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Riders To The Sea Analysis

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Riders to the Sea is a play written by Irish Literary Renaissance playwright John Millington Synge. It was first performed on 25 February 1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theater Society. A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Island, Irishman, and like all of Synge’s plays it is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland. The plot is based not on the traditional conflict of human wills but on the hopeless struggle of a people against the impersonal but relentless cruelty. In 1897, J. M. Synge was encouraged by his friend and colleague William Butler Yeats to visit the Aran Islands. He went on to spend the summers from 1898 to 1903 there. While on the Aran island of Irishman, Synge heard the story of a man from Irishman whose body washed up on the shore of the island of Donegal, which inspired Riders to the Sea..Riders to the Sea is written in the dialect of the Aran islands.

About the Play

This little drama, while it has none of the uproarious “romping” of The Playboy of the Western World, is still an …show more content…

Character analysis of the play Riders to the sea

Characters in Riders to the Sea are Maurya, Cathleen, Nora and Bartley. Men carrying Bartley’s body & women keening ahead of the dead may be seen as rather choral figures at a point of transcendence.

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 sea. The most important aspect of her character is the change in her attitude to life and death after her last son and 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 and the transcendence of

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