Note 42 — RIDERS TO THE SEA[41] By JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE

Synge, born April 16, 1871, at Newton Little, near Dublin, and dying in Dublin, March 24, 1909, belongs to that group of "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" who died before the prime of life was reached. He left six plays, notable the Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows, that are among the greatest in our language. He was delicate from the beginning, and after some education in private schools in Dublin and Bray, left school when about fourteen and studied with a tutor. In 1892 he took his B.A. degree from Trinity College, Dublin, whose rolls contain a number of names famous in English literature. While at college, he studied music at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he won a scholarship. His first impulse was to make music his career, and he spent portions of the next four years in Germany, France, and Italy studying music and traveling. In May, 1898, he first went to the Aran Islands, later to be the scene of Riders to the Sea. Thereafter in Paris in 1899 he met Yeats, who advised him to go back to the Aran Islands to renew his contact with the simple folk there. For the next three years he divided his time between Paris and Ireland. It was in 1904 that his play, Riders to the Sea,[42] was first produced. He was at Dublin that same year for the opening of the Abbey Theatre, of which he was one of the advisers. Whenever the Irish Players visited England, he traveled with them. In 1909 came the operation that ended his life.