The playfellow of Judas, J.M. Synge : Plays, politics and pre-Christian Ireland

Abstract

This dissertation provides a cultural materialist reading of J.M. Synge's dramatisation of the cultural residue of pre-Christian Ireland in five of his seven plays: The Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and The Tinker's Wedding (1909). Synge’s two remaining plays When the Moon has Set (2002) and Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910) are omitted from concentric analysis. When the Moon has Set certainly draws upon the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland but the efficacy of residual culture is secondary to Synge's critique of the decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class into which he was born. Deirdre of the Sorrows is set in pre-Christian Ireland and therefore it is unable to engage with residual sensibilities. Nevertheless, both plays are discussed in this dissertation in order to complement how the other five plays draw upon vestigial beliefs that are manifested as cultural praxes of animism, pantheism, folklore, superstition and magical ritual. The analysis necessitates cultural materialism because the various discursive theories that are concomitant with this strategy of analysis interrogate the relationship between literature and history, which, in turn, explores how Synge's plays were able to intervene within the Catholic, bourgeois ideology that controlled the means of cultural production in the Ireland of the dramatist's time. Of premier importance is Raymond Williams's theory of how a residual culture is able to problematise cultural hegemony. Synge’s dramatisation of such residue may have been irreducibly subject to the ideology of the Catholic bourgeoisie, but it also intervened within this dominance by articulating a subterranean culture that was counter-hegemonic to state-orientated Catholic nationalism. Each of the three chapters in this dissertation argues that Synge's plays interrogated the schematics of residual pre-Christian cultural belief and, in doing so, his drama is understood to be in dialogue with a contemporaneous critique of Catholic progressivism. As Ireland embraced modernity, the critique of Catholic progressivism was pervasive and Synge's plays tackle a specific aspect of the critique: progressive historicism. This thesis understands that Synge’s decision to dramatise a subaltern past that was suppressed by Catholic cultural imperialism was an attempt to brush the progressivism of Catholic historicism against the grain because it attempted to bring the discontents of Irish cultural history into hegemonic dialogue.