This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ...we may find it in the raw state in In Wicklow, where Synge is told of the poor fellow who was taken by some excitement and threw off" his clothes and ran away into the hills; and nothing was known of him until they found his body eaten by the crows. Patch Darcy is important to the tragedy of Nora. Synge brooded over the old man's story told in Aran, and finally gave it its setting in Wicklow. For here, "the peculiar climate, acting on a population that is already lonely and dwindling, 1 See Tlie Aran Islands. has caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful to that of the man who has spent half his life in the mad-house, is common among these hills." Another of the Wicklow plays, the Tinker's Wedding, is to be seen in outline in the journals. This outline has been filled in with rich amusement to make the comedy. The "poor price " to be given for the good Priest's offices has become a "little small sum wouldn't marry a child." The tin can, in the comedy, is drunk at the fall of night, with no good time elapsing, by old Mary Byrne, who thus pushes the ass into a subsidiary part only--both changes dictated by the dramatist's sure instinct. For the Well of the Saints, there is a hint only; in the old Wicklow tramper who had been a month in Kilmainham, and "cared nothing for the plank-bed and uncomfortable diet; but he always gathered himself together, and cursed with extraordinary rage, as he told how they had cut off the white hair which had grown down upon his shoulders." His pride and dignity, like Mary Doul's and Martin Doul's, were in his distinction from the other people: "and I have often...

A seminal study of one of Ireland's major dramatists, still held in highest regard today by scholars and critics.