By advocating this approach to the language of a given community, Synge attempts to draw the audience’s attention to the power of language to shape and capture reality. Widow Quin, when she arrives at the pub, says, “I’m after meeting Shawn Keogh and Father Reilly below,” indicating that this has just happened moments ago.
As one example among many, the play makes frequent use of “I’m after” to indicate “I have just”-this is known as the “hot news perfect” in Irish English. Whatever opinion audience members have on this question of authentic representation, the play is undoubtedly populated with distinctly Irish English ways of speaking. This is especially interesting in Synge’s case, as he did not have a rural upbringing. Synge’s play thus depends on an element of trust between the artist and society-the claim that the former can truly represent the latter. He expressly states this aim in the preface, saying, “I have used one or two words only, that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland.” He views his art as being a “collaboration” between the artist and the “folk-imagination,” stating that the “wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed compared with the fancies one might hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay” (all rural Irish communities). Synge is careful throughout The Playboy of the Western World to render the speech of its coastal community as faithfully as possible. Thus, The Playboy of the Western World reveals the power of words to represent, entertain, and enrich people. Synge’s work: firstly, to create art specific to Ireland and its people, and secondly to do justice to Irish English by distilling its living, breathing richness into poetic and dramatic forms. Ultimately, The Playboy of the Western World is a manifestation of two dual impulses in J.M. Yeats famously told Synge to “give up Paris”-where the two had met-and instead spend time on the Aran Islands (off the west coast of Ireland) to find the poetry undiscovered in rural Irish life. This was part of an overall trend among artists in Ireland to portray their country with realism, spearheaded by the poet W.B.
Synge was committed to rendering Irish English in a way that would do it justice and be considered authentic, an intention that is clear in The Playboy of the Western World. The Playboy of the Western World is a rich and evocative-sounding play that seeks to highlight the poetry and musicality of Irish English (also known as Hiberno-English)-its rhythms, cadences, and capacity for simile and metaphor.
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