DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Playboy of the Western World" (A Comedy in Three Acts) by J. M. Synge. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This edition of The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge is given by Ashed Phoenix - Million Book Edition

‘I’m thinking this night wasn’t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in years gone by.’ – Christy Mahon On the first night of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) the audience began protesting in the theatre; by the third night the protests had spilled onto the streets of Dublin. How did one play provoke this? Christopher Collins addresses The Playboy ’s satirical treatment of illusion and realism in light of Ireland’s struggle for independence, as well as Synge’s struggle for artistic expression. By exploring Synge’s unpublished diaries, drafts and notebooks, he seeks to understand how and why the play came to be. This volume invites the reader behind the scenes of this inflammatory play and its first performances, to understand how and why Synge risked everything in the name of art.

Though he completed only five plays in his short lifetime, J. M. Synge, co-founder of the Abbey Theater, ranks as one of Ireland’s greatest playwrights. Rescuing the Irish peasant from a romanticized stereotype, his plays capture the essence of the Irish spirit in both his realistic characters and his unique language. In the Shadow of the Glen Synge’s first play (1903), based on an Irish folktale, combines the macabre with broad comedy, as an elderly husband fakes his death to test his discontented young wife’s fidelity. Rider to the Sea The greatest short tragedy in modern drama, this moving one-act play from 1904 depicts a peasant woman who has lost her husband and sons, one by one, to the raging sea. The Playboy of the Western World Synge’s satirical masterpiece, produced in 1907, is one of the great comedies of Irish life. A young stranger enraptures villagers with claims of killing his father. In classic Synge style it combines the real versus the fanciful, the traditional versus the individual.