John Millington Synge
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edmund John Millington Synge (16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for his play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre.
Synge suffered from Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer at the time untreatable. He died just weeks short of his 38th birthday and was at the time trying to complete his last play, The Last Black Supper.
CHARACTERS
Maurya: an old Aran fisher-woman, whose name echoes the Greek word moira, meaning ‘fate’. She is a poor victim of dark fatality as represented by the unrelenting sea. The most important aspect of her chracterisation is the change in her attitude to life & death after her last son & the last surviving male member of her family, Bartley, is drowned in the sea. Maurya senses a paradoxical victory over the tyrant-god, for the sea can cause no more harm to the old woman who becomes a sort of mythical embodiment of suffering humanity & the transcendence of suffering.
Bartley: He is the one of the two riders in the play, the other being the ghost of Maurya’s fifth son, Michael. Stubborn in his decision to go to the sea despite the old mother’s premonition & entreaties, Bartley stands for the survival instinct in man, the eros as opposed to the thanatos( death drive) of which the all-devouring sea is the pervading symbol. Bartley rides the red mare, while Michael’s grey pony follows him. It is the grey pony which knocks the red mare down into the sea. Cathleen forgets to give Bartley his bread at the time of his departure; Maurya is unable to deliver the bread as well as her blessing to Barley at the Spring-well; we learn at the end that Maurya forgot to buy nails required for making his coffin. The symbols like the bread & nails, and the fact that Bartley’s near-sacrificial death ironically salvages Maurya from her long victimhood, may suggest that Synge conceived Bartley as a Christ figure.
Cathleen & Nora: They are the two daughters of Maurya. The elder daughter, Cathleen, is more responsible and hard-working, taking care of the household. Nora is a bit immature and innocent, serving as a link with the world out of doors.
SUMMARY
After nine days of constant grieving for her missing son, Michael, who, she feels certain, has been drowned; old Maurya has fallen into a fitful sleep. Her daughter, Cathleen, is busy with household tasks, when another daughter, Nora, slips quietly into the kitchen with a bundle given her by the young priest. It contains part of the clothes taken from the body of a drowned man far in the north. They have been sent to Maurya’s cottage with a view to possible identification.
As Maurya shows signs of waking the girls hide the bundle until sometime when they shall be alone. Maurya’s grieving for Michael is now coupled with fear of losing Bartley, her only remaining son. Five sons and a husband she has already lost to the sea. Will that insatiable tyrant insist on taking her sixth. The priest says not. But now Bartley insists that he will cross to the mainland this very day, in spite of winds and high seas, to dispose of a horse at the fair.
In a fit of pique at this only remaining son for not listening to her pleas, Maurya lets him go without her blessing. The girls persuade her to intercept him with the lunch they had forgotten to give him and so to make opportunity for that blessing a mother should have given.
While Maurya is gone the girls open the package. The clothes are, indeed, Michael’s. Their only comfort is the thought that his body has been given a good Christian burial there in the north where it was washed up. At this point Maurya returns terrified with a vision she had had of Michael riding on the led horse behind Bartley. Now she is sure Bartley is doomed. When the girls show her Michael’s clothes her only response is that the good white boards she had bought for his coffin would serve for Bartley instead.
Even as she speaks, the neighboring women troop in, their voices raised in the “keen,” that monotonous Irish chant of grief. Men follow bringing the body of Bartley who has been knocked off a cliff into the surf by the horse he was leading. The play closes on the note of Maurya’s fatalistic submission. She can sleep now with no worry but that of starvation. “They’re all gone now and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me. . . . No man at all can be living forever and we must be satisfied.”
Riders to the Sea was first produced at Molesworth Hall, Dublin, on February 25, 1904.