27 APPENDICES
A. Biography of John Mellington
Jhon Mellington Synge was born on April 16, 1871 to a middle class
Protestant family. He was educated at private schools in Dublin and studied piano,
flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
He was a talented student and attended Trinity College where he studied Irish and
Hebrew. During this time Synge encountered the writings of Darwin and
developed and interest in the Aran Islands. Reading Darwin coincided with a
crisis of faith and Synge abandoned the Protestant religion of his upbringing.
Post college he went to Germany to pursue a career in music but found
that he was too shy to perfotm so he quit and began pursuing writing. In 1894
Synge moved back to Ireland for a short time and then to Paris to study literature
and language at the Sorbonne. In 1896, Synge visited Italy to study language
before returning to Paris. Later that year he met William Butler Yeats who
recognized his talent and encouraged him to live in the Aran Islands for a while
and then return to Dublin to devote himself to creative work. Beginning in 1898,
Synge spent five consecutive summers on the islands collecting stories and
folklore. It was this same year that he wrote his first play When the Moon Hat Set.
Two years later, in 1900 he sent his play to the Irish Literature Theatre but
it was rejected. He was though, piblished in the New Ireland Review with an
account of his life on the islands. 1901 saw the construction of his second two
plays, Riders to the Sea and Shadow of the Glen. The latter of which was his first
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the Abbey Theatre and produce Riders to the Sea. Synge was appointed Literary
advisor to the theatre and became one of the directors of the company.
In 1907 Synge’s book length journal The Aran Islands was published. It is
slow paced reflection of life on the islands and reflects Synge’s belief that beneath
the Catholicism of the islanders there were older pagan beliefs of the people’s
ancestors. In the same year, Playboy of the Western World, perhaps Synge’s most
well known play was produced at the Abbey and was met with an uproar from
Irish Nationalists.March 24, 1909, at age 38, Synge died of Hodgkin’s disease
leaving behind an important legacy as a key figure in the Irish Litarary Revival.
Other WorksThe Well of the Saints (1905), The Tinker’s Wedding (1908),
Poems and Translations (1909), Deirdre of the Sorrows (completed by W.B.
Yeats and Molly Allgood in (1910), In Wicklow and West Kerry (completed in
1912).
B. Summary of Riders to the Sea
After Nine days of constant grieving for her missing son, Michael, old
Maurya is fallen into a restless sleep. Her daughter, Cathleen, is busy with house
hold tasks, when another daughter, Nora, slips quietly in to the kitchen with a
bundle given her by the young priest. It contains part of the clothes taken from the
body of a drowned man far in the north. They have been sent to the family for
identification, since the clothes may belong to her missing brother.The girls go to
open the package but then decide to hide it in case their mother, who is waking
up, should come in and see them crying Maurya enters.
After the sea had claimed the lives of her husband and four eldest sons,
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to sell a horse, which was the trip Micheal took when he died. But Bartley insists
that he will crossthe main land in spite of winds and high seas. Mad and
aggravated at Bartley for not listening to her please, Maurya allows him to go,
however, without her blessing. Cathleen and Nora persuade their mother to chase
Bartley with the food they forgot togive him and to give him her blessing
regardless of her fears. While she is gone the girls open the package.
Nora recognizes her own stitching in one of the socks, and immediately
knows that the owner of the clothes was indeed her brother, Michael. Their only
comfort isthe hope that his body has been given a good Christian burial where it
was washed up. Maurya returns horrified with a vision she has seen of Michael
riding on the horse behind Bartley. She claims that the vision proves that her fear
of Bartley’s death is being realized.
When her daughters show Maurya the clothes her only response is that the
boards she bought for Michael’s coffin will serve for Bartley instead. As Maurya
speaks the neighboring women enter keening. The Men follow shortly, carrying
the body of Bartley who has been knocked off a cliff into the waves by the horse
he was intending to sell. The play closes on the note of Maurya’s accepting
surrender to the sea, and to the course of life: “They’re all gone now and there
isn’t anything mire the sea can do to me… No man at all can be living forever and
we must be satisfied.”
C. The characteristics Riders to the Sea
A Bundle of Clothes : Cathleen finishes kneading a cake, puts it in the oven and sits down to a spinning wheel. Nora stealthily enters the kitchen, making sure that
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were got off an unknown drowned man in Donegal, a place far north. They are to
find out whether or not these clothes belong to their brother Michael who was lost
at sea nine days before. They hear the mother moving about in the inner room and
quickly hide the bundle in the turf-loft because they do not want to upset her.
Maurya has been going to the sea the last nine days in case Michael’s body was
washed up and she is nearly ‘getting her death… with crying and lamenting’.
Bartley’s Departure: Maurya hopes that Bartley will be prevented from going with
the horses to the Galway fair today. The weather is threatening and Maurya fears
for him. The young priest fails to stop him but he believes that ‘the Almighty God
won’t leave her destitute... with no son living’. Bartley hurriedly enters the
kitchen to get ready for the trip. He gives Cathleen instructions as to what to do
during his absence. Meanwhile his mother goes on talking, trying to persuade him
not to go. Bartley must go the fair to sell the horses, but Maurya laments: ‘If it
was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a
thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?’ Nobody seems to pay
any attention to Maurya’s desperate pleads:
MAURYA: Isn’t it a hard and cruel man won’t hear a word from an old woman, and she holding him from the sea?
CATHLEEN: It’s the life of a young man to be going on the sea, and who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over? Bartley leaves,
blessing the family, but Maurya fails to return the blessing. Maurya’s Foreboding:
Maurya declares that this was the last time that they saw Bartley alive. Cathleen
does not heed Maurya’s superstitious prediction and reproaches the mother for
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Bartley his bread. She cuts it, rolls it in a cloth and sends Maurya with the bread
after him so that she could say ‘God speed you’ and break the unlucky word.
Maurya obeys but complains: ‘In the big world the old people do be leaving
things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men
do be leaving things behind for them that do be old. ’Michael’s Stocking:
Cathleen and Nora wait a while until Maurya disappears from view. Then they
quickly open the bundle with the clothes and examine it. They cannot tell at first
whether or not they are Michael’s, but then Nora counts the stitches of the
stocking and recognizes her own pattern. Michael has got ‘a clean burial by the
grace of God’. Maurya can be heard coming. The girls hide the bundle because
they do not want to add to Maurya’s misery as long as Bartley is on the sea.
Maurya’s Vision: Maurya enters the kitchen, still holding the bundle with the
bread. She does not look at the girls, neither does she say anything. She sits down
on her stool at the fire place and starts keening softly. She does not answer the
impatient questions of the girls, she only says that she saw a most fearful thing.
Talking slowly, as a broken woman, she finally reveals that she saw Bartley riding
the red mare, the grey pony behind him, and that she saw Michael himself in fine
clothes on the pony. Bartley said ‘the blessing of God on you’, and she tried to
returnthe blessing, but the words got choked in her throat, and she remained silent.
Cathleen explains to Maurya that she could not have seen Michael because his
body has been found in the far north. Maurya insists on what she saw. Drowned
Sons: Maurya declares that Bartley will be lost and demands that Eamon be called
in to make her a coffin out of the white boards because she will not outlive
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Stephen and Shawn in a great wind, their bodies were found and carried to the
house on one plank. She lost her son Sheamus, her husband and her father-in-law
in a dark night, their bodies were never found. She lost her son Patch who
drowned when his curagh turned over, his body was carried to the house wrapped
in a red sail from which water was dripping and leaving a track to the door. The
men with the body were preceded byseveral women who came in, crossed
themselves and did not say a word.
Bartley’s Body: Nora and Cathleen hear someone crying out by the seashore.
Maurya continues her soliloquy without hearing anything. Several old women
come in, cross themselves and kneel down without saying a word. Half in a
dream, Maurya wonders whose body is going to follow, Patch’s or Michael’s?
Cathleen says that it cannot be Michael’s and hands Maurya the bundle with
Michael’s clothes. Several men come in, carrying Bartley’s body laid on a plank
and covered with a piece of sail. The grey pony knocked him into the sea, and his
body was washed out. The men kneel down, and so does Maurya and her
daughters.
Fulfilment: The women keen softly in the background. Maurya takes the Holy Water, drops Michael’s clothes across Bartley’s feet and starts sprinkling the
water over the body. She speaks as if she did not see the people around her:
‘They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me’. She
says that she certainly did pray for all her loved ones but admits that she
welcomes the ‘great rest’ she will have now. Nora wonders how calmly the
mother receives the death of her last son, but Cathleen explains: ‘An old woman
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crying and keening, and making great sorrow in the house’? Maurya, resigned,
prays for the deceased and the living ones and concludes:
MAURYA: ‘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
