Analysis Of John Millington Synge's The Playboy Of The Western World

The Playboy of the Western World, John Millington Synge’s last completed work, is the author’s greatest play, and in many ways his most difficult to interpret. J.M. Synge wrote several of his most famous works during the years of the Celtic Revival, and played a significant role in the social movement along with his friends and colleagues Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. J.M. Synge uses the representation of the Irish in his play The Playboy of the Western World to radically critique the idealization of the Irish. The social situation of the Ireland ,during this time has to be discussed. England was ruling over Ireland in a tyrannical manner. The liberties of the people were being crushed and they were being mercilessly exploited. The people of

Doesn’t the world know you reared a black ram at your own breast, so that the lord bishop of Connaught felt the elements of a Christian, and he eating it after in a kidney stew?doesn’t the world know you’ve been seen shaving the foxy skipper from france for a three-penny bit and a sop of grass tobacco would wring the liver from a mountain goat you’d meet leaping the hills?”(PWW.92)
When Christy asks widow quin what pegeen would think of him after she comes to know that his father is alive, the widow says, “she will knock the head of you, I’m thinking, and drive you from the door”(PWW.109). Her father calls her a “hardy girl(who) would knock the heads of any two men in the place.” When Christy showers praises on her she tells him truthfully that she has the notoriety of being the “fright of seven town lands for biting to

For the women of County Mayo, Christy is in great contrast with those like Shawn who is, in Pegeens words, “a middling kind of a scarecrow, with no savagery or fine words in him at all” (PWW. 122). Christy Mahon comes from Irish peasant stock. He was the laughingstock of his village, where women went out of their way to belittle him. He is dirty and unlearned, having done poorly at school. Before the attempted patricide, he lived a life of cringing submission to his father. However, this reality stands in stark contrast to the tale he tells, of an act so unnatural, so divorced from the stifling constraints of traditional morality, that it sets Pegeen’s imagination alight. Though she is observant enough to recognize what he truly is, she is so blinded by the potential of his tale that she blinds herself to this reality. What this reveals is that she values above all else the "fiery" nature of language and words. Through his language, Christy eventually becomes the man he pretends to be. In the beginning of Act II, the girls of the region and Widow Quinn walk four miles in order to satisfy their curiosity about the newcomer since, for the women, he is much more than an outlaw having killed his father. Spehn’s comments on Pegeen’s admiration can be considered true for the rest of the women of Mayo as well: “Pegeen, disgusted with the weak, spineless lads of Mayo, welcomes