The Wicklow Plays

Abstract

The Shadow of the Glen, like Riders to the Sea, is based on a story Synge heard on the Aran Islands, but the play receives its atmosphere and characters from the hills and glens of County Wicklow, which is south of Dublin and within easy cycling reach of the capital. It was an area well known to Synge since his childhood. In the Autobiography he writes, ‘To wander as I did for years through the dawn of night with every nerve stiff and strained with expectation gives one a singular acquaintance with the essences of the world.’ The ‘essences of the world’, as presented in Synge’s essays on the Wicklow countryside and its people, resemble — though in a muted, more elegiac tone — those presented in Riders to the Sea. Here, too, nature is hostile, and the people are continually haunted by thoughts of death. The Shadow of the Glen lacks the epic quality of Riders to the Sea but, in compensation, Synge adds a psychological dimension lacking in the earlier play. In The Shadow of the Glen we find more human problems plaguing the men and women of the glens — depression, loneliness, madness.