Plot Summary Of The Play The Tinker's Wedding

Chapter :3
Tinkers wedding Like all of Synge’s plays, the basic plot of The Tinker’s Wedding derives from folk stories of Irish culture. In fact, the play represents a dramatisation of folk stories told In Wicklow and West Kerry. In the first essay of this prose work “The Vagrants of Wicklow”, a man “on the side of a mountain to the east of Aughavanna, in Wicklow” tells his observations about the tinkers he saw (Synge 4). He mentions the vigorous lifestyle and the marriage customs of the roaming tinkers and tramps. He says that one time he saw fifty of them on the road and “[t]hey are gallous lads for walking through the world” and one of these lads “would swap the woman he had with one from another man, with as much talk as if you 'd be selling a cow” (Synge, In Wicklow 5). The second source Synge would use in his play is the tale of tinkers bargaining with a priest to marry them for money and a tin can. The story Synge heard from a herder when he was at a Wicklow fair is recounted in “At a Wicklow Fair”. Synge tells the story that stirred his imagination:
One time he and his woman went up to a priest in the hills and asked him would he wed them for half a sovereign, I think it was. The priest

Thus, it could be claimed that Synge adds different aspects to the old tinker woman of the original story and creates a marginal character like Mary Byrne in order to reveal the contrast between nature and Christianity. Similarly, Wakamatsu puts forward that throughout the play “[t]wo kinds of law are contrasted — natural law and Christian law” (63). As a result of this comparison, it could be suggested that the tinkers, namely the peasantry in the Irish countryside, had found the principle of life that Synge had been searching for throughout his own life. And, it is the vigour of natural life that is above