Riders to the Sea " by John Millington Synge "

~ A7lA DoNiA ~ · 03-26-2010, 07:12 AM

Riders to the Sea

by
John Millington Synge
___________

Riders to the Sea is a play written by Irish playwright J. M. Synge. It was first performed on February 25,1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin by the Irish National Theater Society. A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Islands, and like all of Synge's plays it is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland.

Important Characters
Only four characters are named: Maurya, an elderly Irishwoman, her daughters Cathleen and Nell, and her son Bartley.

Also mentioned are Maurya's deceased sons Shawn, Sheamus, Stephen, Patch, and Michael.

Plot Synopsis
Maurya has lost her husband, father-in-law, and five sons to the sea. As the play begins Nell and Cathleen receive word that a body that may be their brother Michael has washed up on shore in Donegal, far to the north. Bartley is planning to sail to Connemara to sell a horse, and ignores Maurya's pleas to stay. As he leaves, Maurya predicts that by nightfall she will have no living sons, and her daughters chide her for sending Bartley off with an ill word. Maurya goes after Bartley to bless his voyage, and Nora and Cathleen receive clothing from the drowned corpse that confirms it as their brother. Maurya returns home claiming to have seen the ghost of Michael riding behind Bartley and begins lamenting the loss of the men in her family to the sea, after which some villagers bring in the corpse of Bartley, who has fallen off of his horse into the sea and drowned.

Analysis
This little drama, while it has none of the uproarious "romping" of The Playboy of the Western World, is still an unmistakable indication of John Millington Synge's keen enthusiasm for all the concerns of human life. If he can take pleasure in the vitality and animal spirits of a Christy Mahon, he can likewise savor the dumb tragedy of a Maurya. The play is a picture, compressed and synthesized, of the helplessness of a mother in her hopeless struggle with the sea.

Synge's perfect mastery of words is one of his greatest assets. Like Shakespeare, he can at once supply environment, create atmosphere, paint word-pictures. That sharp contrast between the homely and everyday in life and the gruesomeness of death is clearly drawn in Riders to the Sea. Bartley says: "Where is the bit of new rope, Cathleen, was bought in Connemara?" and Cathleen replies: "Give it to him, Nora, it's on a nail by the white boards. I hung it up this morning, for the pig with the black feet was eating it." This is what Yeats means when he speaks of Synge's loving all that has edge. In Vale, the second volume of his Hail and Farewell, George Moore wrote of Riders to the Sea: "... when I heard this one-act play, it seemed very little more than the contents of Synge's notebook, an experiment in language rather than a work of art, a preparatory essay; he seemed to me to have contented himself with relating a painful rather than a dramatic story, his preoccupation being to discover a style, a vehicle of expression...." And the incident is painful rather than dramatic, for the struggle must be felt in the background, it cannot be seen and participated in by the audience. Consequently, we might almost feel that the struggle here depicted was so hopeless as to leave no room for anything but dumb submission. A true tragedy ought to give the hero a chance to fight; here the dice are loaded. The play is, however, a powerful and beautiful picture.

Riders to the Sea serves to illustrate the essential difference between the one-act play and the play in two or more acts: since the former is almost always concerned with but a single incident, it is capable of very little development. Now a tragedy is not a fact nor an event; it must show great and strong characters -- or a least characters in which there is potential greatness or strength -- struggling with forces which are finally too great to overcome. And we must see the struggle. A tragic figure must have the opportunity to fail honorably, and we wish to see him trying to evade his fate. Hamlet would be ordinary melodrama if he were deprived of his soul-revealing soliloquies; Oedipus, too, if we could not follow the King's efforts to escape what was decreed. A one-act play can scarcely more than indicate the result of a struggle. The last act of Hamlet is not a tragedy in itself, and Riders to the Sea, like that last act, is but the result of what has gone on for a long time before. At the end we feel something of the great sorrow and eventual peace of the old woman in her last words: "Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied." Still, the struggle was wanting.

03-26-2010, 07:12 AM	المشاركة رقم: 1
الكاتب ~ A7lA DoNiA ~ بواب نشط المعلومات التسجيل: Mar 2010 العضوية: 43 المشاركات: 200 بمعدل : 0.04 يوميا التوقيت الإتصال	المنتدى : نافذة الأدب الأنجليزى Riders to the Sea " by John Millington Synge " Riders to the Sea by John Millington Synge ___________ Riders to the Sea is a play written by Irish playwright J. M. Synge. It was first performed on February 25,1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin by the Irish National Theater Society. A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Islands, and like all of Synge's plays it is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland. Important Characters Only four characters are named: Maurya, an elderly Irishwoman, her daughters Cathleen and Nell, and her son Bartley. Also mentioned are Maurya's deceased sons Shawn, Sheamus, Stephen, Patch, and Michael. Plot Synopsis Maurya has lost her husband, father-in-law, and five sons to the sea. As the play begins Nell and Cathleen receive word that a body that may be their brother Michael has washed up on shore in Donegal, far to the north. Bartley is planning to sail to Connemara to sell a horse, and ignores Maurya's pleas to stay. As he leaves, Maurya predicts that by nightfall she will have no living sons, and her daughters chide her for sending Bartley off with an ill word. Maurya goes after Bartley to bless his voyage, and Nora and Cathleen receive clothing from the drowned corpse that confirms it as their brother. Maurya returns home claiming to have seen the ghost of Michael riding behind Bartley and begins lamenting the loss of the men in her family to the sea, after which some villagers bring in the corpse of Bartley, who has fallen off of his horse into the sea and drowned. Analysis This little drama, while it has none of the uproarious "romping" of The Playboy of the Western World, is still an unmistakable indication of John Millington Synge's keen enthusiasm for all the concerns of human life. If he can take pleasure in the vitality and animal spirits of a Christy Mahon, he can likewise savor the dumb tragedy of a Maurya. The play is a picture, compressed and synthesized, of the helplessness of a mother in her hopeless struggle with the sea. Synge's perfect mastery of words is one of his greatest assets. Like Shakespeare, he can at once supply environment, create atmosphere, paint word-pictures. That sharp contrast between the homely and everyday in life and the gruesomeness of death is clearly drawn in Riders to the Sea. Bartley says: "Where is the bit of new rope, Cathleen, was bought in Connemara?" and Cathleen replies: "Give it to him, Nora, it's on a nail by the white boards. I hung it up this morning, for the pig with the black feet was eating it." This is what Yeats means when he speaks of Synge's loving all that has edge. In Vale, the second volume of his Hail and Farewell, George Moore wrote of Riders to the Sea: "... when I heard this one-act play, it seemed very little more than the contents of Synge's notebook, an experiment in language rather than a work of art, a preparatory essay; he seemed to me to have contented himself with relating a painful rather than a dramatic story, his preoccupation being to discover a style, a vehicle of expression...." And the incident is painful rather than dramatic, for the struggle must be felt in the background, it cannot be seen and participated in by the audience. Consequently, we might almost feel that the struggle here depicted was so hopeless as to leave no room for anything but dumb submission. A true tragedy ought to give the hero a chance to fight; here the dice are loaded. The play is, however, a powerful and beautiful picture. Riders to the Sea serves to illustrate the essential difference between the one-act play and the play in two or more acts: since the former is almost always concerned with but a single incident, it is capable of very little development. Now a tragedy is not a fact nor an event; it must show great and strong characters -- or a least characters in which there is potential greatness or strength -- struggling with forces which are finally too great to overcome. And we must see the struggle. A tragic figure must have the opportunity to fail honorably, and we wish to see him trying to evade his fate. Hamlet would be ordinary melodrama if he were deprived of his soul-revealing soliloquies; Oedipus, too, if we could not follow the King's efforts to escape what was decreed. A one-act play can scarcely more than indicate the result of a struggle. The last act of Hamlet is not a tragedy in itself, and Riders to the Sea, like that last act, is but the result of what has gone on for a long time before. At the end we feel something of the great sorrow and eventual peace of the old woman in her last words: "Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied." Still, the struggle was wanting.