation and more generally to put the emphasis on one of the actors in the sentence. “The
reflexive pronoun does not necessarily refer to the subject but is a mere intensifier of the pronoun.” (Hartog
(1909), quoted from Sullivan, J.P. (1976; 100)).
This use of pronouns can also involve a certain social dimension, an idea of politeness and
respect.
It has almost become an institutionalised feature of Hiberno-English, and there are several
occurrences of it in Synge’s plays. Here are a few examples taken from Deirdre of the
Sorrows, which is especially interesting as far as the use of pronouns are concerned, for there
is an actual social hierarchy between the different characters of the ancient Saga.
14
This explanation is more precise than to talk of an anaphoric relation only, for most of the time the reflexive pronoun
does refer to someone or something mentioned earlier in the conversation, or even in the sentence.
53
It was yourself brought Naisi and his brothers to a grave was scooped by treachery. / pronoun used as a
subject.
I’m in dread Conchubor wants to have yourself and to kill Naisi. / pronoun used as a direct object.
That is a question will give small pleasure to yourself or me. / pronoun used as an indirect object. This
last example is also interesting in term of social context, for these words are Lavarcham’s
(Deirdre’s nurse), who is talking to Conchubor, the king of Ulster. Thus, she has almost no
other choice but to address him with a reflexive pronoun denoting respect.
Once again, this recurrent feature in Hiberno-English as well as in Synge’s works can be
considered as a direct translation from the Irish language, which uses the same grammatical
formative to mark both reflexive and emphatic pronouns. According to the Christian brothers
grammar (quoted from Sullivan, J.P. (1976; 93)), the suffix fein may be added to personal
pronouns to form the reflexive pronouns, but may also be used to mark emphasis. Thus
Hiberno-English speakers have basically retained this Gaelic mode of expressing emphasis,
and have come to use the English pronominal equivalents of fein in constructions where they
denote emphatic and non reflexive pronouns.15
c) Definite article
But Hiberno-English is not only a variety of English where elements of reality are
emphasized in the Irish way; we could go as far as saying that Hiberno-English speakers
derive from Irish a completely different way of referring to reality in general.
In this respect, let us have a look at Hiberno-English noun phrases, and especially at the way
determinants are used. Indeed, a common noun without any determinant can only be said to
refer to the notion it is describing, and not to anything concrete.
It is most interesting to notice that Hiberno-English consistently displays the definite article in
structures where Standard English would have ø, a, or occasionally a possessive article. This
fact is common to many different varieties of English, but the list of the different uses of “the”
is much longer in Hiberno-English than in any other variety (Filpulla, Markku (1999))
In Standard English, the definite article is used to refer to a general class of nouns,
such as “the women”. In that case, “the” helps presenting this class as a definite group and can
often help opposing this group to another one – the women vs the men for instance. It is true
that the opposition is still present if “the” is removed, but the fact of highlighting the existence
15
One can also note that the pronoun “itself” is usually employed instead of the adverb “even”.
Ex: If you were the devil itself I wouldn’t accept. This obviously means: Even if you were the devil I wouldn’t accept.
54
of a group as a discrete group strengthens this very meaning. In terms of particular nouns,
“the” is a sign of anaphora in the sentence. This means that the noun which is introduced by
“the” has already been mentioned in the text (ex: Bill was making a card castle. The card
castle was blown down.), or that its existence can be easily inferred, either by the situation or
by a reliance on common knowledge. (ex: Pass me the salt, please!)
In Hiberno-English on the contrary, there is no such notion as anaphora as far as
definite articles are concerned. Interestingly enough, we had already seen a similar situation
when concentrating on reflexive pronouns16. Anaphora does not seem to be taken into account
in Hiberno-English grammar in general.
Furthermore, the definite article is used in Hiberno-English when referring to:17
-
Plural count nouns with generic reference (ø)
Ex: The people were very much afraid of the diseases.
-
Non-count abstract nouns / concrete mass nouns (ø)
Ex: the goodness; the money
-
Quantifying expressions (ø)
Ex: the both of them
-
Names of languages, branches of learning (ø)
-
Physical sensations and states / diseases and ailments (ø)
-
Names of social and domestic institutions / geographical areas and localities (ø)
-
Parts of the body / family (possessive pronouns)
-
Parts of the day, week or year (ø)
Ex: In the summer, twice the week…
-
_ing verb forms referring to activities (ø)
Ex: The labouring, the hurling…
-
Names of persons with an adjective or a title (ø)
(Filpulla, Markku (1999))
16
17
See I)2)b)
The determinants between brackets are the ones a Standard English speaker would use instead of “the”
55
All these examples show us once again, as we had already noticed it in the section concerning
the use of perfect tenses, that Hiberno-English is more concerned by concreteness than
Standard English. Indeed, to say “I have the cancer” and not “I have cancer” is to highlight
this disease in a very different way. When you use the definite article in such a sentence, you
no longer refer to the notion of “cancer” in general, but you almost personify the disease, and
put more emphasis on it in your sentence. And one may suggest that to go from a notion to a
personification is to rely on a more concrete way of expressing reality.
Here is now an example taken from Synge’s Playboy, which will help us understand
more concretely how far it is possible to assert that Hiberno-English displays a structurally
different way of referring to reality.
“PEGEEN: If I am a queer daughter, it’s a queer father’d be leaving me lonesome these twelve hours
of dark, and I piling the turf with the dogs barking and the calves mooing, and my own teeth rattling with
the fear.” (p.116)
This scene takes place at the beginning of the play, when Pegeen tells her father, who is about
to leave for Kate Cassidy’s wake, that she is afraid to spend the night all by herself in the
shebeen.
When Pegeen talks about “piling the turf”, she either means “piling turf onto the fire, or
stacking turf outside the house” (The Playboy of the Western World, in Synge, J.M.(1999;
169)). Thus she is referring to a common activity in the West of Ireland at the time, and she
uses the definite article “the” to determine a concrete mass noun such as “turf”. This gives it a
very concrete quality, for we either feel that we know which turf she is talking about, or that
there is a definite quantity of turf to be piled.
Then she explains she is afraid to it with “the dogs barking and the calves mooing”. She could
be using “the” as an anaphor marker, assuming everybody knows she and her father own dogs
and calves. However, as she is living in a shebeen, (so that her father is a bar tender), it is
more likely that she is talking about the barking if dogs and the mooing of calves in general.
Moreover, she alludes to the night to come, so it seems doubtful that she will be able to
recognize the dogs and the calves she is talking about. The most logical explanation is that in
that case, “dogs” and “calves” are plural count nouns with generic reference, and that
Pegeen’s use of a definite article gives these nouns a more personal and concrete identity than
the English ø would have.
Finally, she is so afraid that she talks about her “own teeth rattling with the fear”. Here,
clearly, “fear” refers to a feeling, almost to an ailment, and a Standard English speaker would
56
necessarily have used a ø instead of “the” in this case. Pegeen’s way of referring to fear
almost presents us with an allegory of fear, because of this definite article highlighting the
existence of this feeling and apparently assuming that it is familiar to all the characters in the
scene.
Once again, this characteristic feature of Hiberno-English relies very much on the Irish use of
determinants. Irish, “like Greek and Hebrew, has only one article, the definite” (Greene (1966),
quoted from Sullivan, J.P. (1976; 113)), and the most of the various grammatical conditions
under which it is used are similar to those alluded to a while ago, about Hiberno-English. It
seems then more than obvious that Hiberno-English speakers have retained the Irish syntactic
requirements governing the appearance of the article, and that Synge is very accurately
including this feature in his representation of Hiberno-English as a glimpse of Irish thoughts
and culture.
3) “And”
This small and apparently most insignificant word, because of the many functions it has
in Hiberno-English, can in fact give us a wonderful insight into the relation between this
variety of English and Irish culture.
a) “And I a proven hero in the end of all” (The Playboy of the Western World,
p.163)
“Leave me go, will you? When I’m thinking of my luck to-day, for she will wed me surely, and I a
proven hero in the end of all.”
As Christie’s words proudly suggest it, in HE, it is quite common to use “and” to
introduce a subordinate clause instead of a coordinate clause18. This is meant to express a
temporal relation of simultaneity or a relation of casual or concessive dependence between the
actions or states of affairs in the two clauses connected by “and”. (Filpulla, Markku (1999)).
This subordinate relation is usually equivalent to the standard use of while, although, when, or
of a relative clause:
- Conjunction1 + noun + aux + pres.part. (English)  conjuntion2 + pronoun +
pres.part. (Hiberno-English)
- {When / since / as / etc…} + aux (English)  “and” + ø (Hiberno-English)
18
The second clause is usually a non finite verb phrase, an adjectival or noun phrase, or a prepositional phrase.
57
Here are some examples taken from Deirdre and the Playboy:
What is there to hurt you, and you a fine, hardy girl would knock the head of any two men in the place?
If they are itself, you’ve heard it these days, I’m thinking, and you walking the world telling out your story
to young girls and old.
Walk on from this, for I’ll not have him tormented, and he destroyed travelling since Tuesday was a week.
(The Playboy of the Western World)
If it wasn’t you’d do well to keep a check on her, and she turning a woman that was meant to be a queen.
If it’s the truth I’ll tell you, she’s growing too wise to marry a big king and she a score only.
It’s too much to have me twoscore and two weeks waiting for your voice in Emain, and you in this place
growing lonesome and shy.
(Deirdre of the Sorrows)
To understand this non-standard use of “and” in Hiberno-English, we have to look back at
Irish grammar once again. The Gaelic utilization of the simple conjunction “agus” is much
more extensive than that of the corresponding “and” in English. (Greene (1966), in Sullivan,
J.P. (1976; 136)). Subordinate sentences beginning with “when”, “as”, “considering”, etc. are
often idiomatically rendered in Irish by the grammatical structure “agus + subject of the
subordinate clause + ag + verbal noun19” (Henry (1904), in Sullivan, J.P. (1976; 136)). In
these constructions the verb “to be” is often omitted, as in these following examples:
Do chonac é agus me ag teacht amach.  I saw him and I coming out. (literally: at coming out)
Bhíodar ina suí i dteannta a chéile agus iad ag caint.  They were sitting together and they talking.
(literally: at talking)
Do bhuail sé uman agus mé ar mo shlí abhaile.  I met him and I on my way home.
(Henry (1904) quoted from Sullivan, J.P. (1976; 136))
So this grammatical structure has once again been almost literally translated into
English, and is widely used in Ireland, and all the more so in Synge’s plays.
“The Irish verbal noun, functionnally synonymous with both the English infinitive and present participle, may
fulfill either of their respective functions depending upon the syntactical means employed. That is, the verbal noun
when preceded by the preposition ‘ag’ performs the function of the English present participle; and when appearing
alone or preceded by another preposition exclusive of ‘ag’, it performs the function of the English infinitive.”
19
(Sullivan, J.P. (1976; 134))
58
b) Enumerations
But even a very common and standard way of using the conjunction “and” can sound
particularly Irish in the mouths of Synge’s characters, and help us learn a bit more about Irish
culture.
“But this talk brought me ease, and I see we’re as happy as the leaves on the young trees, and we’ll be so
ever and always, though we’d live the age of the eagle and the salmon and the crow of Britain.” (Deirdre of
the Sorrows, p.198)
In this extract, Naisi is telling Fergus how much he trusts his love for Deirdre. His words
sound highly poetic and solemn, because of the intricate link between the lovers and the
natural elements surrounding them (“young trees” “eagle”, “salmon”…), but also simply
because of the structure of his sentence. The recurrent use of coordination gives it a highly
rhythmical quality, and illustrates his conception of never-ending love, for this description of
happiness sounds as if it could go on forever20.
This is one of the many examples of how a simple conjunction can underline the tragic
and heroic quality of the stories Synge is presenting in his plays.
The succession of “and” can take up a very tragic quality, as in Lavarcham’s lament, which
closes Deirdre of the Sorrows:
“Deirdre is dead, and Naisi is dead; and if the oaks and stars could die for sorrow, it’s a dark sky and a
dark and naked earth we’d have this night in Emain.” (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p. 217)
This literally sounds like a eulogy, a keen, just like the ones Synge had the opportunity to hear
on the Aran Islands. We can sense the dignity and respect for the dead and their love in the
many parallelisms present in the sentence: “Deidre is dead /and/ Naisi is dead.”
“the oaks /and/ stars” // “a dark sky /and/ a dark and naked earth”. Once again, we can notice
how close to nature the characters seem to be, in their lives as well as in their deaths.
But the conjunction can also give an actual feeling of heroism, as in this passage taken from
the Playboy of the Western World:
“He gave a drive with the scythe, and I gave a leap to the east. Then I turned around with my back to the
north, and I hit a blow on the ridge of his skull, laid him stretched out, and he split to the knob of his
gullet.” (The Playboy of the western World, p.135)21
His words also refer to an ancient Irish tale, “the Cold May Night”, narrating the search for information about the
coldest night which has ever occurred. This story includes visits to an old otter, an aged eagle (or hawk or crow,
depending on the version) and to the oldest of all, a salmon in Assaroe, Co. Donegal. (Seán Ó Súilleabhaín, (1971))
21
The last occurrence of « and » in this sentence is of course introducing a subordinate clause (see I)3)a) ), thus it has
not been highlighted as the others.
20
59
Here the use of the conjunction of coordination gives more reality to Christie’s fictitious
narration of the murder of his father. He manages to picture himself temporally as well as
spatially (“to the north”, “to the east”22). In the first sentence, the second clause, introduced by
“and”, sounds like a direct reaction to the aggression described in the first clause. Likewise, in
the second sentence, we can almost see Christie’s rotational movement, of which the blow
seems to be a logical consequence, thanks again to the use of coordination to link these two
actions.
But this prodigal use of the “and” conjunction can also lead to mock-heroism, as is often the
case in the Playboy of the Western World. According to Declan Kiberd, this is to be linked
with what he calls “alliterative romance”, relying on a quotation about the Irish language by
O’Grady (1881) (Kiberd, D. (1993)):
“The genius of the Gaelic seems to impel alliteration, and its numerous synonyms invite to repetitions
which, properly used, strengthen, and, being abused, degenerate into jingle and tautology. The Irish
speakers of the present day very commonly, for emphasis’s sake, use two synonymous adjectives instead of
one with an adverb, and these they almost invariably choose so that there shall be alliteration.”
In the Playboy, there are plenty of these alliterations, linked by a “and” conjunction:
“powers and potentates”, “cot and cabin”, “prayers and paters”
“cup and cake”, “wealth and wisdom”, “next and nighest”, “wakes and weddings”
In the Aran Islands as well, Synge, who was adept at spotting nuances in the speech of
islanders, notices this speaking habit in one of the women’s speech:
“She plays continual tricks with her Gaelic in the ways girls are fond of, piling up diminutives and
repeating adjectives with a humorous scorn of syntax…”
This constant oscillation between heroism and mock heroism certainly goes back to the
extravagance and bombast to be found in old Irish romances, as well as to the ancient tradition
of storytelling, where exaggeration and lies were the absolute rule.
c) Merging traditions and beliefs
However, Synge’s extensive use of enumerations is not only a tribute to the old sagas,
but also a hint at an Irish popular habit of language. Apart from the legendary Irish love for
words and exaggeration, let’s have a look at how Irish speakers greet each other.
-
22
Dia dhuit
See II)1)
60
-
Dia’s Muire dhuit23
Originally, this could go on and on until people had named half the saints on the calendar.
Although in a very ironic way, Shawn Keogh’s idiom (Pegeen’s unfortunate lover) illustrates
this Irish habit of naming saints:
“Oh Father Reilly, and the saints of God, where will I hide myself today? Oh, St Joseph and St Patrick and
St Brigit and St James, have mercy on me now!” (PWW, p.117)
But here is a maybe more realistic example of greetings in the Playboy:
“MEN: God bless you! The blessing of god on this place!
PEGEEN: God bless you kindly.” (PWW, p.116)
We can see that an adverb (“kindly”) is used to replace the name of Mary, usually added by
the second speaker in Irish.
This is but one example of the religious uses of enumeration and of the “and”
conjunction. Indeed, it is often linked with words of blessing and cursing, and in most of the
situations where there is question of religion in general.
Here are some of the words of blessing and swearing to be found in the Playboy and in
Deirdre:
“May God and Mary and St Patrick bless you and reward you for your kindly talk.” (PWW, p.130)
“Aid me for to win her, and I’ll be asking God to stretch a hand to you in the hour of death, and lead you
short cuts through the Meadows of Ease, and up the floor of heaven to the Footstool of the Virgin’s Son.”
(PWW, p.147)
“…but let you take my word and swear Naisi, by the earth, and the sun over it, and the four quarters of
the moon, he’ll not go back to Emain…” (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p.192)
“By the sun and moon and the whole earth, I wed Deirdre to Naisi. May the air bless you, and water and
the wind, the sea, and all the hours of the sun and moon.” (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p.192)
All these different blessings have the same structure. However, the things by which the
characters swear are very different from one another; in the Playboy, the characters are
referring to the catholic God and his saints, whereas in Deirdre24they call the names of natural
elements surrounding them. So, using the same grammatical devices for such different
divinities may be a way for Synge to call attention to the fact that Irish culture is made of
paganism as much as Christianity, and that if a true Irish culture is to be recreated, these two
23
- God bless you
- God and Mary bless you
24
This play is set long before there was any talk of catholicism in Ireland. This is why the characters have a different
way of alluding to religion: “The gods save you, Deirdre” (p.180), “the gods shield you, Deirdre”
61
elements have to be taken into account. Christie Mahon gives a beautiful illustration of the
author’s conviction in one of his poetic fits inspired by Pegeen:
“Amn’t I after seeing the love-light star of knowledge shining from her brow, and hearing words would put
you thinking on the Holy Brigit speaking to the infant saints…” (PWW, p.146)25
II) A polyphonic conception of vocabulary
However, this analysis of the use of the conjunction “and” seems to suggest that the
content of Hiberno-English is as interesting in terms of culture and national identity as its
form is. Ala J. Bliss goes as far as asserting that in Synge’s plays, there is a “progressive
change of emphasis from syntax to vocabulary”. (Bliss, A.J.(1971)) According to him, the
Playboy in particular relies for its effects very largely on its exotic vocabulary, and he states
that the relative emphasis as between syntax and vocabulary is the same in Deirdre.
Nonetheless, one could say that the norm he establishes (two syntactic features per sentence,
and about five “unique26” words in ten pages) is based on incomplete data. Indeed, however
interesting the notion of “unique words” may be, it is, as we will see, only one category of
lexicon used by Synge. Further more, the syntactic table he uses is adapted from Professor
Taniguchi’s Studies on the Structure of the Dialogue in Synge’s Plays; the idea of the
Japanese researcher was to show the “average number of occurrences per sentence” of a
number of selected syntactic features. The problem there is that this technique is not very
precise about the mentioned occurrences: for instance, he records 0.00 occurrences of the
form do be27 in the Playboy. But how is it possible to know if this feature even occurs once in
the play, with such an approximation?
Thus, it may seem more relevant in this case to say that the importance Synge gives to
vocabulary is indeed becoming greater in his later plays, but that this does not allow us to
underestimate the influence of syntax in his representation of Hiberno-English28.
So what is so particular about Synge’s use of vocabulary? Why does it have a function which
can be seen as distinct from that of syntax? What does it tell us about Irish culture and the
way people lived at the time?
25
The striking number of relative clauses that are not pronominally marked is another characteristic feature of
Hiberno-English, and will be dealt with in Chapter 3.
26
A unique word is a word which does not appear more than once in Synge’s plays.
27
See I)1)a)
28
The only exception would be of course that the only irrelevances in syntax appear in his two earliest plays, Riders to
the Sea and the Shadow of the Glen.
62
1) The power of lexicon
“Arguably, the most transparent reflection of speakers’ attitudes, values and self-perception is to be
found in the lexicon.” (Collins, Peter and Blair, David (2001). “Language and identity in
Autralia” (1-16), in English in Australia, John Benjamins, Amsterdam.) This remark is
certainly very interesting as far as Synge’s growing emphasis on vocabulary is concerned, for
it may be a hint at an evolution in his conception of the dialect itself, and more precisely of
the relation between dialect and national identity.
a) Lexicon and culture
Indeed, vocabulary seems to be a more obvious means of expressing national identity
and culture through a language. Of course, syntax can be presented as more scientific and
systematic, but we have to keep in mind that at Synge’s time, sociolinguistics was not a
widespread subject, and that very few people would have been able to give a very reliable
account of the grammar of Hiberno-English29, all the more so as even fewer people actually
considered it as a variety of English worth concentrating on. Even to a complete outsider, a
word taken from the Irish lexicon is easier to recognize than a syntactic feature30, and it may
also be harder to discard it as “wrong” or sign of the misunderstanding of a rule.
This reliance on vocabulary is also to be found in one of the first books attempting to give a
description of Hiberno-English as a variety: Joyce, P. W. 31(1910). English as we speak it in
Ireland. Reprinted (1988), Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
29
This is all the more true as most English speaking Irishmen were not very comfortable even with Irish grammar. For
instance, here is a short poem about a lecturer at Trinity College:
“Atkinson of TCD
Doesn’t know the verb to be”
(Kiberd, D.(1993))
30
The origin of an element of the lexicon may also be clearer than a syntactic feature. Indeed, sociolinguists are
constantly arguing whether this or that HE syntactic feature comes from Old English or Irish or both (see, for example,
Filpulla, Markku (1999)), whereas etymology is usually a much stronger argument. However, Bliss draws attention to
the fact that one can never be completely certain of the origin of a word either: “In no individual instance is certainty
possible”. (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))
31
Patrick Weston Joyce (1827 – 1914) was brought up speaking both Irish and English, and received his early
education in hedge-schools in Fanningstown. At eighteen he was appointed as a teacher by the Commissioners of
National Education. In 1856 he was one of the fifteen teachers selected for training by the Government to reorganize
the National School System. In 1861 he was awarded a B.A. at Trinity College Dublin, and a L.L.D. in 1871. He was
Principal of the Board of Education Training College from 1876 to 1893. His twenty-one years of retirement were
almost entirely dedicated to writing. (Introduction by Terence Dolan in Joyce, P. W. (1910))
63
In his introduction to the book, Terence Dolan describes it as “full of information, both relevant
and irrelevant for HE studies.” He says the book is “presented in a readable, enthusiastic way almost as
a continuous narrative, with a strong prejudice in favour of the integrity of both Irish and Anglo-Irish
culture. It is at times a dictionary of sayings, an anthology of proverbs, a diary of folklore, as well as being
a collection of Hiberno-Englishisms.” (8). Dolan clearly hints at the non-scientific aspect of the
book, although he doesn’t discard it as completely anecdotal: “All in all, his book is of great
interest for the study of HE, of local history, as well as of general native Irish culture.” (9). Nonetheless,
he seems to suggest that Joyce is much more reliable in cultural terms than in scientific
linguistic terms. And indeed, if we have a look at the table of contents, we can see that only
two of his chapters are in direct relation with syntax32; but even if he is able to list many
features which have been studied by sociolinguists in a more orderly fashion since, he treats
his syntactic material more or less as his lexical material – that is he merely lists and quotes,
but does not methodically analyse it. Anyway, the cultural aspect of language seems to be
what he was mostly interested in, according to some of his other books: Irish Peasant Songs
(1906); Old Celtic Romances, trans from the Gaelic (1879); A Short History of Ireland to
1608 (1893); The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (1869-1913); and thus his
concentrating on vocabulary can be put in direct relation with these goals.
The various sources from which he derives his material are another very interesting point
about Joyce, and can help us draw another parallel between him and Synge. They range from
his memory (“My own memory is a storehouse both of idiom and vocabulary”, (5)) to his readings and
the replies from the correspondents listed at the end of the book (“Eighteen years ago, I wrote a
short letter which was inserted in nearly all the Irish newspapers and in very many of those published
outside Ireland, announcing my intention to write a book on Anglo-Irish dialect, and asking for collections
of dialectical words and phrases. In response to this I received a very large number of communications from
all parts of Ireland, even from America, Australia, and New Zealand…” (6)). But one of the most
interesting sources is probably the notebook he writes about a few pages later in his preface:
“For twenty-years or more I have kept a large note-book lying just at my hand; and whenever any peculiar
Irish-English expression, or anything bearing on the subject, came before me – from memory, or from
reading, or from hearing it in conversation – down it went in the manuscript. In this way an immense mass
of materials was accumulated almost imperceptibly.” (8-9).
Indeed, Synge had the same way of collecting sayings and vocabulary during his life and
especially during his stays on the Aran Islands. Kiberd underlines it in his book (Kiberd,
32
Chapter IV: “ Idioms derived from the Irish language”, and Chapter VII: “Grammar and pronunciation.”
64
D.(1993)), and Synge himself alludes to it in his introduction to the Playboy of the Western
World, and his description of sources definitely sounds like Joyce’s in many ways: “I have used
only one word or two that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my on
nursery before I could read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also
from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo or from beggar-women and ballad-singers
near Dublin…” (The Playboy of the Western World, p.111).
So these two men, who did not exactly have the same aims in their collection of HibernoEnglish material33, had more or less the same method to do so. This may be in favour of the
argument that vocabulary and culture are more directly and obviously linked than syntax and
culture, although these two elements constituting a language are complementary.
Thus when Synge wrote the Playboy of the Western World, which was meant to be both a
praise and an open satire of life in the West of Ireland, he probably decided to rely more on
what people would be more likely to react to, that is lexicon. And he was right about the
behaviour of his audience, for the riots against the play actually started at the utterance of the
word “shift”, and not at the violence implied by the tenth use of “and” as a means of
introducing a subordinate clause. The very uproar triggered out by his most famous play is a
perfect example of what Collins and Blair meant in their book about English in Australia:
lexicon is where language attitudes can be analysed most clearly.
b) Gaelic and lexicon
Synge’s growing emphasis on vocabulary may also be a sign that he understood more clearly
the spirit of the Irish language, which he was trying to render in the speech of his characters.
Indeed, the Irish language is often described as a concrete, noun-centred medium (Kiberd,
D.(1993)).
Thus, for Synge to give more and more importance to lexicon, as opposed to syntactical
constructions, is to understand the deep functioning of the Irish language, and to try to
preserve its meaning even when expressed in English.
2) A sense of place and time
In his “Synge Glossary” (Bliss, Alan J. (1979)), Bliss divides the non-Standard words and
phrases used by Synge into seven classes:
33
Synge aimed at artistic representation whereas Joyce wanted to give a description of the variety. This is particularly
noticeable in the fact that Synge feels the need to argue for realism, whereas Joyce, who did nothing but report what he
heard, does not.
65
The words directly adopted from the Irish language, the words and phrases literally
translated from the Irish, the “mistranslations” from the Irish, the words formerly used in
Standard English but now obsolete, those in general dialect use in England and Scotland,
those in dialect use in limited areas only, and finally the words and phrases of which no other
instances seems to be recorded, and which may have been adopted by Synge.
We will go into details for some of these categories, to see how telling they can be as far as
Irish culture is concerned. Indeed, one can assume that it is because of their direct cultural
and Irish quality that Synge decided to use them in his plays. In a notebook he wrote:
“No personal originality is enough to make a rich work unique, unless it has also the characteristic of a
particular time and locality and the life that is in it.” (quoted from Kiberd, D. (1993; 200))
He aimed at creating an actual sense of place and time through the words of his characters,
and this was best achievable thanks to a skilful use of non-Standard lexicon.
a) Language history
First and foremost, some of these categories are testimonies of the history of HE, and
especially of its genesis, that is the shift from Irish to English in Ireland34.
This is true of the words directly adopted from the Irish language, of which here is a complete
list: banbh, boreen, cleeve, curagh, Dun, frish-frash, keen, loy, ohone, poteen, Samhain, shebeen, sluigs, sop,
streeleen, streeler, thraneen. (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))
Here are a few examples in Synge’s plays, which will help us to give this process a context:
I just riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull… (PWW, p.121) / A loy is a long
narrow spade. In Irish it is written láighe.
Would you go making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drink to-night? (PWW, p.158)
/ Poteen means “illicit whiskey”; it is written poitín in Irish, and literally means “little pot”.
She wouldn’t wish to be soiling them, she said, running out and in with mud and grasses on her feet, and it
raining since the night of Samhain. (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p.179)
Kiberd asserts that he has heard all these words used in the English of the West of Ireland,
except for the word “Samhain”. (Kiberd, D.(1993)) Nonetheless, in his glossary, Bliss records
this word as Irish, and meaning “All-Hallowtide”. More precisely, “Samhain” is the Celtic
festival of the new year, the dead, the north, the element of earth, and the frozen state just
prior to rebirth. Samhain begins on the night of the 31st of October, Hallowe’en, and the dawn
of 1 November, all Saints Day – the meeting point of pagan and Christian religions.( Synge,
34
See Chapter 1, I)2)
66
J.M.(1999; 33)) This direct use of Irish words seems to be developing an innate tendency of
HE, especially at Synge’s time, which was the period just following the main linguistic shift
in Ireland. Indeed, P.L. Henry has noted that “in areas where Irish was recently spoken, many Irish
words are still used, though not always fully understood.” ((Kiberd, D. (1993; 211)). Once again,
this language habit can also help HE speakers to convey nuances almost inexistent in English
as far as the structure of a single word is concerned. One can note, for instance, that five
words of the complete list bear the suffix _een. (boreen, poteen, shebeen, streeleen and
thraleen.) In Irish, this diminutive is generally applied to anything insignificant, small, or of
little consequence, and William Burke wrote that “the delicate flavour of contempt conveyed
by this suffix cannot be adequately represented in English”. (Quoted from (Kiberd, D.(1993))
We can see this meaning in practice among the characters of the Playboy:
Wouldn’t it be a bitter thing for a girl to go marrying the like of Shaneen, and he a middling kind of
scarecrow with no savagery or fine words in him at all? (PWW, p158)
There is almost no need to underline how contemptuous of Shawn Pegeen is, and we can
easily see that the suffix put at the end of the character’s name is very fitting to the description
Pegeen gives of the young man who wants to marry her: “an middling kind of scarecrow”.
However, in the case of Pegeen, it is most likely that the use of this suffix on the heroine’s
name is ironical. Indeed, Pegeen is everything but insignificant in the play, and she even
describes herself as being able to frighten most men in the region:
And to think it’s me is talking sweetly, Christy Mahon, and I the fright of seven townlands for my biting
tongue. (PWW, p.156)
There is another category of words which is very relevant in terms of history of HE:
what Bliss call the mistranslations of Irish. These are words which are used in the English of
rural Ireland, but which are based on an original mistranslation from the source-word in Irish.
As Bliss explains:
“The connotations of an Irish word rarely coincide with those of any individual English word, so that the
correct rendering into English will depend on the context. It seems, however, that at some stage of the
acquisition of the English language Irish speakers learnt a “standard” equivalent of each Irish word, which
they use irrespectively of the context; and this type of “mistranslation” from Irish is a fruitful source of
special Anglo-Irish usage.” (Bliss, Alan J. (1979; 298))
These words draw attention to the process of adopting a new language that Irish people had to
go through during the nineteenth century. They did not only try to forget Irish and learn
Standard English, they basically tried to translate their culture into the new language they felt
67
the need to speak. This is why these mistranslations cannot simply be analysed as a “wrong”
usage made of English vocabulary. They are a clear sign that Irish people were trying to
appropriate the new language and to create a new variety which would be a mixture of Irish
and English. Even English vocabulary is given an Irish meaning.
Given Synge’s opinion on Irish identity and language, he could hardly but use these words in
his representation of HE. Here are a few examples:
If it didn’t, maybe all knows a widow woman has buried her children and destroyed her man is a wiser
comrade for a young lad than a girl, the like of you, who’d go helter-skeltering after any man would let you
a wink upon the road. (PWW, p.129)
It is I will be your comrade and will stand between you and the great troubles are foretold. (Deirdre of the
Sorrows, p.182)
In the first example, comrade means “wife”, and in the second, it means “husband”. This is a
translation from the Irish céile, which can mean either “comrade”, or “spouse”. We can also
note that fear céile means “husband”, and that bean céile means “wife”. So in this case, HE
speakers have concentrated their translation on the matrimonial meaning of he word.
… and he a man’d be raging all times, the while he was waking, like a gaudy officer you’d hear cursing and
damning and swearing oaths. (PWW, p.126)
Here gaudy means “splendid”. It comes from the Irish gréagach, which literally means
“Greek”, but whose other meanings are “splendid” and “gaudy”.
Let you wait to hear me talking, till we’re astray in Erris, when Good Friday’s by, drinking a soup from a
well, and making kisses with our wetted mouth…(PWW, p.155)
In this case, astray is employed as “wandering about”, whereas in Irish, the word ar searchán
can mean both “astray” and “mistaken”. However, Synge seems to enrich this notion of
mistranslation by including it into his artistic representation of HE. Indeed, he obviously
decides to exploit the ambiguity between those two meanings of the word; the underlying
second meaning of astray is used as a hint of the illusory character of his ambition.
So Synge did not only capture the importance of vocabulary in terms of language
history, but he also managed to enrich these characteristics of the HE lexicon by considering
them as essential elements of his representation of HE.
b) Direct historical references
In Bliss’s ‘Synge Glossary’, there are also several words which are in direct relation
with the historical context of the community staged in Synge’s plays. It would be very
difficult to understand some of these for someone who would not be familiar at all with he
68
political and social situation of Ireland at the time. The fact that Synge uses them in his plays
is a proof that he wants to create an actual sense of time and place, to give a very realistic
setting to his characters.
First of all, there are many words suggesting the presence of the coloniser, and
especially the repression associated with the English:
For example, one can sense the presence of the English in the many words Synge’s characters
employ to talk about the police, or members of the administration who could be associated, to
some extent, to the idea of repression:
Is it often the polis do be coming into this place, master of the house? (PWW, p.119)
According to Bliss, the spelling here is designed to indicate stress on the first syllable, with a
long o; this pronunciation is said to be noted by the New English Dictionary on Historical
Principles (Oxford, 1884-1933) for Ireland and Scotland, and it may come from the Irish
póilín, meaning “policeman”. (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))
The peelers is fearing him, and if you’d that lad in the house there isn’t one of them would come smelling
around if the dogs itself were lapping poteen from the dung-pit of the yard. (PWW, p.122)
Peeler means “policeman”. They were named like that after Mr. Robert Peel, during whose
Secretaryship (1812-18) the Irish constabulary was founded. (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))35
Was it bailiffs? […]
Agents? (PWW, p.120)
A bailiff is the manager of a district or an estate. An agent is a deputy or steward, who collects
rent. (Synge, J.M.(1999). Collected Plays and Poems and the Aran Islands. Everyman
paperbacks.)
Bliss also records the word Mergency man, which means “occasional bailiff’s officer,
recruited for special service, especially for evictions”.
Indeed, evictions were quite frequent among the poor peasants who were not always able to
pay their rent. In the Aran Islands, Synge describes attempts of eviction on the islands, (“Two
recent attempts to carry out evictions on the island came to nothing, for each time a sudden storm rose, by,
ot os said, the power of a native witch, when the steamer was approaching, and made it impossible to
land.”, AI, p.291)and underlines the contrast between the islanders and the police force trying to
drive an old woman away from “the hearth she had brooded on for thirty years”: “…these
35
Bliss also record the word “Horney” for a policeman.
69
mechanical police, with the common place agents and sheriffs, and the rabble that they hired, represented
aptly enough the civilisation for which the homes of the island were to be desecrated.”(AI, p.292)
Sometimes the agents of oppression were only related to the English, if not English
themselves:
…and the thousand militia – bad cess to them – walking idle through the land. (PWW, p.116)
Many, surely, with the broken harvest and the ended wars. (PWW, p.118)
These two quotations suggest the idle state of the militia; it was considered as a resented alien
force, definitely not friends of the peasantry and doing nothing but annoying or threatening
people. The second quotation in particular draws attention to the historical fact that bad
harvests often led to rural unrest, especially when this was to be associated with unemployed
soldiers returning from a war, who were a potential source of crime. (The first Vagrancy Act
of the 1820’s was passed to stop the increase of begging, vagrancy and petty crime due to
unemployed soldiers.)36
A whole other range of non-standard words and allusions refer to the legal and illegal
commerce of alcohol in Ireland at the time. Especially in the Playboy, there are many
occurrences of words such as poteen, which means “illicit whiskey”, or to the shebeen of
Pegeen’s father, which can either mean a “low wayside public house”, or more commonly an
“unlicensed public house”. (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))
If you’d come in better hours, you’d have seen ‘Licensed for the Sale of Beer and Spirits, to be Consumed on
the Premises’, written in white letters above the door, and what would the polis want spying on me, and
not a decent house within four miles, the way every living Christian is a bona fide, saving one window
alone? (PWW, p.119)
A bona fide is a “person living at a distance of more than three miles and therefore entitled under
(obsolete) licensing laws to obtain drink as a traveller.” (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))
Likewise, Synge uses the word pot-boy in the Playboy, which has also to do with the
commerce of alcohol in Ireland, for it is “a boy or man employed to serve liquor, clean up and help out
in the pub.” (Synge, J.M.(1999; 169))
36
The « ended war » Michael is talking about is probably the Boer war, which is on the contrary a hint at Irish
resistance against the coloniser. (It is mentioned more clearly later on during the play: “fighting bloody wars for
Kruger and the freedom of the Boers”). The Boers were Dutch colonists in South Africa. The Boer War (1899-1902)
was the war of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State against Great Britain. A number of Irish
nationalists went to fight for the Boers; it was seen as fighting for the rights of small nations against British
imperialism.
70
Alcohol, as part of daily life of the peasantry, could also included in proverbs and
sayings, and it would be a pity not to mention Old Mahon’s words about his son, to conclude
on this lexical field:
And he a poor fellow would get drunk at the smell of a pint. (PWW, p.144)
One last part of lexicon I would like to talk about in this section is that related to
diseases. Indeed, Synge’s plays are set in early twentieth century Ireland, where many people
were still very aware of the disastrous Famine Years during the 1840s. At that period, around
a million people died of hunger and diseases related to it, and another million decided to
emigrate.37Thus it is more than understandable that the lives of most Irish people, and
especially Irish peasants, were still haunted by the spectres of death and diseases and that they
had become part of their daily vocabulary.
In the Playboy, Bliss records words such as cholera morbus, meaning “infectious cholera”, or
the expression old hen, used to describe “influenza”. This is a literal translation of the Irish
expression an tsean-chearc.
The words famished and perished also take up very particular meanings in the English of the
West of Ireland, for they both signify that someone died of cold. Famished comes from the
Irish préachta, which can mean both “famished” or “dying of cold”, and this use of perished
seems to be common to many dialects of English.
Thus we can definitely say that part of the lexicon Synge uses in his plays helps him to
build an actual historical background, which is realistic and clearly Irish.
c) Traditions and sayings
There are also several non-standard words in Synge’s plays which are very informative as to
the way of life and traditions of the people of Ireland, if not directly linked with history itself.
First, his characters have a very developed lexical field when it comes to talk about
nature and working in the fields. It is not very surprising that one of the plays in which most
of these words are to be found is Deirdre of the Sorrows, where most characters, and
especially the heroin herself, have a very close relation to nature. (“She has the birds to school her,
and the pools of the rivers where she goes bathing in the sun.”, p.179)
Conchubor and his lot will be coming quickly with a torch of bog-deal for her marriage, throwing a
light on her three comrades. (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p.214)
37
See Chapter 1, I)2) for the link between this period and the linguistic shift in Ireland.
71
Here bog-deal means “the wood found buried in a bog”, and bog means “moor”, or “heath”.
The latter is to be found in most of the plays. (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))
… putting a curse on the sun that gave them beauty, and on the madder and the stonecrop put red
on their cloaks. (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p.211)
Madder is a herbaceous climbing plant whose root is used for dying clothes, and stonecrop is
a herb that grows on walls and rocks, which is used similarly. (Synge, J.M.(1999; 220))
Bliss records several similar words used to describe plants, such as blackthorn or
carrageen. Blackthorn is “the stick made from the blackthorn bush” (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))
We can also note that walking sticks were at the time sign of gentility. Carrageen is a “kind
of edible moss, Chondrus crispus”; this name comes from a village four miles west of
Waterford.
One last most interesting characteristic of HE lexicon is the way speakers refer to
cardinal points to talk about basic directions. Let’s see how Christie uses the points of the
compass to describe the “murder” of his father:
He gave a drive with the scythe, and I gave a leap to the east. Then I turned around with my back to the
north, and I hit a blow on the edge of his skull, laid him stretched out, and he split to the knob of his gullet.
(PWW, p.135)
The directions are always described as if one were facing the east, which means that east is
“front”, west is “back”, north means “left” and south means “right”.
This shows how important the earth and the sun (with its link to the east in particular) still
were for Irish peasants at the time. (Joyce, P. W. (1910))
Religion is another very important part of the everyday lives of Irish peasants. Thus,
there are many words in relation with religious beliefs and traditions in Synge’s plays.
Religious practices are especially alluded to when they are in relation to death, which is
almost always part of the plot of the plays. In the Playboy, for example, Michael and his
friends go to Kate Cassidy’s wake, which is the night watch of relatives and friends over the
body of a dead person, usually implying celebration, drinking and feasting. (Synge,
J.M.(1999; 16))
As for the keen, derived from the Irish caoineach, it means “lament” and is usually associated
with the women at the funeral. In the Aran Islands, Synge goes as far as describing it as the
lament of the whole community, as opposed to the personal mourning of the family for
example:
“The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of a woman over eighty years, but seems to
contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the
72
inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings
who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas. […] There was
an irony in these words of atonement and Catholic belief spoken by voices that were still hoarse with the
cries of pagan desperation.” (AA, p280)
What is mostly interesting in Synge’s description is that he consciously associates two very
different sides of Irish culture – Catholic beliefs and pagan traditions. This is something
which is easily noticeable in an analysis of the lexicon used by his characters in his plays.
We have already seen how many different saints a character can name in a single sentence,
from St Patrick and St Mary to St Brigit and St Michael38. Irish peasants also had many ways
of describing the religions practiced at the time. So in the Playboy for example, the “holy
missioners making sermons” are protestant evangelists, and the “Luthers” are followers of the
Lutherian church.39 Christie for example, talks about “the sunshine of St Martin’s Day”. St
Martin’s feast day is 11 November, Martinmas.
At the same time, many characters still allude to pagan celebrations, usually associated with
the turn of seasons, or more generally to nature40. We have already mentioned Samhain, but
we can also talk about the opposition between the eastern and the western world, two
mythical lands situated in Ireland (one in the East and one in the West!).41
3) “Gibberish”
“In writing ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, as in my other plays, I have used one word or two
only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could
read the newspapers.” (PWW, p.111)
In his preface to the Playboy, Synge asserts he only invented a word or two in the play; he
wants to advocate for the realism of his representation of Hiberno-English, and prevent
people from associating his characters with the stock Irishmen usually presented in most
English-speaking plays.
However, according to Bliss for example, there seem to be much more than just a word or two
which are not likely to have been heard among the “people of Ireland”. At first glance, this
38
See I)3)b)
Joyce also records that Protestants are said to go to “Church”, whereas Catholics go to the “chapel”. He also
underlines that Catholics could be called “back of the hill people”, in reference to the period when under James the 1 st,
catholic lands were given to Scottish Presbyterian planters, and thus catholic people had to get a living in the glens.
(Joyce, P. W. (1910). English as we speak it in Ireland. Reprinted (1988), Dublin : Wolfhound Press)
4040
Joyce mentions the Mayday festival, with the Beltane celebration, in honour of the god Bel. (Joyce, P. W. (1910))
41
In “sailing from Mayo to the Western World”, the meaning seems to be sailing from Mayo to America. (Bliss, Alan
J. (1979))
39
73
sounds like an argument against his claim for realism, as far as strict linguistic realism is
concerned. Indeed, one would not expect Balzac’s characters, for instance, to use words
which have been invented by the author! But so far, it is clear that Synge has mostly been
trying to remain faithful to Gaelic culture, and to the spirit living inside the Irish language,
which is in many ways much more interesting than a realistic rendition of actual peasant
speech. Thus, to some extent, we may be able to consider this habit of creating new words as
a faithful representation of the creation of Hiberno-English itself, and of an exciting side of
Irish folk culture, which is the art of storytelling.
a) Gibberish and the genesis of Hiberno-English
There are two different categories of words found in Synge’s plays which can be
analysed as being “gibberish”. First of all, it is not always easy to determine if the words
which have been literally translated from the Irish are genuinely a part of Hiberno-English
usage (such as hag, ill-lucky or playboy), or if they have been translated by Synge for his own
special purposes. For instance, Bliss seems very doubtful that the expression on the ridge of
the world, which means “in existence and is supposedly a translation from the Irish expression
ar dhruim an domhain, has ever been used in natural speech. (Bliss, Alan J. (1979))
But in his glossary, Bliss also records a number of “words and phrases of which no other
instance seems to be recorded, and which may have been invented by Synge”, such as: bias
crossing roads, curiosity man42, dreepiness, louty43, over, pitchpike, puzzle-the-world44,
scorch, straitened waistcoat, string gabble, swiggle45, tackle, turn of (the) day. (Bliss, Alan J.
(1979; 299))
This idea of using words which have no objective existence in any Irish dialect is not
purely gratuitous on Synge’s part. It seems that it cannot be separated from his search for a
language which may convey an actual sense of place. Indeed, he recalled in his
Autobiography:
“I had a strong feeling for the colour of locality which I expressed in syllables of no meaning, but my elders
checked me for talking gibberish when I was heard practicing them.” (quoted from Kiberd, D. (1993;
200))
Curiosity man means “human prodigy”.
Meaning loutish, or clumsy.
44
Meaning « total enigma », although the New English Dictionary on Historical principles (Oxford 1884-1933)
records somewhat similar combinations such as puzzle-brain or puzzle-wit.
45
This is apparently a portmanteau word combining swing and wriggle.
42
43
74
Of course, the reaction of his family can easily remind us of the reaction of a number of
Dublin critics hailing his language as “gibberish” when he tried to express his feeling for the
colour of peasant locality in dialect.
But more than that, this act of linguistic invention is actually part of his process of creation.
Indeed, many of his notebooks contain several of his inventions, and it may be interesting to
notice that on the first page of one of them, he wrote “quibblers and querry-heads – JMS”; the fact
that he added his initials seems to suggest that he invented the phrase himself. (Kiberd, D.
(1993))
Somehow, Synge’s method to create his representation of HE is to be linked with the
actual process of creation of the language itself.46What happened in the “hedge-schools” can
perhaps help us understand why Synge’s characters have a tendency to use unrealistic words
in their everyday speech.
Joyce gives a very lively description of what a hedge-school was:
“At the end of the seventeenth century, among many other penal enactments, a law was passed that
Catholics were not to be educated”. Thus, for the people who did not accept this deprivation of the
means of education, “schools were kept secretly, though at great risk, in remote places – up in the
mountain glens or in the middle of bogs. […] and from the common plan of erecting these in the shelter of
hedges, walls, and groves, the schools came to be known as “Hedge Schools”.”
After the repeal of the penal laws, schools could be held freely among the Catholic
community, and they were usually held by a private schoolteacher who was living on the fees
paid by his pupils, but some of them still retained the name of hedge-school. (Joyce, P. W.
(1910; 149-150))
But, as we have seen in the first chapter, there remained an important linguistic difficulty. If
these children were to survive, they had to speak English, however little knowledge their
teacher had of it at first. Thus the teachers, usually being rather familiar with Latin, would try
to avoid Anglo-Saxon words, for they were not quite sure of their connotations. Likewise,
they would use very few Norman-French words, and try to stick to the Latin ones as often as
possible. This is why unnecessary Latinisms such as “potentate” or “retribution”, which
actually almost sound like “gibberish”47, were common place in all types of rural HibernoEnglish. Furthermore, the teachers, in absence of any formal diploma, had a tendency to
overuse polysyllabic words in order to impress the parents of their pupils and to advertise
46
See Chapter 1 II)2)a)
Bourgeois calls them « jaw-breakers », accusing Synge of inaccuracy in his representation of HE. (Bliss, Alan
J. (1971))
47
75
their mastery – at least relative mastery – of the English language. So even if Synge uses a
few Latin words which were not in use at the time, he nonetheless acknowledges a historical
fact which is part of the process of creation of Hiberno-English, as one can see in this rhyme
quoted by Kiberd:
While words of learned length and rumbling sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed and still their wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.
b) Nonsense and lying
Nonsense can even be said to be genuinely part of Irish oral culture, and especially of
the tradition of storytelling. Indeed, it seems that most of the stories would have a nonsensical
ending, whatever their subjects. In the Aran Islands, Synge gives an account of it. Describing
the storyteller, he writes:
“He is so blind that I can gaze at him without discourtesy, and after a while the expression on his face
made me forget to listen, and I lay dreamily in the sunshine letting the antique formulae of the story blend
with the suggestions from the prehistoric masonry I lay on. The glow of childish transport that came over
him when he reached the nonsense ending – so common in these tales – recalled me to myself, and I listened
attentively while he gabbled with delightful haste: ‘They found the path and I found the puddle. They were
drowned and I was found. If it’s all one to me to-night, it wasn’t all one to them the next night. Yet, if it
wasn’t itself, not a thing did they lose but an old black tooth’ – or some such gibberish.” (AA, p.318)
Here obviously, the words themselves make perfect sense, but it is their association which
sounds completely nonsensical. However, there are many similarities between this extract and
Synge’s “gibberish”. First, this word appears in the account he gives of the words of the
storyteller, and it is associated with “childish transport”; we have seen that Synge’s interest in
“gibberish” dates back from his childhood as well. Furthermore, it would have been quite
hard for Synge to insert such sentences in one of his plays; so what he did is that he
transferred the concept of nonsense, which is inherent to Irish culture, into his representation
of Hiberno-English. Thus one could go as far as saying that the words he especially invented
for his characters are symbolic of this traditional inclusion of nonsense in the art of
storytelling.
This is all the more true as his inventions can sound like lies, as far as the actual lexicon of
Hiberno-English is concerned. The fact that his characters use these words may be considered
76
as an attempt at making his audience believe that the “gibberish” genuinely exists in the
tongues of the peasants of the West of Ireland. How could we find a better definition of oral
storytelling than to describe it as the art of lying? Synge himself makes this association about
Old Pat Dirane in the Aran Islands:
“I am leaving in two days, and old Pat Dirane has bidden me good-bye. […] They say on the island that he
can tell as many lies as four men: perhaps the stories he has learned have strengthened his imagination.”
(AA, p.303)
Likewise, lying is how Christie manages to become a hero in the small Mayo village where he
seeks shelter. All the villagers, even Pegeen, are more bedazzled by the “gallous story” of the
fake murder of old Mahon, than by the “dirty deed” accomplished by Christie in the last act,
when he tries to make his lie come true. He tells it himself to the Mayo people before leaving:
“… you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie” (PWW, p.162)
And it is also by telling stories – which will surely include many lies and exaggerations – that
Christie and his father decide to take their revenge on the villagers:
“…my son and myself will be going our own way, and we’ll have great times from this out telling stories of
the villainy of Mayo, and the fools is here.” (PWW, p.166)
So in conclusion, Synge’s linguistic creativity is in no ways to be discarded as
inaccurate, for it stands as a symbol for an essential part of Irish oral culture: storytelling.
III) A Gaelic tradition endlessly open
This was indeed a great source of inspiration for Synge in his plays; we can see for
example the importance he gives to the stories he was told in the Aran Islands, among which
lies the anecdote which triggered out the plot of the Playboy of the Western World, as well as
the story at the origin of the Shadow of the Glen. What is mostly interesting is that Synge did
not only revere those tales, he also aimed at giving them a new status by reviving them.
Indeed, storytelling is first and foremost part of oral culture, and what Synge managed to do,
thanks to his relying on Hiberno-English, is to give it an actual literary status, without
discarding the oral spirit of its origins. Once again, he tried to play with the antagonism
between two cultures, the ‘literary’ and ‘folk’ cultures of Irish people. He managed to present
oral storytelling heard on the Aran Islands to a sophisticated Dublin theatre. And by doing
this, he also achieved one of the goals announced in the Preface to the Playboy, that is to
transform the Ibsenite drama of ideas as much as he transformed the oral materials on which
he worked. As Kiberd, one could go as far as saying that to a certain extent, the Playboy is “a
77
problem play in a folk medium. […] In rejecting the temptation to imitate folk forms and in pursuing a
more difficult art which sought to wed folk techniques with modern forms of literature, Synge was at one
with the most progressive contemporary writers in the Irish language.” (Kiberd, D. (1993; 162))
1) Re-narrating the sagas
a) Sagas and folklore
First of all, let’s have a look at some of the folk traditions and ancient saga stories with
which Synge has infused most of his plays.
For example, The Shadow of the Glen can be interpreted as a wake, which seems to be an
essential element of the representation of death for Synge. Although it turns out to be an
ironic version of it, there are many traditional rules to be found during the play, from the
setting of the corpse on a “bed in the kitchen” with sheets hung over it, to the mention of the
fact that at no time during the wake should the corpse be left alone, or the idea of playing
games of courtship. And maybe it is because the play turns out to be a mock-wake (Dan is in
fact not dead, Nora leaves her husband for a tramp, and both had spent the night praising the
virtues of Nora’s former lover, instead of her husband’s) that one can say that Synge actually
manages to transmute folk beliefs into modern dramatic art.
Likewise, Riders to the Sea is filled with premonitions of catastrophe, so much as to make its
tragic ending sound inevitable from an early point in the play. For example, it was considered
dangerous for a person not to return a blessing; people on the Aran Islands even thought that
compliments to another person were harmful if they were not rounded off by the words “God
bless you”. Thus, it is more understandable why Cathleen is so upset with her mother Maurya
when she fails to return Bartley’s blessing as he leaves the house:
“Why wouldn’t you give him your blessing and he looking round in the door? Isn’t it sorrow enough is on
everyone in this house without your sending him out with an unlucky word behind him and a hard word in
his ear?” (Riders to the sea, p.24)
We can see that the idiom of the characters seems to be part of the belief expressed by
Cathleen, as if Synge wanted to underline the origin of this belief without sounding
patronising or folksy: there are two features which have already been analysed – the use of
“and” to introduce a subordinate clause48, and the HE focusing device using “it is” at the
48
See I)3)a)
78
beginning of the sentence to highlight one of its elements49. Cathleen also uses the preposition
“on” in a very characteristic way; in HE, an action done “to someone’s disadvantage” is said
to be done “on him”. This structure is also utilized to place curses “on” people. (Sullivan,
J.P.(1976))50
The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows51 are even more interesting as
far as storytelling and folk beliefs are concerned, for they both manage to combine the stories
of the ancient Irish sagas with the idea of folk traditions. Indeed, in these two plays, Synge
revives both the art of storytelling and the technique of narrating a myth, partly thanks to his
use of language and HE.
In the Playboy for instance, the art of storytelling is of course revived in the character of
Christie Mahon, the “playboy” turned into a “mighty man by the power of a lie”. In the way
he uses language, we can sense his skills as a storyteller growing as the play progresses.
As a genuine storyteller would, he manages to transform the raw material of the opening
scene into a tale which takes heroic proportions at the beginning of Act 2 (Price, A. (1961)):
Don’t strike me. I killed my father, Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that. (p.121)
 I hit a blow on the ridge of his skull, laid him stretched out, and he split to the knob of his gullet.
(p.135)52
He becomes a hero by creating a legend for himself, through the power of his own words.
But by playing with Christie’s image, Synge also manages to recreate the ancient
technique of narrating a myth. Indeed, The Playboy’s atmosphere is mostly that of mock
heroism, and Christie can easily appear as a distorted image of the Gaelic hero Cuchulain.
Thus, Synge himself could pass for the satirist Bicriu, who is believed to be at the origin of
the story of the Ulster cycle, for it was he who played with his characters, making fun if them
whenever he wanted and consciously stirring them in and out of trouble. (Kiberd, D. (1993))
The fact that he uses Hiberno-English to develop this distorted image of a heroic myth can be
seen as an illustration of the mock heroism in action, for Synge was playing with the down-toearth connotations of the dialect, compared to the heroic aura of the Irish language in regards
to the narration of sagas, but it is also a hint at the definition of storytelling, which could not
exist but among the people and their language. Thus, to give an artistic representation of Irish
folk traditions, the most appropriate language was that of Irish people – Hiberno-English.
49
See I)2)a)
This structure is a direct translation from an Irish structure, deriving from the fact that there is no verb
equivalent to « to have » in Irish. (Sullivan, J.P (1976))
51
In both plays, Synge concentrates on an episode of the Ulster cycle: the life of Cuchulain for the Playboy, and
the Exile and death of the sons of Usna for Deirdre. (Gantz, J. (1981))
52
See I)3)b) for a complete analysis of this sentence.
50
79
b) Mirror images
In terms of representation of sagas and folks beliefs, one could say that The Playboy of
the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows are mirror images of one another, and
underline two different and original ways of illustrating an ancient myth.
Indeed, as we have just seen it, the Playboy presents us commoners echoing a reversed
mythical situation. On the contrary, in Deirdre, we are presented with a genuine version of the
myth, but the kings and queens of the Ulster Cycle are actually living like commoners, and
having a very close relation to nature.
In both plays, Synge chose to have his characters speak in Hiberno-English. This has been
seen as a major flaw of his plays, by critics such as Bourgeois, for instance:
“All his characters, despite geographical differences, talk alike” (Quoted from Bliss, Alan J. (1971))
To this quotation one could easily add “despite of historical and social differences”, as far as
the Playboy and Deirdre are concerned. However, Bliss suggests that Synge’s dialect is not as
uniform as Bourgeois claims it. For him it is mostly a matter of chronological progression.
(Bliss, Alan J. (1971)) This is indeed true insofar as a feature such as the omission of the
relative pronoun53 is concerned, for example. It seems to have become a real linguistic
obsession for Synge, and Taniguchi records almost no relative pronouns in Deirdre, whereas
one could find some of them in his earlier plays: “Synge sparingly uses the relative pronouns, and in
Deirdre of the Sorrows, for instance, no relatives are used except in a few cases.”(Taniguchi, J. (1972))
Here are a few examples of this HE feature:
What we all need is a place is safe and priceless in your own like. (Deirdre, p.182)
And he a man would be jealous of a hawk would fly between her and the rising sun. (D, p.178)
My two brothers, I am going with Naisi in Alban and the north to face the troubles are foretold. (D, p.191)
Having said that, Synge also seems to nuance his use of Hiberno-English according to the
story he chose to stage, and the Playboy and Deirdre are mirror images of the dialect as well.
The same syntactical features are used for both plays, but their effects sound much more
subdued in Deirdre, because they are used with a less extravagant frequency. Likewise, we
can have a look at what Bliss calls “unique words”, and see how they are used in the idiom of
the characters of these two plays. (Bliss, Alan J. (1971))
53
Even when it is the subject of a relative clause.
80
A “unique word” is a word of which there is only one occurrence in Synge’s works. They
constitute a little more than two-thirds of the total 282 words recorded in Bliss’s “Glossary”.
There are 24 occurrences in Deirdre, whereas Bliss recorded 102 unique words in the
Playboy. Considering the average number of occurrences per ten pages, we get 5.5 in Deirdre,
and 17 occurrences per ten pages in the Playboy, that is three times as many.
Thus, it becomes more obvious now that Synge tried to adapt his use of Hiberno-English to
the subject he was dealing with. He managed to demonstrate quite skilfully how the same
dialect could represent heroism and tragedy, as well as mock-heroism and comedy, depending
on the emphasis put on its characteristic features, and that storytelling and mythical narration
could find an adequate modern literary representation thanks to the language of the folk.
2) Myth in idiom
Let’s have a look then at how Synge manages to relate Hiberno-English to the myths
and beliefs of Ireland, and how this association successfully works.
a) The tales of the folk
Synge had grasped the close relationship between the heroic world of the ancient
legends and the world of Irish peasants among who these stories were still alive. And his use
of Hiberno-English to stage the myths of Cuchulain and Deirdre aims at reproducing the way
their stories are still told in Ireland. This is his subtle way to suggest that peasants should be
considered as the guardians Irish culture, for they preserve it and make it evolve at the same
time.
His Deirdre, for example, is not an ethereal image of purity and poetry, as many versions of
the story written around the same period turned out to be. Here is an extract of Yeats’s
version, followed by an extract of Synge’s Deirdre:
Do you remember that first night in the woods
We lay all night on leaves, and looking up,
When the first grey of the dawn awoke the birds,
Saw leaves above us? You thought that I still slept,
And bending down to kiss me on the eyes,
Found they were open. Bend and kiss me now,
For it may be the last before our death. ( “Deirdre”, in Yeats, W.B. (1974; 68))
81
It’s well you know it’s this night I’m dreading seven years, and I fine nights watching the heifers walking
to the haggard with long shadows on the grass; [with emotion] or the time I’ve been stretched in the
sunshine, when I’ve heard Ainnle and Ardan stepping lightly, and they saying: ‘Was there ever the like of
Deirdre for a happy and sleepy queen?’ (Deirdre of the Sorrows, in Synge, J.M.(1999;193))
We can notice that whereas Synge’s characters speak in Hiberno-English, Yeats’s Deirdre
speaks in Standard English verse, which gives her a certain unreal quality. As Kiberd says, it
sounds like the two lovers are “posing for posterity” (Kiberd, D. (1993)) There is a certain
sense of frozen insensitivity in the way Deirdre asks Naisi to “bend and kiss her”, thus
wishing to re-enact their first night
together.
On the contrary, Synge’s Deirdre has abandoned her mythological verse for a folk-like idiom,
and is thus enabled to be poetical without sounding frozen and stilted (‘Was there ever the
like of Deidre for a happy and sleepy queen”). Moreover, her vocabulary is more colourful,
especially as far as natural elements are concerned (“heifers, haggards, sunshine and shadows
on the grass”, vs “ woods, leaves, birds and the first grey of dawn”).
It sounds like Synge had a much more human conception of mythical representation than
most of his contemporaries. This is what he writes about his play:
“I am trying a three-act prose Deirdre to change my hand. I am not sure yet whether I shall be able to make
a satisfactory play out of it. These saga people, when one comes to deal with them, seem very remote; one
does not know what they thought or what they are or where they went to sleep, so one is apt to fall into
rhetoric.” (quoted from Kiberd, D. (1993; 191))
To avoid this falling into rhetoric54, he decided to rely on the folk spirit and on the original
version of the myth, and not on versions of versions translated into English and deprived of
their coarse atmosphere.
So the robust, personal idiom of his characters is in keeping with the mortal conditions to
which they are assigned, and this representation of the heroes of the Ulster cycle is very
faithful to the folk rendering of the legends. “Conchubor and the other leaders of the Ulster Cycle
were euhemerised gods who had been reduced by the storytellers to the status of mortals.” (Kiberd, D.
(1993))
The tone of the play is neither elegiac nor filled with mysticism. On the contrary, the plot is
more centred on the idea of a crisis in human relations, and just as Synge seemed eager to
concentrate on the daily preoccupations of his characters (“what they thought or what they are
54
As an author such as Leahy did in his version of the myth.
82
or where they went to sleep”), he also decided to suppress all the supernatural interventions in
the myth. Indeed, in the original literary version, unlike the versions spread by folk
storytellers, the characters’ actions were motivated by a superior and irrational spirit called
geis in Irish. Synge’s lovers have free will, and it is their own choice to decide to go back to
Ireland and face Conchubor. Thus they become truly tragic and play a genuine part in their
own destruction. They are not tricked or forced to return, they deliberately choose to die
rather than see their youthful love wither:
There are as many ways to wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is no way to keep
life, or love with it, a short space only […] It’s for that we’re setting out for Emain Macha when the tide
turns on the sand. (Deirdre of the Sorrows, p. 200)
This suppression of a traditional feature of the myth was deliberate on Synge’s part, for he
aimed at presenting a myth more human and true to the spirit it had acquired in the spirit of
Irish people. However, thanks to his use of language, he also manages to return to the letter of
the Book of Leinster, where the first version of Deirdre is to be found in Irish.
b) A return to traditions
In the 12th century Book of Leinster, the story of Deirdre and Naisi is listed among
thirteen aitheda55. Here the mode of narration is intensely realistic, sometimes almost
mercenary. Deirdre is described as a “barbarian woman, rude and passionate in her speech and savage
in her actions.” (Kiberd, D. (1993))
As for Lavarcham, Deirdre’s nurse, she is said to be a monstrous woman who can fly across
Ireland by means of her strangely twisted legs. The narration ends with the death of the sons
of Usna, and Deirdre lives a humiliating life with Naisi’s enemy, Eoghan MacDurtacht. The
bleak honesty of the story is even emphasized when the heroine eventually flings herself from
Eoghan’s chariot and dashes her brains out on a rock. (Kiberd, D. (1993))
Synge’s plot can seem quite different from the original version, for Deirdre stabs herself and
falls in Naisi’s grave at the end of the play. However, the language his characters use helps
them get closer to their first representation. Indeed, many critics have said that Synge’s use of
Hiberno-English in his Deirdre was incoherent for such an idiom was not fitting for royal
characters. But they must have forgotten that the use of idiom was actually part of the Book of
Leinster narration. Moreover, the roughness of speech may be a way to make up for the rather
tame ending, when compared to the ancient version:
55
elopements
83
It is not a small thing to be rid of grey hairs, and the loosening of teeth. It was the choice of lives we had in
the clear woods, and in the grave we’re safe, surely…
It is most likely that Yeats’s Deirdre would have been offended to have to talk so rudely about
grey hairs and loose teeth…
But Synge’s dialect, shared by commoners and noble figures, also echoes the old Gaelic
hierarchy, where kings and queens were not so distant from their subjects, and they almost
shared their lives and speeches. (Kiberd, D. (1993))
So even if the story itself has evolved over its eight centuries of written existence, Synge has
managed, thanks to his use of Hiberno-English, to present ancient Irish myths with their
original spirit and atmosphere.
c) Towards universality
Both the idiom and the myths gain something in this interaction. Mythical heroes
become more human and credible, and they are no longer stock figures, but actual human
beings thrown in a tragic situation. This is skilfully expressed because these kings and queens
in the most desperate situations still use the idiom of Irish people, Hiberno-English. So, in a
way, isn’t Synge also proving that even a local variety of English is capable to express the
universality of a myth? Isn’t it what Deirdre herself suggests in these words?
It was my words without pity gave Naisi a death will have no match until the end of life and time.
(Deirdre of the Sorrows, p.211-2)
So Synge is definitely infusing his English speech with Irish spirit, from their
conception of time to their ancient beliefs and traditions. His representation of HibernoEnglish can indeed be linked to “romantic nationalism” insofar as he builds it on his
knowledge of Irish past and traditions.
Nonetheless, many elements of his characters’ speech suggest that he does much more than
just reviving. He also seems to be inventing a new life for this language, along with a new
image for Irish identity, thanks to his skill in exploiting the clash between English and Irish
cultures. He had far more innovative and modern ideas than most of his contemporaries, and
this is certainly why his representation of Ireland holds a very special place at the beginning
of the twentieth century, and why his plays triggered out so many controversies.
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Chapter 3
Free speech
A dramatist once wrote a play
About an Irish peasant,
We heard some of the audience say
“The motive is unpleasant.”
Our own opinion, we admit,
Is rather – well – uncertain,
Because we couldn’t hear one bit
From rise to fall of curtain.
(Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 185)).
This is an extract from a poem which was published in the Arrow, a theatre journal,
shortly after the first staging of the Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre in
Dublin, in January 1907. It refers to the historical riots which took place in the theatre during
the eight representations of Synge’s most famous play. Indeed, most people in the audience
sounded literally outraged by what they saw and heard, and were shouting so loud that it was
hardly possible to understand a single word of what the actors were saying.
Several criticisms about the Playboy, in respect to plot, characterisation, and also about
language tend to underline the fact that Synge was not fully considered as belonging to the
revivalist movement, although we have seen that his use of language definitely has many
characteristics of romantic nationalism. W.B. Yeats seems to sense the situation of his friend,
as he writes in a letter to John Quinn on 15 February 1905:
“He will start next time with many enemies but with many admirers. It will be a fight like that over the
first realistic plays of Ibsen.” (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 173))
Synge’s representation of Hiberno-English in the Playboy but also in the rest of his plays was
not supported by many, and Irish people resented it as an insult towards themselves and their
identity. It was mainly taxed of obscenity, blasphemy and misrepresentation of Irish speech by
audiences as well as by newspapers and theatre journals.
85
Here is for example an extract from a review of the play by The Freeman’s Journal1:
“A strong protest must, however, be entered against this unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant
men and, worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood. The blood boils with indignation as one recalls the
incidents, expressions, ideas of this squalid, offensive production, incongruously styled a comedy in three
acts.” (quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 177-178))
Here all the vigour of the protests against Synge’s play can easily be sensed, with expressions
such as “the blood boils with indignation”, and “this unmitigated, protracted libel”. The
reviewer underlines the idea of misrepresentation of Irish peasantry, all the more so as it is
linked with the obscene and offensive quality of the play.
Of course, as we will see later on, these attacks triggered out a virulent reaction on the part
of Synge and his supporters as well, and the whole event lead to what could be described as a
cultural and political controversy about Ireland, theatre, and freedom of speech and
expression.
It is quite paradoxical that his plays should have experienced such a bad reception by
the Irish public if we look back at what the author wrote in the preface to the Playboy for
example, where he was describing his choice of plot and use of language as realistic and
poetic at the same time. Thus it will be more than interesting to analyse Synge’s
representation of speech in the light of the criticisms it triggered out at the time his plays
were staged for the first time. First of all because understanding criticisms is probably one of
the best ways to prove them wrong, but also because it will help us define more clearly
Synge’s position in the national and cultural debate, for it is now obvious that he was neither
a supporter of the Empire, nor a true revivalist.
As far as his use and representation of language is concerned, it is rather likely that there is
already something post-colonial about Synge’s conception of culture and nationalism, and
that he was trying to convey these revolutionary ideas as he designed his literary
representation of Hiberno-English.
« The Freeman’s Journal supported Parliamentary nationalism, with deference to the hierarchy. » (Kain, R. M.
(1979; 174))
1
86
I) Misrepresentation?
One of the main critics which were made to Synge regarding his use and representation
of language is that he is not faithful to real peasant speech, and that the language of his
characters is completely unrealistic.
In a satire published in the Saturday Evening Herald at the time of the first staging of the
Playboy of the Western World, which presented a dialogue between “Rafferty” and “Casey”,
Rafferty declares:
“Misther Yates shows us as we used to be like, an’ Misther Synge shows us as we are not.”
(Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 180))
However restrictive it may be, the distinction which is made between Yeats and Synge is
rather interesting, for it suggests that Yeats was much more of a revivalist in the strict sense
of the term – that is he was concentrating on representing ancient myths and believed in a
transfiguration of Ireland into a new Celtic haven – whereas Synge is presented as a liar, a
charlatan as far as a true representation of Irish peasantry is concerned. Nonetheless, both
playwrights seem to be discarded as being too remote from Irish people to be able to
understand them properly. (“Misther Yates and Misther Synge”)
It is true that the idiom of Synge’s characters definitely has a very Rabelaisian quality, which
astonished Irish audiences, who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, could still vividly
remember the English representation of the Stage Irishman. It was all the more true that this
epiphany of language was in clear contrast with the extreme realism of the settings. Let’s
have a look at the stage indications in the first act of the Playboy:
“Country public house or shebeen, very rough and untidy. There is a sort of counter on the right with
shelves, holding many bottles and jugs, just seen above it. Empty barrels stand near the counter. At back, a
little to left of counter, there is a door into the open air, then, more to the left, there is a settle with shelves
above it, with more jugs, and a table beneath a window. At the left there is a large open fire-place, with
turf fire, and a small door into inner room. Pegeen, a wild-looking but fine girl, of about twenty, is writing
at a table. She is dressed in the usual peasant dress.”
(The Playboy of the Western World, in Synge, J.M.(1999; 113))
Synge gave all possible indications to make sure the setting would actually look like a proper
shebeen (he even gives the Irish name), from the position of jugs and barrels to the detail of
the “turf fire”, which was used by most families in the West of Ireland. Likewise, it is written
that Pegeen should be dressed as a traditional Irish peasant girl.
87
Thus, according to this realistic setting, it is understandable that audiences should have
expected a regular traditional peasant drama, like those which had already been staged by
the Abbey at the time. Instead, they were presented with characters speaking a surprisingly
colourful and imaginative language, so that most of the people in the audience, and later on
many readers of the Playboy in particular, considered Synge’s representation of HibernoEnglish unfaithful to Irish reality.
Indeed, many critics, up to a very recent period, were used to discard Synge’s works, and
especially his use of language as being totally unrealistic. For instance, St John Ervine
accused Synge of being “a faker of peasant speech”, describing his language as “contrived literary
stuff, entirely unrepresentative of peasant speech.” (Quoted from Kiberd, D. (1993)) Some people
went as far as thinking there was something almost surreal about Synge’s representation of
Hiberno-English. Frank Hugh O’Donnell wrote that “it is very clever and often powerful but it is
not Irish. It belongs to Syngeland.” (Quoted from Strand, G. (1996))
Even Taniguchi, in his book about the artistic representation of Hiberno-English, devotes a
whole part to the language of Synge without really describing it as worthy of analysis, and
certainly not as an idiom to be praised for its linguistic value as far as mere realism is
concerned. Indeed, he does not consider it as a true testimony of Hiberno-English, for he calls
it “Syngese dialect”, meaning that it is the result of a pure invention by the author.
(Taniguchi, J. (1972).)
Thus in this section, we will try to analyse the idiom in the light of the contradiction
between these criticisms and the linguistic and literary project Synge has defined in his
introduction to the Playboy of the Western World; how realistic is his idiom, and what can
exactly be defined as realistic in terms of literary representation of a dialect?
1) Synge and Lady Gregory
a) Features and occurrences
First of all, it is very hard to give an informed account of the reality of Synge’s dialect.
Indeed, to do this properly, we would need to compare the idiom of the characters in Synge’s
plays with actual data dating back from the same period. But it is quite obvious that no tape
recordings were made in the 1900s, and even written data dating back from this period is quite
difficult to find. Indeed, sociolinguistics was not at all a widespread discipline, and one of the
88
only testimonies we have is Joyce’s book2. (Joyce, P. W. (1910)) However, we have already
seen that the latter is definitely not as reliable as a contemporary scientifically designed
sociolinguistics book on Hiberno-English would be. Indeed, there are no figures concerning
the frequency of occurrence of the features he is listing, and no proper analysis concerning the
features themselves. So it would be quite experimental and rather misleading to rely on
Joyce’s description as far as realism is concerned3.
As the most scientific method is not available to analyse the realism of Synge’s representation
of Hiberno-English, one of the alternative would be to compare his way of representing the
dialect with the technique used by another playwright of the same period who worked on the
same idiom as Synge – that is Lady Gregory4. By comparing their own particular methods of
dealing with the representation of language in a play, we may be able to reach a conclusion as
to the degree of realism in the language of Synge’s characters.
There are two main criteria to determine the realism of a speech. First of all, the
relevance of the features used by the author is very important, and we have already analysed
some of them5as far as Synge is concerned. A speech can be said to be realistic if it is made of
actual linguistic features, which have to be properly used with regards to syntax and context.
But it is also important for these features to be used with a rather reasonable frequency, which
remains in keeping with the frequency of the speech of an actual speaker. However, we have
just said that it would be really hard to decide on the average frequency of occurrence of a
certain feature at Synge’s time, because of the lack of data. So as far as Synge and Lady
Gregory are concerned, it would be interesting to concentrate on a few linguistic features and
see how each makes use of them.
One well-known Hiberno-English syntactic feature which we have not analysed yet is
the non-standard use of relative pronouns. Unlike in Standard English, there is a general
avoidance of wh_ forms. Filpulla (Filpulla (1999)) records no occurrence of “whom” in his
2
3
See Chapter 2, II)1)a)
See Filpulla’s data for a few linguistic features
« Lady Gregory (1852-1932) was one of the most important writers of the period when Irish writing started
achieving international prominence and one of the most important presences on the cultural scene in the period when
cultural nationalism flourished. […] She has figured in recent Irish cultural debate only as a playwright and Abbey
Theatre director, although her folklore collections, journals and translations constitute equally important parts of her
life’s work.” (McDiarmuid L. and Waters, M. (1995; 11-12)) She wrote some forty plays including Spreading the
4
news, the Rising of the Moon and the Gaol Gate. She made folklore material central to her dramatic work, but
her writings also show an effort to dramatize Irish history. One of her most famous literary collaborations is the
nationalistic play Kathleen Na Houlihan, which she wrote with W.B.Yeats; her co-authorship was so obvious,
although not acknowledged by Yeats, that the editors of her Selected Writings decided to include it in the
volume.
5
See Chapter 2
89
corpus; “who” is said to be quasi non-existent in rural dialects and “which” is slightly more
common, although it is mainly used in urban dialects. “That” is by far the most often
occurring relativisation device, but on the whole, the use of relative pronouns in general is
rather rare. The most frequent form of relativisation in Hiberno-English is in fact the use of
what Filpulla calls “contact clause” – that is the omission of the relative word. (Filpulla
(1999)).
In the light of these facts, we can compare two of Lady Gregory’s plays (Kathleen Na
Houlihan6 and Spreading the News) with the Playboy of the Western World and see how each
playwright uses relative pronouns.7
Use of “contact
Use of
Use of “who” and
clause”
“that”
“which”
Kathleen Na Houlihan
7.5 %
92.5 %
0%
Spreading the News
12.5 %
87.5 %
0%
The Playboy of the Western
92 %
5.5 %
2.5 %
World
Both playwrights seem to have decided to include this non-standard feature in their
representation of Hiberno-English, but each put the emphasis on a different occurrence. For
instance, the figures for Kathleen and The Playboy are almost reversed if we consider the use
of “that” and of a “contact clause”. Indeed, the dialect of Lady Gregory’s characters sounds
much tamer insofar as she concentrates on the use of “that” instead of “who” or “whom”, but
she does not go as far as Synge, who definitely decides to suppress relative pronouns as often
as he can. This can mean that he was aiming at a very radical representation of HibernoEnglish, and Bliss (Bliss, A. (1971)) even describes this quasi systematic suppression of
relative pronouns as an obsession. However, Synge still retains a few occurrences of “who”
and “which”, as if he wanted his representation to be as comprehensive as possible; his
6
As it has already been said, Kathleen Na Houlihan is the product of the collaboration between Lady Gregory
and W.B. Yeats. However, Yeats admitted himself that he was not able to write in peasant speech, and so if the
story is said to be taken from a vision he had in a dream, the language itself is to be attributed to Lady Gregory.
Joseph Holloway, who kept a diary of Dublin theatre life, wrote: “The odd thing is that Fay told me Lady
Gregory wrote the whole of it except the part of ‘Cathleen’”. (quoted from Tóibín, C. (2002; 63))
7
I decided to give the results of my counts in percentages, because the plays are of very variable lengths and I
felt that the average number of occurrences per page – which Taniguchi uses for example (Taniguchi (1972)) –
was not clear enough.
90
method is here opposed to that of Gregory, who goes for an average dialect much less violent
in its choice of features and especially of the frequency of occurrence of these features.
Another interesting point is the use of reflexive pronouns and the difference between
bound and unbound pronouns8. Synge and Lady Gregory have a very different way of
representing this non-standard feature, as the numbers given by Taniguchi (Taniguchi (1972;
28) underline it.9
Bound reflexive pronouns Unbound reflexive pronouns
LADY GREGORY
The Wrens
3
2
Hyacinth Halvey
6
0
The Travelling Man
1
2
The Jackdaw
4
0
The Rising of the Moon
0
3
The Gaol Gate
1
1
0
6
The Shadow of the Glen 0
6
SYNGE
Riders to the Sea
Once again, the radicalism of Synge’s representation can be noticed, for there is no record of
a single bound reflexive pronoun in his two plays, whereas Lady Gregory tries to merge the
standard and non-standard uses in her representation. This can of course be one more proof of
her idea of an “average” dialect, but the figures also suggest a certain inconsistency. Indeed,
she does not really seem to be able to decide whether she wants to put the emphasis on the
non-standard feature or not. For instance, in Hyacinth Halvey, there are no unbound pronouns,
whereas in the Rising of the Moon, there are no bound relative pronouns. Likewise, in the
Wrens, there are more bound than unbound pronouns, and it is the contrary in the Travelling
Man. Eventually, the Gaol Gate presents us with an equal number of occurrences for each
feature. Moreover, this practice has been described as unnecessary by Hail and Farewell
(quoted from Taniguchi (1972; 28)): “She writes ‘he, himself’ instead of omitting the parasitical ‘he’
as she might very well have done.” This may be explainable by the fact that Synge had a much
8
For thorough analysis, see Chapter II, I)2)b)
All the dramatic works used in this table consist of from 300 to 500 words, which allows a direct comparison of
the various figures. (Taniguchi (1972))
9
91
more precise knowledge of Hiberno-English and of Irish than Lady Gregory had, but it must
also be because they had different conceptions of the representation of a dialect.
Lady Gregory was basically using was she considered as “Kiltartan dialect”, which was used
by the people who lived where she grew up and lived. Elizabeth Coxhead (Coxhead, E.
(1969)) describes it as a “delicious trot and lilt of its own”. In his biography, Colm Tóibín
(Tóibín, C. (2002; 40) admits that: “She translated it10 into the English of Kiltartan, she said, the area
around Coole, but much of it, in fact, is quite plain and natural, almost neutral in its tone.”
She was probably more realistic than Synge in her representation insofar as she tried to
remain moderate in every respect; the frequency of occurrence of non–standard features is not
surprising high, and she does not try to widen her range of Hiberno-English features as much
as possible. However, this leads to a rather neutral, if not sometimes awkward portrayal of
Hiberno-English.
On the contrary, Synge manages to design a language which is rough and colourful, by
underlining every non-standard feature, often without any regards to the average frequency of
occurrence of this very feature. As W.B. Yeats said, he loved all “that has edge, that is salt in the
mouth, that is rough to the hand, that heightens the emotions by contest, that strings into life the sense of
tragedy”. (Quoted from Price, A. (1961)). He is clearly only relying on the notion of realism as
far as the choice of linguistic features is concerned, but the result reads rather like a drastic
concentration of Hiberno-English than like a simple representation of it. “Synge made a selection
from the idiom of the peasants and created a language authentic and credible and more exact, compact and
beautiful than the actual utterance of anyone.” (Bliss, A. (1971))
So, in terms of realism, we can say that Strong is right to write: “The language of Synge’s plays is
not the language of the peasants, insomuch as no peasant talks consistently as Synge’s characters talk; it is
the language of peasants, in that it contains no word or phrase a peasant did not actually use.” (Quoted
from Bliss, A. (1971)).
In a way, he was as right as his critics as far as realism was concerned, because they did not
have the same definition of the word. He was aiming at the essence of peasant speech,
whereas his critics were looking for an actual transcription of Hiberno-English.
10
The story of Cuchulain
92
b) Representations
Synge’s radicalism as opposed Lady Gregory’s moderation are also quite noticeable in
the very themes of their plays as well as in their goals as writers, so that in a way, the
representation of language is telling as to the whole literary and cultural project of the author.
Of course, at first glance, their plays have many things in common. Their characters are both
peasants living in the West of Ireland, and they speak in dialect. “Rejecting the traditional double
plot structure that had consigned the rustics, or the ‘downstairs’ people, to comic relief, they placed the
historically marginalized figures of Irish country people in the centre of the new drama.” (McDiarmuid
and Waters, (1995; XXX))So one could refer to their plays as peasant dramas, but it would be
without sensing all the differences and the nuances between these two playwrights.
Although they actually take place in rural Ireland, it is not possible to describe Synge’s
plays as mere peasant drama, because of all the irony and the tragedy with which they are
infused. On the contrary, Lady Gregory’s plots are much more straightforward, especially as
far as nationalism and society are concerned. Her comedies are witty and cheerful, and plays
like Kathleen na Houlihan read like an allegorical textbook for nationalists to be.
Let’s compare for instance The Playboy of the Western World and Spreading the News.
In the former, Christie Mahon becomes a hero in a Mayo village because of a voluntary lie –
that he has killed his father with a shovel – and his transformation allows him to get away
from the angry villagers and to remain the “playboy” in the end. So there is an actual
reflection on the power of history and narration, and on the dangers of worship, as well as a
vitriolic representation of the idealised West of Ireland.
Spreading the News is much more traditional in its approach of life in the West, and in its
conception of comedy. The pattern of fictitious murder is to be found here as well, but the
whole story originates in a casual misunderstanding at a fair. As a result, the innocent Barley
Fallon is accused of having murdered a neighbour, and run off to America with his wife.
Contrary to Christie he doesn’t get away in the end, and is taken to prison with the man he is
supposed to have murdered. Basically, in the play, the only existing criticisms are aimed at
the English presence in Ireland, which is for example personified by the character of the
magistrate, and they are often more awkward and obvious than ironic.
The goals of these two writers were also quite different, and totally in keeping with the
way they chose to represent Hiberno-English.
93
Lady Gregory had always been very influenced by folklore, and for Henry Glassie, for
instance, she is “one of the first great folklorists”. (McDiarmid and Waters, (1995; XXV)) Her
point was to give value to the stories, to the minds and imagination of Irish people. But she
did it with this very same moderation11 we were talking about before, for she thought that this
was the best way to give a higher standard to Irish traditions and culture.
In the light of this, we can see that Lady Gregory’s and Synge’s ways of dealing with the
contradictions in Irish culture are very similar to their conceptions of representation of
language. “Synge’s was in truth a carrion vision, but he was always critically aware of its costs: and this
is what distinguishes him ultimately from a writer like Lady Gregory” (Kiberd (1993; XIII)).
What Kiberd means is that Gregory had for example noticed the strange discrepancy between
the poverty of the storytellers and the magnificence of their tales. However, being more
interested in the folklore itself than in the cultural and social implications of her analysis, she
did not push it any further, apparently pleased with the paradox. On the contrary, Synge, who
aimed at representing the entire reality of life, made his best to explore and underline the gap
between the richness of Irish culture and the poverty underlying it (Kiberd (1993)). For
instance, Mary King noticed that most of Synge’s characters are obsessed with the price of
everything and that their personalities are often absorbed by the work and striving necessary
to acquire or produce these items. Indeed, in Riders to the Sea, for example, a drowned man
cannot be identified by his bruised body, but by a dropped stitch in his stocking, which is a
mere object.
But Christie Mahon is the best representation of Synge’s concern for the discrepancies
underlying Irish culture. Indeed, he has often been described as the image of a Gaelic pagan
myth hero emerging from a Christianised, anglicised and impoverished society, whose
language intensifies all through his evolution from a subhuman to the “playboy of the western
world”. In the Playboy, as well as in his other plays, the representation of a heroic language
trying to survive in an impoverished environment can be seen as the metaphor of human
vitality striving under the pressure of institutional forces. (Deane, S. (1971))
Eventually, it becomes clearer now that Synge’s radical conception of realism in language is
echoed in the way he built his plots as well as in his goals as a playwright.
11
Sometimes this moderation even went as far as censorship, as with her interpretation of the story of Cuchulain,
Cuchulain of Muirthemne, of which she removed all signs of rough violence and erotism. For her the book might
be used as a school book, and she was very careful about not shocking the prudish. (Tóibín, C. (2002))
94
2) Pronunciation
a) Synge and Sean O’Casey
In terms of realism and accurateness of representation, one could also wonder why
Synge did not provide any precisions about the phonetics of Hiberno-English. According to
Bliss, the only time Synge used non-standard spellings to denote the pronunciation which was
current in Ireland at the time was in his first attempt at writing in Hiberno-English; it was a
poem he wrote in 1895 called “Ballad of a pauper”.
This never happened in his plays, except for the word “devil”, spelt “divil” throughout all his
plays. Bliss suggests that it is his way of underlining that the fact of using this word was not
considered to be an act of profanity for the peasants of the West.
This might be explained, on a purely pragmatic dimension, by the historical evolution of the
Abbey theatre. Indeed, when it was first created, English acting troupes were hired to perform
in Dublin. But at Synge’s time, the theatre had managed to find Irish troupes; so Synge might
have thought that they did not need any phonetic indications because they were supposed to
be familiar to the accent of the characters. However, Bliss remarks that except for the “ballad
of a pauper”, Synge did not use phonetic representation in his poems either, although he was
using Hiberno-English in his translations of Villon’s poems for example. Thus, the
explanation seems to be somewhere else, perhaps in what he aimed at representing along with
the language itself. Let’s compare his method and motivation with those of another
playwright of the time, Sean O’Casey.
Contrary to Synge, Sean O’Casey12, who wrote his plays in Dublin dialect, decided to
make pronunciation part of his representation of Hiberno-English. He did not give any scenic
indications about it, but used variations of spelling to render the variations in pronunciation.
Here is an extract from one of his early plays, called the Plough and the Stars:
“Fluther
They seem to get on well together, all th’ same.
Mrs Gogan
Ah, they do, an’ they don’t. The pair o’ them used to be like two turtle doves always billin’
an’ cooin’. You couldn’t come into th’ room but you’d feel, instinctive like, that they’d just been afther
kissin’ an’ cuddlin’ each other…. It often made me shiver, for, afther all, there’s kissin’ an’ cuddlin’ in it.
But I’m thinkin’ he’s beginnin’ to take things more quietly; the mysthery of havin’ a woman’s a mysthery
Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) was an Irish dramatist who involved himself in the Irish political struggle both for
independence and the betterment of conditions for the poor. He is mostly famous for his early plays, which were
produced at the Abbey: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and the Plough and the Stars. (Sean
O’Casey (1998))
12
95
no longer…. She dhresses herself to keep him with her, but it’s no use – afther one month or two, th’
wondher of a woman wears off.” (The Plough and the Stars, 154)
In this extract, O’Casey underlines two main phonetic features of Hiberno-English.
First of all, the numerous occurrences of _ing verbal forms and their phonetic transcriptions
suggest that there is a tendency to replace /ŋ/ by a simple /n/ when this phoneme occurs at the
end of a word. This feature has a great influence on the rhythm of the sentence, just as the
occurrence of “an’” instead of “and” and of “th’” instead of “the”. It gives Mrs Gogan’s
speech a bouncy and dynamic quality.
The playwright also represents an important characteristic of Hiberno-English pronunciation
in this passage with words such as “mysthery” or “dhresses”. Indeed, Hiberno-English
speakers have a tendency to aspirate alveolar plosives ( /t/ and /d/ being pronounced most of
the time [th ] and [dh ]).
Thus, to a certain extent, one could say that O’Casey’s representation is more thorough and
more precise than Synge’s, because he included the representation of pronunciation, whereas
Synge did not. But is there a reason why Synge decided not to use this side of language in his
plays?
b) A different sense of time and place
It seems that each playwright had a different idea of the way they wanted to represent
Hiberno-English, and of what they wanted to represent in their plays.
Indeed, O’Casey’s plays are set in Dublin whereas Synge’s characters come from the Irish
countryside. Moreover, Synge’s plays take place at the beginning of the twentieth century but
the atmosphere is still that of a colonised country – he is trying to take a snapshot of a society
which is about to disappear – whereas O’Casey’s Dublin is a city fighting for independence,
from 1915 to 1923, where the gap between the labouring class and the middle-class is easy to
sense. So in a way, Synge is aiming at describing a whole period of time, whereas O’Casey is
concentrating on a particular place at a very precise point in history13. This may be one of the
reasons why their methods of representing language are different.
Indeed, O’Casey’s characters are all Dubliners, so the community they are part of is
much more precise and restricted14than that of Synge’s characters15. Thus it is not surprising
13
The Plough and the Stars, for example, takes place during the Easter Rising in 1916.
Geographically as well as historically.
15
His plays are not set in the same place in Ireland: the Shadow of the Glen takes place in “County Wicklow”,
which is not far south from Dublin, whereas the Playboy of the Western World takes place on a wild coast of
Mayo.
14
96
that the former can use a particular accent to stress the fact that his characters belong to the
same place and community, whereas the latter decides to focus on syntax and vocabulary,
which enable him to present his characters as having a common national identity thanks to
their language, and not a regional identity thanks to their accent; for accent is too changeable
to help building any kind of national identity – a Dublin accent is very different from a
Galway accent, as well as there is a great difference between a London and a Liverpool
accent.
3) Representing and transforming
a) Representation and art
In fact, Synge’s conception of realism is in close relation with the way he wanted to
represent life in general. When reading the Aran Islands, it becomes rather clear that Synge
was more interested in special events in the lives of the islanders, in stories they could tell to
him and reflections they had about language than in everyday life activities on the islands,
such as fishing for example:
“On our way home he gave me the Catholic theory of the fairies” (AA, 260)
“After Mass this morning an old woman was buried” (AA, 279)
“In the fury of her speech I seem to look again into the strangely reticent temperament of the islanders, and
to feel the passionate spirit that expresses itself, at odd moments only, with magnificent words and
gestures.” (AA, 294)
So, in a way, as the Aran Islands read like a distillation of special events in the lives of the
islanders, the speech of Synge’s characters could be analysed as a distillation of special events
of language, especially designed to suit his artistic and cultural purposes throughout the plays.
This is probably why his idiom seems to have a rhythm of its own, which was even hard for
his actors to understand. Yeats himself testifies of this fact:
“He made word and phrase dance to a very strange rhythm, which will always, till his plays plays have
created their own tradition, be difficult to actors who have not learned it from his own lips… The players
were puzzled by the rhythm… Perhaps no Irish countryman had ever that exact rhythm in his voice.”
(Quoted from Bliss (1971; 44))
But the most acute witness is probably Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, one of the actresses, who said
of Synge’s representation of Hiberno-English:
97
“At first I found Synge’s lines almost impossible to learn and deliver… It was neither verse nor prose. The
speeches had a musical lilt, absolutely different from anything I had heard before. Every passage brought
some new difficulty and we would all stumble through the speeches until the tempo in which they were
written was finally discovered.” (Quoted from Bliss (1971; 44))
However, if it is true that he cannot be labelled as a true realist, there is no way his
representation of Hiberno-English can be discarded as purely unrealistic and fantastical.
Indeed, according to Todd Loreto (Loreto (1989)), an accurate transcription of unrehearsed
speech – as what would be used as data by a sociolinguist such as Filpulla for instance – lacks
in the cohesion and logical development normally required in a play. He describes the
language of a character as the “idealisation of the essential characteristics of the speech of a group or
an individual.” Thus an idiom suited for a play needs to be more precise and richer than reality
and the reason why it does not constitute a complete representation of the actual dialect is
because is still remains a literary device. (Sullivan, J.P. (1976))
This can be linked to Aristotle’s conception of the role of the artist, who for him is not
confined to what is or what was, but can also concentrate on what should be, because an work
of art is a self-contained whole with its own laws. (Price, A. (1961)). Likewise, Synge, Yeats
and Lady Gregory greatly admired a dictum by Goethe: “Art is art because it is not nature”, and
in a way, one could describe Synge’s attempt at creating his own representation of HibernoEnglish an attempt at producing “an art more beautiful than nature”. (Kiberd (1993; 214)).
However, he manages to infuse the idiom of his characters with the very spirit of Irish life,
and this is probably the best way to advocate for his realism.
“The words chosen are, like the things they express, direct and dreadful, by themselves intolerable to
conventional taste, yet full or vital beauty in their truth to their conditions of life, to the characters they
depict, and to the sympathies they suggest.” (Irving D. Suss, quoted from Price, A. (1961))
b) Dialect and language
But the emphasis he puts on the non-standard characteristics of his characters’
language is also very interesting as far as Synge’s definition of Hiberno-English is concerned,
for his way of highlighting the non-standard mechanisms of the idiom allows him to give it
the status of a proper language.
Let’s take a look at Quin’s attempt at defending Synge’s realism:
“It was of course this quality [or great originality and vividness] that earlier attracted J.M. Synge, and
which, in the highly concentrated form in which he used it in the Playboy of the Western World, so
98
astonished his hearers that he found it necessary to devote a whole preface to affirming its very existence in
the mouths of Irish speakers of English. No one who reads Dr. Henry’s book need have any further doubt
about Synge’s highly-coloured language.” (Quoted from Bliss, A.J. (1971; 44)).
Quin was alluding to a book about one form of Hiberno-English, called an Anglo Irish Dialect
of North Roscommon, where Henry analyses many striking features of this idiom. According
to Bliss, there is no way the comparison Quin draws between “an anthology of out-of-the-way
idioms” and Synge’s plays can advocate for any kind of realism on the part of the playwright.
On the contrary, Henry himself suggests that highlighting the structure of a dialect gives it a
higher status, because it shows how its inner mechanism is not just due to chance or a “chaos
theory” (Kallen), but how there is a linguistic coherence, which allows the dialect to sound
like a valid interpretation of language, instead of just an incorrect version of a standard
language.
Consequently, Synge’s emphasis on the non-standard elements of the language is far more
serious than many critics seem to acknowledge. Indeed, if he is not realistic in terms of
frequency of occurrence, he manages to highlight the Irish reality of the dialect, and to
demonstrate how such an idiom has a consistent and coherent mechanism of its own.
II) Exploiting gaps
The other major criticism which was made to Synge, especially about the language he
used was that his plays were obscene and blasphemous, and thus insulting for Irish people
and more particularly for Irish girls. Although it may seem really hard to understand the
reaction of the audience nowadays, this was taken very seriously by most Irish people who
were familiar to the plays – especially to the Playboy of the Western World – and triggered
out a great debate after the play was staged. The “Playboy riots” (Kain, R. M. (1979)) are
here to prove that Synge’s position as far as national identity and cultural representation of
Ireland are concerned is far from traditional; he can hardly be called a revivalist in the strict
sense of the word, as Douglas Hyde can. He is way too critical and inquisitive about the
society he is describing to be seen as a playwright of mere peasant dramas designed to glorify
the West of Ireland. Once again, W.B. Yeats found the exact words to illustrate this situation
in a passage from “the Death of Synge” in the Autobiographies:
“Ireland […] has given itself to apologetics. Every impression of life or impulse of imagination has been
examined to see if it helped or hurt the glory of Ireland. A sincere impression of life became at last
impossible, all was apologetics. There was no longer an impartial imagination, delighting in whatever is
99
naturally exciting. Synge was the rushing up of the buried fire, an explosion of all that had been denied or
refused, a furious impartiality, an indifferent turbulent sorrow.” (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979;
175-176))
You can sense Synge’s radical view of life in these words.(“rushing up”, “explosion”,
“furious impartiality”) For Yeats, there definitely is a gap between him and the nationalists
who thought every field in society had to be working for the glory of Ireland; to a certain
extent, he opposes Synge’s works to Maud Gonne’s conception of a national literature, in
which there is no question of art, but only of politics and of utilitarian literature16. She was
certainly pleased with plays glorifying the heroic past of Ireland, but forgetting all the details
which were not positively arguing for the honour of her country and her countrymen. On the
contrary, Synge went for the full reality of life, poetic notes as well as Rabelaisian notes; his
aim was not to please the Gaelic League and its supporters, but to build a cultural identity
which would not be idealised and unreliable. Not only did he want to underline the
coloniser’s shortcomings, but he also wanted his audience to be critical of the way Irish
society was evolving. As Synge said himself about the Playboy of the Western World: “a great
deal that is in it, and a great deal more that is behind it, is perfectly serious, when looked at in a certain
light.” (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 182))
Under the cover of obscenity and blasphemy, this is probably one of the main reasons why
this very play triggered out so many violent debates, politics as well as culture-wise. Dublin
audiences raved about the insulting content of the play, and its lack of nationalistic feelings,
whereas Yeats and the supporters of Synge thought they were advocating for free speech and
fighting for the liberty of the new nation against the dictates of “societies, clubs and leagues”
(Yeats, quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 179)). Indeed, this is how the debate Yeats organised
on the week following the first staging was advertised in Dublin:
“SUPPORT
ABBEY THEATRE
AGAINST ORGANISED OPPOSITION
___________
HE WHO STRIKES AT
FREEDOM OF JUDGEMENT
STRIKES
« A play which pleases the men and women of Ireland who have sold their country for ease and wealth, who
fraternise with their country’s oppressors or have taken service with them, a play that will please the host of English
functionaries and the English garnison, is a play that can never claim to be part of a national literature. » (Quoted
16
from Harrington, J.P. (1996))
100
AT THE SOUL OF THE NATION”
(Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 180))
Dramatic and unilateral as this announcement sounds – Yeas and his followers do not seem
to acknowledge any other kind of opposition than organised opposition, thus taking the whole
controversy to a very political level – it nonetheless underlines how seriously all the
accusations against Synge’s plays were taken at the time.
Because his plays, and more precisely his use of language can be read as an accurate
criticism of Irish society in general and not only of the coloniser’s presence, Synge may be
considered as being one of the first Irish artists belonging to a post-colonial movement as far
as cultural nationalism is concerned. In his article “The National Longing for Form”,
Timothy Brennan (Brennan, T. (1990)) explains that post-colonial nationalism implies that
authors do not only have to create an aura of national community – mostly because the states
have already been bequeathed – but it is also necessary for them to expose the excesses that
the people chasing a national identity have created at home. It is true that at the time Synge
wrote his plays, Ireland had not reached independence yet, nonetheless, his concern for a true
and solid Irish cultural identity seems to suggest that he was looking ahead of his time insofar
as he considered that independence was inevitable and thought it was perhaps more
important for writers to prepare the future of the new Republic. In this respect he can be
compared to later post-colonial writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie:
“His postcolonial vision was that of a man who was not so much working for Irish independence as
assuming its inevitability, and seeking to provide in art images and ideas appropriate to a liberated people.”
(Kiberd, (1993; XXX))
So we can now study Synge’s representation of Hiberno-English in the light of this definition,
as opposed to the accusations which were experienced by his Playboy at the time of its first
staging.
1) Debunking stereotypes and ideals
Synge was gifted with a wonderful sense of irony, which he managed to incorporate in
his representation of language in his plays. It lead to many criticisms and accusations at the
beginning of the twentieth century, for he was definitely expressing a position which was not
mainstream. The language of his characters is neither British English, nor the Irish the
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Gaelic League was trying to revive17. It is not only an attempt at bridging gaps thanks to a
faithful translation of Irish past into English, but it is also a very skilful exploitation of
cultural clashes – between Irish and English cultures as well as within Irish culture – which
allows him to prove a master at debunking several theatrical and cultural stereotypes.
a) The Stage Irishman and English traditions
Up until the end of the nineteenth century, Ireland had been more exploited than
expressed as far as literature was concerned. Indeed, the audience for most writing was
primarily in England, and their expectations had to be satisfied. Thus Irish people were hardly
ever presented other than as rude drunkards who could not speak properly or obedient but
awkward servants to rich Englishmen. Many writers were relying on what Kiberd calls
“paddy-whackery, rollicking notes and stage-Irish effects”. (Kiberd, D. (1995; 136)).
Susan Mitchell, a minor poet who knew native Ireland quite well despite her being a member
of the Protestant Ascendancy, wrote an impassioned conclusion to her “Ballad of Dermody
and Hynes” to express Irish resentment towards all those years of mockery and
misrepresentation:
“We are a pleasant people, the laugh upon our lip
Gives answer back to your laugh in gay good fellowship;
We dance unto your piping, we weep when you want tears;
Wear a clown’s dress to please you, and to your friendly jeers
Turn up a broad fool’s face and wave a flag of green –
But the naked heart of Ireland, who, who has ever seen?”
(Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 174))
In these lines, one can clearly sense the opposition between “we” – Irishmen – and “you” –
Englishmen, the former going through a hardship of self-degradation to please the latter in a
cruel comedy (the expression “friendly jeers” is quite telling in this respect). Mitchell
humorously underlines the ridicule to which most Irish characters were assigned in English
plays (“a clown’s dress”, “a broad fool’s face”) as well as the stereotypical description of
Ireland (“piping” and “a flag of green”). But her point in this extract is to show how all this
representation of Ireland is purely artificial and far from reality, and to suggest that no
Englishman ever tried to look behind the masks of foolish clowns Irishmen were forced to
17
Synge despised the Irish of the Gaelic League and the national newspapers as being fake and having nothing
of the authenticity he was himself aiming at.
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wear to please their colonisers. (“the naked heart of Ireland” being of course opposed to the
disguises described earlier on in the poem.)
This passage makes it quite understandable why Irish people should be quite sensitive as soon
as there was a question of their being represented in a play. Ironically enough, many people
accused Synge of re-enacting this English tradition of the stage-Irishman in his
representations of his fellow-countrymen, mainly because of the language they were speaking.
It had such strength that it intensified the hostility of the first Dublin audiences. On the
contrary, it turns out that Synge was proclaiming the death of the stage-Irishman with the
words he put in the mouths of his characters, and especially Christie Mahon, the Playboy of
the Western World. Synge was well aware of the dangers of what he called the “rollicking
note” (Kiberd, (1993; 204)). In 1902, he wrote a review of Seumas MacManus’s Donegal
Fairy stories, and criticised the author because he had failed to “bring out the finer notes of the
language spoken by the peasants”. (Quoted from Kiberd, (1993; 204)) For him there was a clearcut difference between comedy and mockery, which could be sensed in the language. Still
about MacManus’s book, he said: “the language of several of the stories has a familiarity that is not
amusing, while it is without the intimate distinction good humorous writing requires.” (Quoted from
Kiberd, (1993; 204)).
A closer analysis of a short extract from a play presenting an example of Irish
“brogue” will definitely underline how Synge’s dialect is “a far cry from the stage-Irishman”
(Quoted from Kiberd, (1993; 204))
In Dekker’s play called the Honest Whore, part II18, the Irish character id called Bryan, and he
speaks approximately 30 lines out of the 2600 of the whole play. Here is one of his speeches:
“I, do predy, I had rather have thee make a scabbard of my guts, and let out all the Irish puddings in my
poore belly, den to be a false knave to de I faat, I will see dyne own sweet face more.” (Quoted from
Sullivan, J.P. (1976))
Clearly, the linguistic portrayal of an Irishman underlines the author’s lack of competence in
the variety he is trying to parody, more than to represent. Indeed, it is limited to doubtful
phonological and lexical levels, thus not even attempting to reach the structure of the
language, which must have been totally unknown to Dekker. Moreover, the poor Bryan is also
tagged with many expressions which sound awkward and do obviously not belong to
Hiberno-English, such as “dyne own sweet face”, or the highly prejudiced “the Irish puddings
in my poor belly”.
18
Written in 1604.
103
On the contrary, we have studied Synge’s idiom thoroughly enough to say that he had a very
clear knowledge of what Hiberno-English was, as well as a commendable mastery of Irish. He
seemed fascinated, if not obsessed by the structure of the dialect he wanted to represent in his
plays, and thus he was actually debunking the stereotype of the stage-Irishman by showing
that Hiberno-English was not at all an English spoken with a bad accent and a lot of mistakes,
but a proper variety of English capable of the greatest poetical effects. To a certain extent,
one could suggest that the only tokens of stage-Irishmen on the night of the first staging of the
Playboy were the violent people in the audience. Ellen Duncan, in a letter to the Irish Times,
noted the “total lack of self-control, the gross ignorance, and childish stupidity of the crowd” that day,
which might have been more likely to lead the English to regard such behaviour “a truer
example of Irish culture and Irish manners.” (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 181)
But however concerned Synge was with the problem of misrepresentation of Irish
people, he could not be called a staunch nationalist, for he did not dismiss English linguistic
traditions altogether, and tried to exploit the culture of the colonisers as best he could. At the
time the Playboy was staged for the first time, W.G. Fay said that one had to excuse Synge for
his play on the ground that he “has had no joy in life”, and attribute his “vigorous speech” to
the influence of Elizabethan drama. (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 182-183)). If his
contemptuous and rather illogical first remark deserves no attention, he was not completely
wrong about Elizabethan influence. First of all because we have already seen that Elizabethan
English is what is called a “superstratum” for Hiberno-English, which means that there
obviously is a direct linguistic link between these two varieties of English. Furthermore, if
Synge’s language can sometimes be compared to Rabelais’s use of words, he is not far from
Shakespearian speech either. Far from the Victorian restrictions, there is in Synge’s idiom all
the exuberance and joy for words which can be found in Shakespeare’s epiphanies of
language. The plays of the Elizabethan writer are always full of linguistic surprises and he is
never afraid to shock his audience with bawdy allusions and puns, probably because his was
one of the freest periods in England as far as language and wit were concerned.
b) “Cuchulainoid” theatre
Staunch Irish nationalists had designed their own way to fight against the image of this
stage-Irishman we have just described. They decided to invent a counterpart to “Paddy”, a
hero who was somewhat like a surreal Cuchulain of the twentieth century – tall, strong, manly
and handsome, with such heroism in his actions and behaviour that one could imagine he had
104
just come out of an old Irish book of tales and epics: “the unreal, impossibly virtuous, benign
Irishman so popular with the Dublin audience”. (Holder, quoted from Strand, G. (1996)) Of course,
there was no way such a character could possibly speak anything but a language as pure as his
own invented image; so he would rather speak Irish19 or an ethereal form of English20 than
use the raw material provided by Hiberno-English.
But this was exactly the definition of revivalism Synge despised, and against which he was
fighting. He is being very explicit about it in the following exchange of letters between him
and his friend Stephen MacKenna21.
MacKenna thought it was necessary to distinguish between the freedom of the artist and the
responsibility of a national theatre:
“You should be free as artist, penseur. Whether you should be played I do not know. I think art has many
mansions… I mean vaguely that I like the philistine idea of a purely fantastic unmodern – forgive me if I
borrow “unIbsenified” – ideal, breezy-spring-dayish Cuchulainoid […] national theatre. […] I confess I
believe in the ripeness and unripeness of nations and class Ireland blessedly unripe. Modern problem even in
peasant robes I do not like to see made public property in Ireland yet. Give us our own literary nationhood
first, then let us rise to our frieze-clad Ibsens.” (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 174))
In his answer, Synge denied that Irish people were any more innocent than the Norwegians or
Germans, with their Ibsen and Sudermann. He underlined that he was not advocating for
“morbid, sex-obsessed drama in Ireland” because he thought it was “bad as drama”, but not on the
grounds of the Irish having “any particular sanctity, which I utterly deny.” For him, “no drama can
grow out of anything other than the fundamental realities of life which are never fantastic, are neither
modern nor unmodern and, as I see them, rarely spring-dayish, or breezy or Cuchulainoid.” (Quoted from
Kain, R. M. (1979; 175))22
He was convinced that “squeamishness is a disease, and that Ireland will gain if Irish writers deal
manfully, directly and decently with the entire reality of life.” (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 175))
No wonder then his own representations of Irish mythical heroes are steeped into mockheroism and reality of life. His “Cuchulain” is called Christie Mahon – the Playboy of the
19
As was the wish of the Gaelic League
We have seen that this was the case in Yeats’s version of Deirdre. (See Chapter 2, III)2)a))
21
MacKenna was a journalist and a student of philosophy.
22
Paradoxically enough, most revivals of Synge’s plays have been presented as Cuchulainoid drama, to avoid
the revolutionary side of the play. Actors and directors deliberately put the emphasis and the lyrical side of
language, almost annihilating the violence and irony of most lines. (Kiberd (1993))
20
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Western World23 – and his language as well as his actions is definitely more ironically downto-earth but also more poetical than the standards of the Gaelic League would have wished
them to be.
For instance, let’s have a look at an extract from the famous love-scene between Pegeen and
Christie:
“PEGEEN:
And what is it I have, Christy Mahon, to make me fitting entertainment for the like of
you, that has such poet’s talking, and such bravery of heart.
CHRISTIE:
Isn’t there the light of seven heavens in your heart alone, the way you’ll be an angel’s lamp
to me from this out, and I abroad in the darkness, spearing salmons in the Owen or the Carrowmore?”
(PWW, p.155)
Pegeen clearly defines Christie as her hero, gifted with a poet’s talk and bravery of heart. And
Christie seems to come up to her expectations then, and to fit the role to which he has been
assigned, according to his accurate and passionate choice of words.
However, the most poetical metaphors can turn into Rabelaisian insults in the mouth of Old
Mahon, describing his son:
“… when it was I did tend him from his hour of birth, and he a dunce never reached his second book, the
way he’d come from school, many’s the day, with his legs lamed under him, and he blackened with his
beatings like a tinker’s ass.” (PWW, p.150)
The comparison between the “wonder of the western world” and the tinker’s ass is the
epitome of Synge’s taste for mock-heroism and irony; as soon as a myth is emerging from the
poetic words of his Hiberno-English speaking characters, he manages to debunk it by
exploiting the roughness of the dialect, which is also part of its essential definition.
As Kiberd says about the Playboy: “The play is not simply a critic of Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s
Cuchulain, nor is it just another sally against the Gaelic League idealisation of the countryman. It is a
challenge to both schools to concede the essential continuity of both traditions and to recognize the
savagery, as well as the beauty, which lies in their heart.” (Kiberd (1993; 114))
But this method consisting getting the best of different traditions and being critically aware of
their flaws earned Synge many criticisms; as far as the idea of “Cuchulainoid drama” was
concerned, nationalists who were “hardening themselves into hypermasculinity, in preparation of an
uprising” (Kiberd (1993; XXV)) accused him of “betraying the forces of virile nationalism” to a
movement of decadence (Kiberd (1993; XXV)), without understanding that his plays and
Declan Kiberd, in his chapter about « Synge and Irish literature – saga, myth and romance » draws several
parallels between the two characters, but also underlines how skilfully Synge manages to distort the original
story and give it an ironical and mock-heroic slant. (Kiberd, (1993))
23
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especially his mischievous myth debunking were aiming at providing a coherent cultural
identity for the future nation.
2) Celtic roughness and Victorian chastity
This indictment of Synge’s lack of respect for the image of the Irish hero is in fact just
one small part of a bigger opposition between the author of the Playboy and Deirdre and
staunch Irish nationalists.
Indeed, it has already been said that revivalism was proving very rigid and selective about
which part of Irish culture were worthy to be revived and made popular again. And Synge’s
goal was to underline the growing gap between a nineteenth century society in which people
were thinking in Irish while speaking English and a twentieth century Ireland where it was
more likely that people would end up “thinking Victorian English” even when they were still
speaking Irish. To a certain extent, his plea for cultural dynamism resembles Yeats’s
conception of the anti-self:
“… I think the law-maker and the law-breaker are both needful in society – as the lively and volcanic
forces are needed to make earth’s crust habitable – and I think the law-maker is tending to reduce Ireland,
or parts of Ireland, to a dismal, morbid hypocrisy that is not a blessed unripeness.” (Quoted from Kain,
R. M. (1979; 175))
However, Synge’s crusade against hypocrisy lead people to discard his plays as obscene and
blasphemous. But there is nothing more interesting than people’s attitudes towards a certain
brand of language to learn more about the society from which this language emerged, and
about the idiom itself…
a) Obscenity (analysis of “shift”)
An analysis of the origins of the “Playboy riots” (Kain, R. M. (1979)) may help
understand why Synge’s plays – which now seem very tame compared to some contemporary
theatrical performances insofar as they do not include any visual piece likely to be criticised
as being “obscene” – were felt to be so offensive to Irish people.
Amazingly enough, the audience at the Saturday night opening of the Playboy of the
Western World, stayed rather calm during the first two acts, so that Lady Gregory dispatched
a telegram to Yeats, “Play great success”. But during the third act, in the middle of an
extravagant piece of poetry in praise of Pegeen, Christie’s words were responded with boos
and cat-calls filling the theatre:
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“It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a driven of chosen females, standing in
their shifts itself maybe, from this place to the Eastern World.” (PWW, p. 163)
Nobody could hear the rest of the play that night. Lady Gregory had to send another telegram
to Yeats: “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.” (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 177))
Thus, a closer analysis of the attitudes of audiences and of Irish people in general
regarding this very word – “shift” – would be quite useful to grasp how people felt about
decency and obscenity at that time in Ireland.
First of all, “shift” in this situation means of course “underwear”. However, the whole outrage
the word created might have been only a problem of register of language. Indeed, according to
the Oxford Dictionary of English, the meaning and the connotations of “shift” changed with
time and places, and when Synge wrote his plays, it was only recently that it had gained an
obscene connotation, apparently because of its most frequent association with the female
body24. So, seeing that linguistic evolutions of this kind usually start in large cities before they
spread in more remote areas, one could assume that what was considered to be utterly
indecent by a Dublin audience was still seen as a very innocent word in a small Mayo village.
(Greene, N. (2003))
However, it is true that what really shocked the Dublin audiences was the fact that this word
was associated with the women of Ireland, all the more so as Christie was alluding to the
women of the West, who were supposed to be eternally chaste and pure, according to the
revivalist motto of the time. For instance, shortly after the beginning of the riots, an Irish
newspaper published the letter of a “western girl” giving her opinion on the whole “shift”
debate, and confessing that Synge was absolutely unfair with the girls from the West, for she
would not even dare uttering the word “shift” when she was alone in her room…(Greene, N.
(2003)) Susan Mitchell, in her poem “Oh, No! We Never Mention It!” suggests the absurd
prudery of such an attitude:
“Then by those early memories, hearken to one who prays
The right to mention once again the word of other days,
Without Police Protection onece more her voice to lift –
The right to tell (even to herself) that still she wears – a shift!”
(Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 185))
24
For apparently it was thought indecent to allude to the fact that women actually had bodies at the beginning of
the twentieth century.
108
It is more than likely that Synge was trying to confront Irish people with their true past and
culture, contrary to what the Gaelic League was trying to do for example. For instance, T.R.
Henn’s can illustrate this situation very acutely:
“… in an access of outraged modesty, Victorian in character, but connected somehow with the idea that the
very word was insulting to the womanhood of Ireland, whose chastity and purity had become a national
myth, even as the saintliness of the island as a whole. It is probable that the audience, in their
bewilderment at the more subtle ironies of the play, missed the full point of the phrase.” (Quoted from
Strand, G. (1996))
Yeats and Lady Gregory had sensed the problem while the play was being rehearsed, and they
tried to make a few cuts in the text. But it was Synge himself who was directing it, so it was
impossible for them to make the text Victorian enough for the prude ears sitting in the theatre.
Jack Yeats even wittily suggested to Synge to install a drummer in the wings and ask him to
cover the words likely to shock the audience:
“If you don’t want to have to leave out all the coloured language in your play, you’ll have to station a
drummer in the wings, to welt the drums every time the language gets too high for the stomachs of the
audience. They used to do so in the old music-halls,
Thus
Get out of that ye son of a – rub, a dub, dub, dub –”
(Quoted from Benow, H. (1971))
Apparently, Synge was not too willing to indulge into censoring the Gaelic past on which
Irish people were trying to build a new cultural identity; he wanted Irish people to be proud of
their past and heritage, and not to try to turn it into a Victorian artefact. In fact, Synge’s image
of women in their shifts is inspired by the legend of Cuchulain; in the original manuscript, the
hero was permitted the vision of thirty naked virgins25, so it seems that Synge, under Yeats’s
advice (Kiberd (1995)) tried to appease the prudish members of the Abbey by cladding his
maids in “shifts”26. Thus, his use of this word and the violent reactions it triggered out are an
ironic way of underlining how Victorian and prudish Irish people had become.
“The hero regularly returns from combat filled with a “battle rage”, which leads the men of Ulster to forbid his
entry into the city of Emain Macha. They fear that his spasms might destroy peace and damage city buildings, and so
they conduct earnest discussions of the ways in which his ardour might be cooled. This is finally achieved by sending
thirty women, stark naked, across the plain of Macha in serried ranks: and when the hero sees them, he blushes to his
roots, casts down his eyes, and with that “the wildness went out of him”.” (Kiberd (1995; 183))
25
In his typescript version, Synge had his women “stripped itself” instead of in “shifts itself”, but Yeats told him
that the more puritanical members of the Abbey would not tolerate such an image. (Kiberd, (1995; 183))
26
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b) Blasphemy and violence
Synge was calling Irish people’s attention to the linguistic freedom which their
ancestors had and which they risked to lose because of their conception of the English
language. Synge aimed at uncovering the whole reality of the Irish past, and the liberal
relation the Irish had towards language was one of the most important points he wanted to
underline in his plays27.
This is one of the main reasons why the language of Synge’s characters is so lively and full of
colours. The Evening Mail reviewer, called H.S.D. at the time, said that the dialogue was
“racy of the soil”, and that the characters were “all conversationalists of abounding imagination and
riotously opulent in flashing phrases.” (Quoted from Kain, R. M. (1979; 179))
But it is at the same time and for this very same reason outrageously out of conventions,
because linguistic conventions at the time were becoming more and more English – and more
than ever Victorian28 – whereas Synge was trying to infuse the language of his characters with
all the possible Irish freedom of speech and Gaelic liberal traditions; so he did not only rely
on bawdy allusions to remind people that even Gaelic heroes and heroines had bodies and
talked about them, but thanks to the language of his characters, one can say that he brilliantly
managed to infuse controversial elements of Irish culture in his representation of HibernoEnglish. Opposing the attitudes of people towards language at the time, he put the emphasis
on the pagan idiom of Irish beliefs, and his use of Hiberno-English helps him make a realistic
analysis of the relation people held to violence.
Christie seems to be the epitome of the association between paganism and Catholic beliefs in
Synge’s plays:
“CHRISTY:
They’re coming. Will you swear to aid and save me, for the love of Christ?
WIDOW QUIN:
If I aid you, will you swear to give me a right of way I want, and a mountainy
ram, and a load of dung at Michaelmas, the time that you’ll be master here?
CHRISTY:
I will, by the elements and stars of night.” (PWW, p.147)
Here Christie gives two very different examples of phrases of swearing and blessing (“for the
love of Christ” and “by the elements and stars of night”), which suggest a kind of equivalent
between pagan and catholic language because of the parallelism of structure in the two
27
Apparently, it was much easier to swear and not sound rude in Irish than in English (Kiberd (1995)), and
Synge aimed at endowing his representation of Hiberno-English with this Irish uninhibited use of language.
28
Kiberd, for instance, underlines that most revivalists had become more Victorians than Victorians themselves,
because they had a very obsolete vision that the English society they were trying to oppose – they saw it as a
decadent society, corrupted by industrialisation, and not at all as the prude Victorian England of the time.
110
sentences. This is a perfect illustration of the fact that Synge manages to infuse the language
of his characters with Irish traditions, and to underline their contradictions by exploiting their
richness.
But the language of Irish religion can also be used to emphasise the direct link
between violence and religion in Irish traditions. Here is, for example, how Christie confesses
that he killed his father:
“CHRISTY:
Don’t strike me. I killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that.
PEGEEN:
Is it killed your father?
CHRISTY:
With the help of God I did, surely, and that of the Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede
for his soul.” (PWW, p. 121)
Here we can see that Synge wittily juxtaposes a confession of murder with traditional catholic
phrases of blessing. This mixing of two very different fields of language allows him to merge
two different aspects of Irish life and highlight how paradoxical this union can sound.
Violence and religion, however antithetic, are intricately linked in Irish culture, as well as in
what Synge wanted to define as the Irish attitudes towards language.
The logical link between the religious field of language and the language of violence is even
more obvious Michael’s blessing of Christie and Pegeen after the Playboy has proposed to
Pegeen:
“A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man did split his father’s middle with a single clout should
have the bravery of ten, so may God and Mary and St Patrick bless you and increase you from this mortal
day.
CHRISTY and PEGEEN:
Amen, O Lord!” (PWW, p.160)
This almost sounds like the closing blessing of a wedding ceremony (especially because of
Christy and Pegeen’s answer), except for the reason which triggered out the benediction.
Once again, Synge manages to pervert catholic language habits and to leave room for the
violent side of Irish culture to show, especially when the audience expects solemnity and
purity. Thus it becomes quite clearer as to why the audiences of Synge’s time were so
shocked by the language of the play, and why they taxed it of blasphemy and exaggerated
coarseness. The playwright was mischievously disrupting their tame language attitudes with
true resurgences of Irish past.
Violence is present all through Synge’s plays, and is not always justified by a glorious
and nationalistic ideal.
Some of the characters have a rather cruel appetite for violence, which underlines that peasant
life in the West was not that idyllic after all:
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“… you’d have a right so to follow after him, Sara Tansey, and you the one yoked the ass cart and drove
ten miles to set your eyes on the man bit the yellow lady’s nostril on the northern shore.” (PWW, p.132)
No wonder then prudish people sitting in the Abbey could feel offended by the crudeness of
the speech of Synge’s characters!
In a way, one could go as far as saying that the way Synge conceived his
representation of Hiberno-English is violent in itself, for it is almost over-loaded with HE
syntactical features and colourful vocabulary, filling the audiences’ ears with a stronger
rhythm than what they are used to, and drowning them under a never-ending flow of images
and colours. It is as if Synge were trying to underline the evil side of Irish culture not by
presenting actual acts of cruelty and violence on stage, but by designing the most violently
Irish version of English possible; this allows him to be faithful to Irish past because he is not
concealing its inherent crudeness, but he was also convinced that this was the best way of
underlining the poetry of Irish culture, for as he declares in the Preface to his own Collected
poems, which he submitted for editing and publication to Yeats: “…before verse can be human
again it must learn to be brutal.” (Quoted from Kiberd (1995; 169))
He was trying to show how a Gaelic past could endlessly disturb a revivalist present; in a
way, Synge’s conception of Irish identity and the criticisms it triggered out could be
illustrated by this oxymoron taken from the Playboy, at the beginning of the second act:
“Well, this’d be a fine place to be my whole life talking out with swearing Christians …” (PWW, p.130)
c) Gallous stories and dirty deeds
The nationalist description of Synge has long been quite similar to those words of
Fanon about the pitfalls of national consciousness:
“The native intellectual who comes back to his people by the ways of cultural achievements behaves in fact
like a foreigner. Sometimes, he has no hesitations in using a dialect in order to show his will to be as near as
possible to the people… The culture that the intellectual leans towards is often no more than a stock of
particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer
garments.” (Quoted from Kiberd, (1993; XXVIII))
On the contrary, Synge catches so much more than the outer garments of folk culture. He
never behaves like a foreigner. He knew that “there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty
deed” (PWW, p.164), insofar as he was well aware that a never-ending flow of talking,
however brilliant and poetical, is often a poor compensation for a failure to act. (Kiberd,
112
(1993)) Talking about the Playboy, Kiberd says that “the play’s counterpoising of fine words and
failed action makes it a caustic study of the fatal Irish gift for the gab.” (Kiberd, (1993; XXVIII))
Indeed, in this play, there is a torrent of talk about a murder which never takes place in the
end. Likewise, in Deirdre of the Sorrows, the heroine is caught in the hands of fate, and her
only consolation is that her words allow her to imagine how her currents exploits will be told
forever. Once again, the striking beauty of this character’s language is in direct opposition
with its ineffectuality. (Kiberd, (1993))
In a way, thanks to his analysis of language attitudes in Ireland, Synge suggests that people
should always keep a critical eye on themselves, even if they are part of a brand new Irish
nation. And this is what he does for his own country, often with irony and humour. In his
preface to the Tinker’s Wedding, he declares:
“…where a country loses its humour, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be morbidity of the
mind…” (Synge (1999; 37))
For all these reasons, he can certainly be considered as a post-colonial writer, as far as his
representation of language is concerned. He was aware of the evils of colonisation and was
opposed to it, but he did not hesitate to use his characters’ language to tackle his
countrymen’s as well as his own shortcomings.
But doesn’t this also reveal a kind of scepticism regarding the whole cultural revolution which
was going on at the time, or at least a very sharp lucidity concerning its flaws and
contradictions?
3) The inefficiency of the “backward look”?
Indeed, the very idea of representing the inefficiency of a brilliant language suggests
that Synge knew the limits of the movement he was part of, as well as his own limits. His
imaginative representation of Hiberno-English, which was however quite faithful to Irish
spirit and culture, did not create a new school of writing, even though some Irish writers kept
on exploiting the richness of their dialect, like Sean O’Casey for example.
Synge was working for a new Irish cultural identity, and yet he seemed much more realistic
about it than Yeats for example. The author of “a land of heart’s desire” was definitely
expecting his country to transfigure and be born again, as in Kathleen Na Houlihan, where in
the end of the play, the old woman personifying Ireland is transformed into a young queenlike girl:
113
“PETER:
Did you see an old woman going down the path?
PATRICK:
I did not; but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.” (Yeats selected
plays, p.256)
On the contrary, we can see that ironically enough, in the Playboy, for instance, the only
transfiguration taking place is Christie’s, and it is done through the “power of a lie”:
“… you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie.” (PWW, p.162)
Being a plain young man without any existence of his own at the beginning of the play, he
transforms into the Irish hero of the village and then becomes an independent and proud man
who can leave the village with a sneer. Nonetheless, this representation of the birth of
individuality and identity is not based on any magical or heroic device, but on the lie that
Christie killed his father.
So in a way, one can say that Synge was conscious that his country needed transformation and
independence, but he was also aware of the dangers of Gaelic and heroic illusions and knew
the flaws of the cultural movement in which he took part. In his plays, he seems brilliantly at
ease when he carries his ideas and convictions through his representation of Hiberno-English,
because of the signification of the dialect itself but also because of the different reactions the
use of a language can trigger out.
114
Conclusion
Thus, far from being the dreamer with very little interest in politics whom Yeats liked
to picture, Synge could be described as a rather radical figure in the Irish debate about the
cultural identity of the nation (Kiberd, (1993)); his literary representation of Hiberno-English
could easily be a textbook case in this respect.
Indeed, the author of Deirdre and the Playboy had sensed how central the issue of
language was to the whole debate. As he was no revivalist at heart, he knew that glorifying
Irish only meant asking the people of Ireland to live in an artificially reconstructed past. And
even though his works can be partly analysed as several snapshots from a dying civilisation
and society, he was all but opposed to the forces of change; he describes himself as “someone
who wanted to change things root and branch” (Kiberd, (1995; 175)). He knew that you could not
ignore the evolution of a society, especially as far as linguistic matters were concerned.
So his choice to use Hiberno-English in his plays seems more than natural because it was
quite representative of the actual linguistic evolution which Ireland had been going through
for more than fifty years. Indeed, contrary to what was happening in politics, as far as
nationalism and fight for independence were concerned, most Irish people seemed to believe
that the key to linguistic bliss was the merging of English and Irish traditions. HibernoEnglish could easily be interpreted as the direct translation of Irish past and traditions into the
English language, each antagonistic culture gaining something in the process, for the newborn variety has been described as something more than the sum of its parts (Kiberd (1993)).
However, the language of Synge’s characters is not at all an attempt at discarding the heritage
which the Irish language carries in its words and sounds. Indeed, what is Hiberno-English but
the most Irish version of English possible, the English first spoken by those who were still
thinking in Irish? So in a way, Synge’s regeneration of the Irish past into a creative present –
which gave birth to the representation of a variety of English naturally infused with ancient
sagas and Gaelic traditions – underlines his belonging to what we have defined as “romantic
nationalism”, where a new Irish identity was considered to take roots in the rich past of the
country.
But Synge’s representation of Hiberno-English was way too radical to be accepted by
everyone. He was determined to be realistic as long as it allowed him to be critical, not only
115
of the coloniser, but also of the new structures and systems of thoughts which were being
elaborated by Irish people themselves. He was being as objective as possible with the new
nation in the building, and tried to highlight what staunch revivalists were trying to conceal.
Thus, because his representation of language had this realistic post-colonial quality about it, it
was wildly discredited for many years as being obscene and unrepresentative of the Irish
nation, whereas Synge’s language was in fact one of the more faithful representation of Irish
life and spirit available at the time.
Of course, as far as scientifically proven realism is concerned, Synge was being way too
imaginative to be true, but on the other hand, he managed to represent the essence of what for
him was to be at the roots of the new nation’s cultural identity – a rich Irish past and an
inseparable English heritage.
And as this representation was achieved thanks to his own version of a regional variety of
English, one could suggest that Synge’s actual achievement is much more interesting than a
scientifically correct transcription of the dialect spoken by Irish people at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Indeed, he managed to express a whole conception of life and culture with
a variety of English which had not – and still has not – obtained any official existence. Thus
he really gave Hiberno-English a new status, insofar as he presented it as a perfect means of
expression which was supposed to give the Irish a clearer identity without any separatist idea,
for it was expressing Irish life and merging two antithetic cultures at the same time.
These are factors which T.S. Elliott had certainly not taken into account when he said that “the
language of Synge is not available except for plays set among the same people.” For Synge’s
representation of Hiberno-English is so much more than just folklorism. Indeed, the language
of his characters helps to recreate an identity for Ireland thanks to its eternal past, but it also
displays several examples of how English as a whole is to be enriched and revitalised by its
non-standard varieties. (Kiberd, (1993)) This is probably one of the reasons why HibernoEnglish sounds so perfectly adequate even when it has to express the eternity of a myth like
Deirdre’s.
Once again, Synge’s literary representation of Hiberno-English skilfully demonstrates how
incredibly rich and significant a non-standard variety of English can be, and how, especially
as far as a post-colonial point of view is concerned, it can even be taken far beyond the level
of a single nation towards universality, for as Salman Rushdie says, talking about postcolonial writers in general:
116
“Those of us who use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that,
perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real
world.” (Quoted from Kiberd, (1995; 163))
117
Documents
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
Document 2 : Filpulla’s figures
(Filpulla, Markku (1999). The grammar of Irish English. London: Routledge.)
Frequencies of « after » perfects in the HE corpus
Area (size of corpus, words) N
N/10,000
Clare (30,000)
Kerry (44,000)
Wicklow (42,000)
Dublin (42,000)
3
1
9
12
1.0
0.2
2.1
2.9
HE total (158,000)
25 1.6
Frequencies of the “extended-now” perfects in the HE corpus
Area (size of corpus, words) N
N/10,000
Clare (30,000)
Kerry (44,000)
Wicklow (42,000)
Dublin (42,000)
23
24
17
17
7.7
5.5
4.0
4.0
HE total (158,000)
81 5.1
Frequencies of the temporal uses of “with” in the HE corpus
Area (size of corpus, words) N
N/10,000
Clare (30,000)
Kerry (44,000)
Wicklow (42,000)
Dublin (42,000)
8
21
2
1
2.7
4.8
0.5
0.2
HE total (158,000)
32 2.0
136
Frequencies of periphrastic do in the HE corpus
Area (size of corpus,
words)
Do+V Do
be
Do be Neg Que Imp Other N
V_ing
N/10,000
Clare (30,000)
Kerry (44,000)
Wicklow (42,000)
Dublin (42,000)
--11
8
2
1
1
6
2
----2
1
--1
5
1
1
-------
--2
2
1
----1
---
2
15
24
7
0.7
3.4
5.7
1.7
HE total (158,000)
21
10
3
7
1
5
1
48 3.0
Frequencies of the subordinating uses of “and” in the HE corpus
Area (size of corpus, words) Total of subordinating “and” N/10,000
Clare (30,000)
Kerry (44,000)
Wicklow (42,000)
Dublin (42,000)
8
18
17
5
1.8
6.0
4.0
1.0
HE total (158,000)
48
3.0
Frequencies of topicalisation in the HE corpus
Area (size of corpus, words) N
N/10,000
Clare (30,000)
Kerry (44,000)
Wicklow (42,000)
Dublin (42,000)
33
70
59
36
11.0
15.9
14.0
8.6
HE total (158,000)
198 12.5
Non-standard occurrences of the definite article in the HE corpus
Area (size of corpus, words) N
N/10,000
Clare (30,000)
Kerry (44,000)
Wicklow (42,000)
Dublin (42,000)
116
155
135
80
38.7
35.2
32.1
19.0
HE total (158,000)
486 30.8
137
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