When John Millington Synge and Molly Allgood fell in love, he
was thirty-five, she nineteen. Neither knew that he had Hodgkin's
disease, of which he was to die in three years. Synge had already
achieved recognition as a playwright--translations of two of his
plays had been performed in Berlin and Prague--and he was
codirector, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, of the Irish National
Theatre Society. Molly had started her acting career the year
before, in the newly opened Abbey Theatre, with a walk-on part in
Synge's "Well of the Saints." She had been promoted from crowd
scenes to bit parts to lead roles in "Riders to the Sea" and "The
Shadow of the Glen." She was still only a member of the company,
however, while Synge was a director, whose codirectors disapproved
of fraternization. Synge and Molly also faced the disapproval of
two widowed mothers. Barring an occasional holiday trip or company
road tour, they could seldom be alone together, except on secret
afternoon meetings for long walks in the country. Hence their
hundreds of letters.
Molly's letters do not survive; they apparently were destroyed
when Synge died. But his letters convey her mercurial charm, her
openness, her love of life, her impulsiveness, and her temper--as
violent as his own. What they convey of him (when he is not
reproving her or remonstrating with her, as he does in the early
months of their relationship) is the love of nature, the poetic
language, the bittersweet irony, the elemental quality of emotion,
that we know from the plays. His concern for his craft is seen as
he struggles with "The Playboy." ("Parts of it are not structurally
strong or good. I have been all this time trying to get over weak
situations by strong writing, but now I find it won't do, and I am
at my wit's end.") Synge was quite unperturbed by the violent
outrage and near-riots the play provoked. ("Now we'll be talked
about. We're an event in the history of the Irish stage," he wrote
cheerily.)
As his illness progresses, following operations in 1907 and
1908, there is great poignancy in the gradual abating of references
to marriage plans and in the shift of salutation from "Dearest
Changeling" to "My dearest child."
After Synge's death his friends and biographers discreetly
avoided mention of Molly, who under her stage name of Maire O'Neill
became one of the leading actresses of the Irish theater and lived
until 1952. His letters to her have not been published before,
except for the few quoted in Greene and Stephens' 1959 biography. A
primary source for the study of Synge and the Irish theater
movement, the letters include poems inspired by Molly and extensive
information about Abbey Theatre business.
In addition to a biographical introduction, Ann Saddlemyer has
included a map of the Wicklow and Dublin areas and numerous
photographs of both Synge and Molly.
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