‘Deirdre of the Sorrows’

Abstract

The story of Deirdre, of whom it was prophesied that she would bring destruction on the Sons of Usna, is one of the most beautiful and touching of the Irish legends, and has inspired retelling by such writers as Sir Samuel Ferguson, A. E., Eva Gore-Booth, W. B. Yeats and James Stephens.¹ While in Aran, in either 1900 or 1901, Synge made a translation of the Irish text, The Fate of the Children of Uisneach, which had been published in 1898 by the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. When, in 1902, he reviewed Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne, he singled out Deirdre’s lament over the dead Naisi and his brothers as ‘one of the finest passages in the book’. (Prose, p, 369) He wrote to Molly Allgood in 1906, ‘My next play must be quite different from the P. Boy. I want to do something quiet and stately and restrained and I want you to act in it.’² But The Playboy and illness prevented him turning to the new play; on 22 October 1907, he wrote to Molly: ‘I got a “Deirdre” fit yesterday and I wrote 10 pages of it in great spirits and joy, but alas I know that that is only the go off.