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Analysis Of Synge's In The Shadow Of The Glen

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Synge’s evergreen play In the Shadow of the Glen(1903), though it winds up in half an hour, it delivers a great dramatic punch. It is an outcome of a story he happened to hear at Aran Islands which he narrated later in his work The Aran Islands. Though it is a one-act play, it captures bitter humor and biting wit of peasant life of Ireland. In this play Synge portrays Nora Burke as the actual representative of women who are subject to tragedies that are the ultimate results of presiding social mores of Ireland. He rejected to an extent the idealized creation of the peasant, which had been a central aspect of writings done by the revivalist writers. Such revivalists hardly knew the peasants they tried to present in their work so that they could construct them as per the idealization, inside the noble realm of poverty and suffering. Dublin audience did not know exactly – and did not want to know the real Irish. So that they created in their minds an idealized version of Irish peasant which was promoted by the plays of the Irish National Theatre Society, such as W. B. Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), or Douglas Hyde’s Irish-language plays. As a result of this blind idealization, Synge’s works were attacked for the actual presentation of Irish folks as they are. Breaking the very expectation of the Dublin audience about the portrayal of characters, his characters did not fit to the idealized ones. During the summer days he spent in Wicklow and the Aran islands Synge had
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