Abstract
John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea is a tragedy -- the tragedy of a whole people earning their living upon the surging breakers, battling against the monstrous waves in their small curaghs, with dark fate ever brooding over them. The islanders’ fear and hatred of this inexorable fate is given full expression in the drama, seemingly indicating that the sea by its terror and sublimity had cast a shadow upon Synge during his visit to the Aran Islands making him Greek-minded in the presence of tragedy. |Though Synge’s tragic drama, Riders to the Sea, is Greek in essence, it throbs with life — a simple common life as felt and seen and sung by Synge among isolated humanity, the poor Irish peasants on the rock-bound Aran Islands thirty miles off the western coast of Ireland—a life of enduring suffering and struggling' with the soil and sea. Synge sublimated the life of the islanders by his poetic prose, enlivened it by his colorful imagery, and endowed it with noble sentiment. Synge found an environment that was romantically primitive. |The drama in its simplicity, lucidity, dignity, and interpretation of a simple humanity is like a rare geode inlaid with innumerable glistening gem-crystals, each reflecting within its facets the untainted light of common life sublimating it to a pristine beauty. Though the play embodies the poetry of life, it maintains Greek dramatic qualities of the tragedies of the Golden Era. |To find in modern drama a tragedy so essentially Greek in essence as Synge's Riders to the Sea may appear rather enigmatical; all the more so, that Greek elements should be identified so distinctly in an Anglo-Irish drama of the modern era. To throw some light on this apparent enigma is the purpose of this thesis. |As a helpful preliminary for the study of the background of the drama and for a better understanding of the author's attitude in writing Riders to the Sea the next chapter offers a life sketch of the dramatist.