John Millington Synge

Synge's paternal grandfather, also named John Synge, was an evangelical Christian involved in the movement that became the Plymouth Brethren, and his maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, was a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Famine.

He was a descendant of Edward Synge, Archbishop of Tuam, and Edward's son Nicholas, the Bishop of Killaloe.

His nephews included mathematician John Lighton Synge and optical microscopy pioneer Edward Hutchinson Synge.

Edmund John Millington Synge (16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival.

His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

Synge was born on 16 April 1871, in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, the youngest of eight children of upper-middle-class Protestant parents.

His father John Hatch Synge was a barrister, and came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow.

Synge's father died from smallpox in 1872 at the age of 49.

He was buried on his son's first birthday.

His mother moved the family to the house next door to her own mother's house in Rathgar, County Dublin.

Although often ill, Synge had a happy childhood there.

He developed an interest in bird-watching along the banks of the River Dodder, and during family holidays at the seaside resort of Greystones, County Wicklow, and the family estate at Glanmore.

Synge was educated at home and at times at schools in Dublin and Bray, and later studied piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

He travelled to the continent to study music, but changed his mind and decided to focus on literature.

The family moved to the suburb of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in 1888, and Synge entered Trinity College, Dublin, the following year.

Between November 1889 and 1894 he took private music lessons with Robert Prescott Stewart.

Synge later developed an interest in Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, and became a member of the Irish League for a year.

He left the League because, as he told Maud Gonne, "my theory of regeneration for Ireland differs from yours ... I wish to work on my own for the cause of Ireland, and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement."

He was a talented student and won a scholarship in counterpoint in 1891.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1892, having studied Irish and Hebrew, as well as continuing his music studies and playing with the Academy Orchestra in the Antient Concert Rooms.

His early interest was in music, leading to a scholarship and degree at Trinity College Dublin, and he went to Germany in 1893 to study music.

In 1893 he published his first known work, a poem influenced by Wordsworth, Kottabos: A College Miscellany.

After graduating, Synge moved to Germany to study music.

He stayed in Coblenz during 1893 and moved to Würzburg in January 1894.

Owing partly to his shyness about performing in public, and partly to his doubt about his ability, he decided to abandon music and pursue his literary interests.

He abandoned this career path in 1894 with a move to Paris where he took up poetry and literary criticism and met Yeats, and then returned to Ireland.

Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease.

He died aged 37 from Hodgkin's-related cancer, while writing what became Deirdre of the Sorrows, considered by some as his masterpiece, though unfinished during his lifetime.

Although he left relatively few works, they are widely regarded as of high cultural significance.

He returned to Ireland in June 1894, and moved to Paris in January 1895 to study literature and languages at the Sorbonne.

He met Cherrie Matheson during summer breaks with his family in Dublin.

He proposed to her in 1895 and again the next year, but she turned him down on both occasions because of their differing views on religion.

This rejection affected Synge greatly and reinforced his determination to spend as much time as possible outside Ireland.

In 1896, he visited Italy to study the language before returning to Paris.

He planned on making a career in writing about French authors for the English press.

In that same year he met W. B. Yeats, who encouraged him to live for a while in the Aran Islands, and then return to Dublin and devote himself to creative work.

In 1899 he joined with Yeats, Augusta, Lady Gregory, and George William Russell to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which later established the Abbey Theatre.

His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Tinker's Wedding (1909).

Although he came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background, his writings mainly concern working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view.

Owing to his ill health, Synge was schooled at home.