SYNGE, J.M. The Playboy of the Western World. A comedy in three acts. Edited by Stanley Sultan, with six brush drawings printed in colour by Louis le Brocquy.

Massachusetts: Imprint Society, 1970. Imperial octavo. pp. 132. Yellow buckram, gilt decorated. Edition limited to 1,950 copies. Signed by the artist Louis le Brocquy and Stanley Sultan. In fine condition.

John Millington Synge (1871-1909), playwright, was born in Rathfarnham, County Dublin and educated at Trinity College where he won prizes in Irish and Hebrew. He studied at the R.I.A.M. and became proficient on the piano, violin and flute. Turning to literature he settled in Paris where he met W.B. Yeats, who advised him to return to the Aran Islands and write about the way of life there. By 1905, his plays ‘In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea’ and ‘The Well of Saints’ had been performed in the Abbey, and Synge became the leading playwright of the literary revival.
When the Abbey Theatre opened in December 1904, Synge became literary advisor and later a director with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His great comedy, ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, now a classic of the Irish theatre, caused a riot on its first Abbey production in 1907. Undeterred, Yeats put on ‘The Tinker’s Wedding’ shortly afterwards. In the same year ‘The Aran Islands’ (illustrated by Jack B. Yeats) was published.
His last and unfinished play, ‘Deirdre of the Sorrows’, was said to have been inspired by his love for the actress Molly Allgood (Maire O’Neill), who played Pegeen Mike in ‘The Playboy’.
Suffering from Hodgkin’s disease, he died unmarried, on 24 March, 1909. Ironically Synge never saw his collected works in print. They were first published by Maunsel in 1910.
Fine American edition, printed by Dolmen but never published here. Very scarce.

[L3 8G]