Gallous Stories or Dirty Deeds? Representing Parricide in J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World

Abstract

The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. Gallous Stories or Dirty Deeds?Representing Parricide in The Playboy of the Western World Piers Beirne and Ian O'Donnell Largely ignored in sociology and criminology, The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge is the most famous and the most controversial play in the history of Irish theatre. This article examines the meaning of the apparent parricide at the centre of Synge's play. Though Synge's authorial intentions in respect of the play's parricide are not open to complete reclamation, we examine, first, his self-stated reliance on the violent actions of William Maley and James Lynchehaun and second, with the aid of police records and newspaper reportage, we delve into the situation of intergenerational homicide whenPlayboy was being imagined and first performed. The culture wars and associated media frenzy around the play provide an instructive backcloth against which to interpret the meanings of violence in a colonial society on a path to national self-determination. Introduction: Murder and Mayhem in The Playboy of the Western WorldI'll say a strange man is a marvel with his mighty talk; but what's a squabble in your back-yard and the blow of a loy have taught me that there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed.The Playboy of the Western World (Act 3, lines 570-573) 1 Gallous, 1. n., alt. gallows; 2. adj., deserving to be hanged; 3. daring, wicked, mischievous; 4. type of humour.Its narrative never quite finished to the satisfaction of its author, the playwright John Millington Synge (1871Synge ( -1909, The Playboy of the Western World (Synge, 1907a; henceforth, "Playboy") was first performed in public by the Irish National Theatre Society on 26 January 1907. The performance, at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, was jointly directed by Synge himself and by his friends the poet WB Yeats and the English playwright and theatre patron Lady Augusta Gregory.Playboy was in the vanguard of the Irish literary renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Probably the most famous play in Irish history, it is surely the most controversial.Playboy is a story in three Acts. It is set in a shebeen (a small pub), in remote County Act One begins on a dark autumn night when a young, landless peasant, Christy Mahon, stumbles frightened, tired and dirty into the shebeen. There is considerable speculation among the assembled customers that this young man might be on the run from the law. All are stunned Christy implies that he committed this deed because his father had treated him very roughly. He rues, moreover, that his father was 'a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old and crusty, the way I couldn't put up with him at all' (1:266-268). Not long after, Christy embellishes his motive by stating that just before the murder, while they were digging potatoes together, his father was de...