Synge's plays have not faded from the Irish stage, unlike the work of so many other playwrights of the Irish Dramatic Movement. His own works continue to merit regular production, particularly The Playboy of the Western World, and attract some of the most outstanding interpreters of the contemporary Irish stage. Yet the subversive originality of Synge's work is often more apparent nowadays in the profound impact and influence he continues to exert on contemporary Irish drama. Michael Billington, theatre critic of the Guardian, welcomed the DruidSynge staging by director Garry Hynes of Synge's six canonical plays in July 2005 as offering 'a rare chance to assess the man who did so much to shape modern Irish drama', and went on to note how Synge had been a 'fount of inspiration for other Irish writers'. Of the contemporary dramatists, Billington cites Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson and could well have added the names of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Marina Carr, all five of whom will be discussed in this chapter. When Friel - the most outstanding of contemporary Irish playwrights and arguably Synge's modern inheritor - spoke at the reopening of the 'Synge cottage' on Inis Meáin in 1999 he acknowledged Synge's influence not only on his own formidable body of work but on that of every other Irish playwright: 'On this occasion, on this island, it is very important to me to acknowledge the great master of Irish theatre, the man who made Irish theatre, the man who reshaped it and refashioned it, and the man before whom we all genuflect.' As Friel openly acknowledged, Synge laid out the template of what an Irish theatre might be.

It began as it was to continue, with conflicts and controversies. Synge's first performed play, The Shadow of the Glen, precipitated a split in the Irish National Theatre Society that staged it. At the play's premiere on 8 October 1903 in the Molesworth Hall in Dublin, two of the company walked out in protest, along with the recently resigned Vice-President of the INTS, Maud Gonne. Arthur Griffith led a strong editorial campaign against it in his paper United Irishman. Even though Synge had based the one-act comedy on a folk-story told him in the Aran Islands of a man pretending to be dead to expose his wife's infidelity, the play was judged to be unIrish, and Synge was accused of decadent foreign influences. His play was 'a corrupt version' of the 'Widow of Ephesus' and 'no more Irish than the Decameron'. Irishwomen, Griffith claimed, 'are the most virtuous in the world'; however loveless an Irish rural marriage might be, the housewife, unlike Nora Burke in Synge's play, does not go off with a Tramp. In spite of the enthusiastic promotion of Yeats, in part because of it, Synge's plays were suspect from the start. And they were never to become popular in Ireland in his lifetime. Even Riders to the Sea, his one play later to attract respectful admiration from Dublin audiences, was regarded with dismay when first produced on 25 February 1904. 'The long exposure of the dead body before an audience may be realistic, but it certainly is not artistic,' complained the Irish Times. 'There are some things that are lifelike, and yet are quite unfit for presentation on the stage, and we think that “Riders to the Sea” is one of them.'

Samuel Beckett didn't often reveal his literary influences, yet his admiration for the writing of John Millington Synge is a matter of record. As Beckett's official biographer James Knowlson wrote in an early essay on the connections between Synge and Beckett: “[I]n answer to a somewhat bold question relating to the most profound influences that he himself acknowledged upon his dramatic writing, Beckett referred me specifically to the work of J. M. Synge. Such an acknowledgement is relatively rare with Beckett and the nature and extent of his debt is therefore all the more worth pursuing.” / There are numerous biographical similarities between the two writers. Both grew up in affluent upper-middle-class sections of south Co. Dublin; both had a strict Protestant religious upbringing under the direction of somewhat repressive mothers; both were students at Trinity College Dublin, an institution with which each had an ambiguous relationship; most importantly, both discovered their mature literary styles through an intensive engagement with a language other than English. Each writer even found a supportive interlocutor in the artist Jack Yeats, perhaps Ireland's most important modernist painter. Yet despite all of these points in common, Beckett's identification of Synge as a profound formal influence initially seems odd when one compares the texts each writer produced. Early works by Beckett such as More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy are remote in their concerns from the Revival, and demonstrate an anti-traditional aesthetic very much opposed to the conventions of Irish writing at the turn of the century.

Americans were well prepared for the first US tour of the Abbey Players in 1911 by those intrepid advance men, William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. In August, before the departure of the Players for their 16 October opening in Boston, both of the theatre's directors were giving publicity interviews to American reporters, which were carefully couched to address anticipated objections to two of the plays in the repertory, G. B. Shaw's The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. In an interview for a South Carolina newspaper, Yeats told the story of the 1907 Playboy riots. Expressing outrage that 'violence' had been used against the 'chief work of the chief dramatist of Ireland', Yeats explained that although some 'dislike' had been expected for 'a fantasy so strange and full of mischief', violence that was 'intended to prevent others from hearing and judging for themselves' could only have been dealt with by calling in the police. Yeats exulted that the Abbey Players had won their fight before the week was out, and not only did the curtain fall to 'thunders of applause' at Dublin performances, but The Playboy continued to be presented in Dublin to 'enthusiastic and crowded audiences - some of the rioters sitting there and applauding', and in England and on the continent, 'the play had won not only for Synge but for the Ireland that produced him, admiration and respect'.

John Millington Synge, widely regarded as the most influential Irish dramatist of the twentieth century, burst on to the scene in 1903 when his first play, The Shadow of the Glen, caused a stir among audiences and critics alike during its opening run in Dublin. Over the next two years Synge produced another two plays: Riders to the Sea (1904), which is considered to be one of the greatest one-act plays in the history of modern drama; and The Well of the Saints (1905) which celebrates the imagination and heroism of the dissident who refuses to be coerced into conformity at the behest of the moral majority. Synge may well have drawn on the lessons of the latter play when, in 1907, he became notorious as the author of The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in the Abbey Theatre and brought his work to the attention of the wider world for the first time. Two other plays, The Tinker's Wedding written in 1907 and Deirdre of the Sorrows staged posthumously in 1910, complete the canon of Synge's plays. Yet before his early death in 1909 he also left a small body of prose of considerable significance which includes The Aran Islands (1907) and an extraordinarily rich compendium of travel essays, now collected under the title In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (CW II, 187-343), as well as a robust collection of poetry (1909). Despite the relatively small corpus of work he left behind, Synge's stature has continued to grow steadily among audiences, readers and critics since his early death over a century ago.

Experiencing a Synge play for the first time is not just watching any story unfold. Something is happening on the stage that you have never quite felt before. People are speaking in a language which appears to be English, but it is an English once or twice removed. What precisely it is removed from is not that clear either. But the sets and the setting tell you that this is Ireland, and these are people who would be speaking Irish if the audience could only understand them. But most of the people of Ireland could not understand a play in Irish in the early years of the twentieth century and, more assuredly, the greater part of the world could not either. It is obvious, therefore, that Synge is doing something with his Irish peasantry, and is attempting to mimic some kind of Irish. When characters in a Synge play speak, the air hums with something that does not quite belong. Their relationship with reality is oblique and romantic. Their tongue is a twisted idiom, at times crude, at times poetic. The serious academic question is, what part of his language belongs to him, and what part of it belongs to the Irish language? There is no doubt whatsoever that Synge had a fine command of Irish. Declan Kiberd's book Synge and the Irish Language is the most authoritative study of Synge's relationship with the language, and most anything else is likely to be no more than a footnote to that study.

The legend of Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach has been arguably the most popular of all Irish tales with artists and with audiences. It became famous as one of 'trí truaighe na scéalaíochta' ('the three sorrows of storytelling'). In the twelfth-century Book of Leinster it is referred to as a 'longas', a narrative of exile. That version centralises the three doomed brothers in a harsh account of warrior life. Deirdre's role is only briefly described - she is wild and rude, compelling Naoise to undertake with her the elopement to Alban. In one memorable scene, she grabs him by the ears to make him do her will, but she is not otherwise pivotal. After the brothers die, she is forced to live for a year of humiliation with an enemy of her lover, Naoise, after which she dashes her brains out upon a rock in a terrible image of female derangement and suffering. It is only in much later medieval versions that Deirdre's emotional graph is made a crucial element all through the narrative. Now, she moans with pain and in the end commits suicide on her lover's grave. In the words of Celtic scholar Eleanor Hull, the wild woman of the Book of Leinster has been 'transformed into the Lydia Languish of a later age'. Those changes reflect the growing importance of women as an audience for the heroic tales, with a consequent increase in the profile of female protagonists. After this reconfiguration the tale is seen as a love story rather than simply one of warrior honour: and indeed the clash between love and honour allows for a developing subtlety in the psychological portrayal of a tragic heroine.

“One wonders in these places why anybody is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent air, which is like wine in one's teeth.” J. M. Synge, 'In West Kerry', The Shanachie, 1907 / In a letter to Lady Gregory dated August 1905 Synge revealed that the Blasket Islands off the Dingle Peninsula in West Kerry were the most interesting place he had ever been. The close association of Synge with the Aran Islands in Galway, through his plays and prose writings, has meant that his emotional and spiritual connection to the Blaskets is often overlooked. Part of his fascination with the Kerry islands was the almost complete absence of English as a spoken language and, as he writes to Lady Gregory, the necessity of being 'thrown back on my Irish entirely' in order to communicate (CL I, 122). The Irish language is woven into the topography of the landscape with the name of every hillock, inlet and outcrop carrying a local history of meaning. Synge's travel essays are acutely attuned to the landscape: from the Blaskets to Mayo, from Wicklow to Connemara, he documents the geography of the land as keenly as he records his conversations with local people. Synge's travel essays, collected under the title In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (1910) and his long prose piece on his Aran sojourns, The Aran Islands (1907), illustrate how he can be understood as an early modernist. The concept of modernity is sometimes misunderstood as a descriptor of what is current and contemporary but often, paradoxically, modernity is concerned as much with the past as with the present.

J. M. Synge was neither the first nor the last modern Irish playwright to run into gender trouble. His treatment of gender and sexuality is, however, credited with starting the most notorious theatrical controversy in the riot-studded history of Irish theatre. Theories purporting to explain why Irish nationalists responded so violently to the premiere of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 are as numerous as the stars in the sky; but Synge's contemporaries made it clear that they were protesting, among other things, his representation of Irish women. In particular, they were appalled by the spectacle of Irish women expressing and acting on their own sexual desires - or, as Synge's nemesis Arthur Griffith put it, 'contending in their lusts for the possession of a man who has appealed to their depraved instincts by murdering, as they believe, his father'. But The Playboy's unusual romance was by no means Synge's only transgression. In fact, all of Synge's plays critique, indict, or undermine the premises upon which nationalist constructions of 'Irish womanhood' were built. This essay will investigate what was at stake in the nationalist notion of 'Irish womanhood', will show how Synge's dramatic work dismantles that notion, and will suggest some of the forces that shaped Synge's own very different understanding of gender, sexuality and femininity. To understand why Synge's women caused so much trouble, we must consider them as the product of Synge's approach to three things that always inform constructions of gender: the body, sexuality and reproduction.

Of all the dramatists of the Irish Revival, John Millington Synge is the most intimately connected to the development of modern drama in Europe. His image of Irishness was focused through a European lens. As Daniel Corkery put it: 'It was Synge's European learning enabled him to look at Irish life without the prejudices of the Ascendency class coming in the way . . . Europe cleared his eyes . . . not entirely of course.' That last cautious caveat goes some way to explain Synge's appeal to modern sensibilities beyond the Ireland he depicted. His later work has an awareness of his problematic complicity in a status quo he wanted to challenge - and one benefit of Synge's continental schooling was a consequently reflexive critique of his own cultural and social predispositions. As a result, his plays' careful calibrations of self and society would in turn become influential interventions in twentieth-century European drama. Not that this process made his work any less Irish. Synge considered that if any purposeful rebellion were to take place in Ireland it required just such a European dimension.

In John Millington Synge's dramas The Well of the Saints (1905) and The Tinker's Wedding (published 1907), peripatetic characters unconscious of ageing, sinfulness or ugliness live in a pre-lapsarian state that is disrupted by contact with the fallen realms of the Church and proprietorship. At the close of both, the by now tainted nomads reject any further dealings with the corrupting and implicitly entwined ideologies of capitalism and established religion and attempt to return to their original condition. The plays both centre on the loss of innocence of the wanderer foolish enough to initiate dealings with God's representative and the earthly values that he is ultimately seen to uphold. In a reversal of the folkloric associations of the rambler from which the plot of The Tinker's Wedding derives, worldliness is represented by the dogmatic churchmen and their nominally pious congregations, naivety and a genuine closeness to real divinity and pre-capitalist artlessness by the animistic peoples of the road. In short, despite their mythic echoes, both of these plays are deeply engaged with Revival-era debates on religious practices, economic transformation, and cultural difference, and constitute significant responses by Synge to the wider cultural shifts of late nineteenth-century Ireland. At the outset of The Well of the Saints, Mary and Martin Doul share an unselfconscious contentment, dwelling in what they alone perceive to be an Arcadian idyll.

Among the many topics that could be included in a Companion to John Wesley, readers might be surprised to find a chapter devoted to Wesley's engagement with the natural sciences. Or, based on some influential precedents, they may anticipate an exposé of Wesley's opposition to scientific theories and reasoning. Over a century ago, in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), Sir Leslie Stephen contended that “we already find in Wesley the aversion to scientific reasoning which has become characteristic of orthodox theologians” (2:412). Andrew Dickson White echoed this evaluation twenty years later in his (in)famous History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). One shortcoming of these critiques of Wesley is that they relied mainly on secondary sources and passing comments in his Sermons and Journal. As a result, they provide little sense of the scope of Wesley's interest in and publications about the natural world. In 1763, Wesley issued for the benefit of his Methodist people A Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation; or, A Compendium of Natural Philosophy, a two volume work distilling his reading of several book-length works as well as extracts from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge and other journals.

John Wesley's long life (1703-91) almost spanned the eighteenth century. Any Companion to him needs to provide some sense of this period. Scholarly biographies of Wesley have provided some attention to this topic, of which the most impressive and successful to date is Henry Rack's Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. Extended treatments of his age by Wesley scholars have been rare and rather unsatisfactory. For example, in 1938, the amateur historian J. H. Whiteley published Wesley's England: A Survey of XVIIIth Century Social and Cultural Conditions, as part of the celebrations marking the bicentenary of Wesley's conversion. The book is drawn from secondary sources, aimed at a Methodist readership, and fails to give a coherent sense of the period. However, Whiteley astutely recognized that “the difficulties of the project are manifold, for this is a century of England's story whose details are surprisingly contradictory and elusive.” Eighty years later, this characterization holds. There is no consensus among professional historians about Wesley's context. Indeed, at present they are probably more divided than they have ever been about how to conceptualize the period in which he lived.