Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/191

 Rh put on respectively October 8, 1903, and February 25, 1904, at Molesworth Hall, Dublin. "The Tinker's Wedding" which has been played only once, and then in London, dates from about the same time. "The Well of the Saints" was produced on February 4, 1905, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and "The Playboy of the Western World" on January 26, 1907, at the same place, to the accompaniment of an uproar that a certain element of Irishmen have considered it proper to create ever since on its first appearance in all cities whatsoever, whether in Great Britain or America. One wonders what they would have done had he made it as biting as Ibsen made "Peer Gynt." "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which Synge left unrevised, was first produced at the Abbey Theatre on January 13, 1910, the last of the six plays of his maturity. It was in the years from 1902 to 1909 that he had "what is best and richest"—a full life, lived largely in the Ireland that he loved; the artist's joy in making that life into a new beauty, a beauty that was all compact of exaltation and extravagance and irony; and love for a woman in whom his man's life and his artist's life were united, for her who embodied his dream of Pegeen Mike and added her life and her art of the stage to his dream of Deirdre, as day by day it emerged from his mind. And so great was his joy in these good things that his precarious health, and even his year—long last illness, could not, while he had any strength, lessen the high spirit of his writing. There is none of his plays more vital than "Deirdre of the Sorrows."

And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation,