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This chapter examines the fracture of the theatre movement and cultural nationalist alliances in the post-Boer period. Yeats, with financial backing from Annie Horniman, was able to set up the INTS in the Abbey Theatre and establish the organisation as a professional company. Cultural nationalists, particularly Griffith and Moran, attacked the theatre for rejecting propagandist imperatives; however, their attack on Synge reveals a conservative nationalist agenda also evident in their anti-Semitic support for the Limerick Pogrom of 1903. Beyond the apparent oppositions, however, a ‘union of Sceptics’, often in left-literati combinations, operated to suggest alternatives. Journals such as Dana, the Nationist, and the National Democrat; theatre groups such as the Theatre of Ireland and the Ulster Literary Theatre; and the range of material available at the Abbey from Colum, Boyle and Lady Gregory demonstrate a broad spectrum of opinion.

This chapter considers closely the debut of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and the ensuing ‘riots’. It emphasises Synge's radical credentials and argues that Synge's Playboy was a calculated provocation. With the greatest offence deferred until the final act, the riot is considered as Synge's intention, producing an avant-garde event rather than simply a play. The following controversy, including Yeats's decision of the theatre to reinforce the play's run with police presence and prosecutions, is understood as polarising opinion. However, the division was not as absolute as has previously been portrayed; northern republicans in the Dungannon Clubs found the issue petty; language campaigners found it irrelevant; and some, such as George Roberts and Tom Koehler, recognised Synge as a writer that might revivify Irish parochialism with the irreverence of nascent European modernism.

This chapter tracks the impact on the theatre of the radicalisation of Irish politics following the General Election of 1910. The momentary success of the Home Rule Bill (1912) is set against the 1913 Dublin lockout and the Irish Volunteer movements. Left politics, voiced by Larkin and Connolly, are considered resonant with the theatre of Robinson, O'Kelly, St John Ervine, Thomas Murray, Fitzmaurice, and Gerald MacNamara. Left-literati alliances were re-forged against the conservative nationalism of William Martin Murphy and Griffith. The First World War drove republican logics to the fore; indicated both by the pessimism of Wilson's The Slough and the excited radicalism of MacDonagh, Eimar O'Duffy, and Patrick Pearse himself. Republicanism, indicated by Pearse's references to Ibsen and Synge, is shown as having absorbed theatrical forces of display, to be reiterated in the Easter Rising of 1916.

This chapter reassesses the role of the theatre in pre-Revolutionary Ireland. Considering Yeats's ‘Man and the Echo’, it argues that the theatre was central to the Irish revival. Parnellism provided an important opening for cultural nationalism because it looked forward to ripening opinion rather than established consensus. Nationalism contained conflicts along lines of class, gender, and generation, all revealed in theatre as much as in the activities of Irish Socialist and Feminists; and the regional development of theatre in Cork and Ulster is emphasised. The model of Ireland as lost to tribal opposition is rejected; left-literati alliances were indicators of resistance to bourgeois nationalist imperatives. Republicanism proved open to such modernist lessons, but while Synge is presented as influentially provocative, his creative anxiety should not be reduced to revolutionary provocation alone.

This chapter argues that Synge deploys a queer aesthetic in his representation of the Irish peasantry. Furthermore, it suggests that by doing so, Synge develops a more fluid and inclusive model of Irish national affiliation than other writers of the Irish Revival. Rather than seeing a break between Wildean aesthetics as they are embodied in the figure of the dandy and the figure of the peasant promoted by the Revival, the chapter reveals Synge’s project as an elaboration of queer aesthetic practices along new lines. By expanding our understanding of the queer beyond questions of identity to modes of style, the chapter explores how the critical and ethical concerns of queer theory might be brought to bear in novel contexts.

The rubric ‘literature and society’, which seems irrelevant to much of the literary work produced in the period 1891–1921, comes into its own from 1922 onwards. Whereas the plays of William Butler Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and George Fitzmaurice — compounded of myth, folklore, and fantasy — had formerly dominated the Irish theatre, the prose realism that had certainly also been a part of the Abbey tradition in the works of William Boyle, Padraic Colum, T. C. Murray, Seumas O'Kelly, and Lennox Robinson now began to drive fantasy and verse from the Abbey stage. Irish drama became a more faithful reflection of contemporary Irish society. There has been a growing tendency in Ireland, north and south, for the arts to receive assistance from business and finance. Literature benefits through prizes offered for drama, fiction, and poetry; summer schools and international conferences often receive subsidies.

This book examines the work of the first three directors of the Abbey Theatre — William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge — and in each case suggests the nature of their personal primitivism and the extent to which it was influenced by comparative science. It discusses how critics ignored the existence of Celtology — the scientific, comparative study of Celtic culture, language, and literature that developed in the 1870s — and too often analysed the Celticism, and thus the primitivism, of the Irish Revival only in terms of the romantically primitivist tradition vocalised by both Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold. One of the reasons why the primitivism of the Irish Revival has as yet received scant attention is that a vital distinction between primitivism and ‘archaism’ has been smudged by its most eminent critics.

John Millington Synge incorporated the constructions of man's place in nature, that came to him from extensive reading in comparative science, into a primitivism which relied instinctively upon the notion of man as an organic part of the natural world. This intense engagement with scientific comparativism arguably enabled the modernism of Synge's work for the Irish theatre. Yet for all this, Synge was one of the ‘last romantics’ and as much as evolutionism was a quotidian reality to him, he never fully disavowed either his romantically primitivist vision of early man, or his view of himself as the soul-mate of the primitive hunters. He was ‘Synge’, not ‘singe’, and his relationship to the implications of Darwinism remained equivocal. With Synge, the threads of connection between the Irish Revival and the comparative mythologists, philologists, and folklorists of Continental Celtology, become a veritable cat's-cradle. The notes Synge made from the great tomes of comparative anthropology and mythology he read were selective in the extreme, and his own priorities are more than evident in his selection of material.

The primitivism of the Irish Revival has been misunderstood for too long because its complex and varied politics have been seen as depending on a particularly uncomplicated attitude towards the past. This book has shown that William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge all looked to the past — and to contemporary survivals of the past — as it was envisaged by comparative scientists or (in the case of Lady Gregory) by travellers and colonialists who had themselves assimilated the lessons of comparative science. For all the serendipity and anti-scientism of Yeats's approach, there was a pattern to the way he used comparative anthropology and mythology. For Synge, the iconoclasm of his vision owed much to his early acceptance that the romantic primitivism of Celticism was utterly outdated by the end of the 19th century because of the revelations made by comparative philologists, mythologists, and anthropologists. Lady Gregory's primitivism was stubbornly romantic and, despite knowing many comparative mythologists and anthropologists personally, science did not make her vision change.

In the 20th century, Ireland was an important site for the reception of Homer, largely through one work — James Joyce's Ulysses. This chapter tells an alternative story about Homer among the Irish by focusing not on James Joyce, but on the dramatist John Millington Synge and the scholar George Derwent Thomson. It argues that Synge's and Thomson's consciousness of Homer was shaped by their extended visits to the Aran Islands and the Blasket Islands, respectively. However, it also argues that Homeric poetry affected their descriptions of contemporary Irish people living on those islands. By discussing how ancient Greece was imported into modern Ireland, and how in turn Ireland was exported into Homeric epic in the works of both men, it offers a fascinating picture of the connections and differences between Thomson and Synge, as well as a case-study in the contingent circumstances that have often affected the circulation of Homer in the 20th century.

This chapter takes as its scope the substantial canon of Irish literature in the first decades of the twentieth century that engaged intimately with violence. It argues that the expression of violence can be understood according to four categories, each of which the chapter develops with respect to a host of writers, whose styles and political positions are widely divergent. The categories are not entirely parallel in structure, but together provide a capacious picture of the language of violence in the period: keening (or ritual lamentation), generative violence (the mode of the Rising), reprisal (the dark doppelganger of generativity), and allegory (in which the nation or body is likened to a tree or building). In tracing these four modes, the chapter invites a loosening of the ordinary political binaries that characterize criticism of this period. Prominent figures include, for keening, Synge and O'Casey; for generative violence, Synge, Yeats, Pearse, and other leaders of the Rising such as Plunkett and MacDonough; for reprisal, Mitchel, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey; and for allegory, Yeats. Ultimately, the chapter charts an entirely new scheme for reading the violence canon in this period, attuned to the historical shifts eventuated by uprising, war and the institution of the nation state.

After the international success of Rickshaw Boy, Lao She returned from the US to Mao's China in 1949 with high hopes. Welcomed back by his comrade from Chongqing days, Zhou Enlai, he was accorded the title, ‘People's Artist’ along with a slew of committee posts. Lao She had never shied from identifying himself as a ‘petty bourgeois’ writer who had a sense of righteousness but no enthusiasm for political factionalism. That he did so at a time when Mao's 1966 rectification campaign declared its objective to repudiate reactionary bourgeois academics, was to seal his own doom. 40 years after his fiction first started to explore China's emergence onto the global stage, Mao's Cultural Revolution got underway and Lao She was driven to drown himself. Lao She's play of the period, Teahouse, ranks in cultural magnitude with J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907), each a monument to the twentieth-century struggle of decolonizing nationhood. The consensus is that non-Western modernisms have a place not as derivative products of a Euro-American original but as full partners in a literary movement, best understood by regarding modernism as an aesthetic response to conditions of modernity that are globally structured but nationally or locally particular.

Even though John Bull's was not performed in Dublin until November 1907, it arguably had a presence in Ireland ten months earlier. Synge's response to Shaw's play was to reconfigure the play into The Playboy of the Western World causing a riotous audience to explode. In contrast, Shaw's play was well received during its Dublin premiere, as many of his non-Irish plays had been. As John Bull's and Playboy are explored, their ideological similarities emerge as significant, yet the plays are quite different in their effect on their audiences. The differences between these plays marked a debate between international and national considerations by Shaw and Synge, and led to additional leftist Irish plays by other writers who followed Shaw, and eventually Synge. This debate anticipated the socialistic approaches that moved onto the streets as Synge's final illness neared him to death in 1909.

This chapter moves out of Dublin theatres, in part, as Shaw delivered his lecture “The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland” to Dubliners in the context of Connolly's elaborate reply to the Catholic Church's effort to stifle socialism, Labour, Nationality, and Religion. The difference between Shaw's lecture and Connolly's Church response touches on the very debate fostered by Shaw and Synge. Connolly then became involved in the Irish trade union movement, uniting it with socialist theory. The period was peppered with Shavian-influenced plays, entering themselves into the socialist debate. As the bourgeois Dubliners whom Shaw satirized, who were also the enemies of Synge's plays, moved against trade unionism, the 1913 Dublin Lockout commenced. The colossal Dublin struggle of labor against capitalism was under way, and Shaw's presence was at hand.