In the Shadow of the Glen
1904
A widow kneels beside her dead husband's body, preparing for the wake. But in the damp silence of a Wicklow cottage, the dead have a way of speaking back. When Dan Burke reveals himself not to be a corpse after all, the pretense shatters, and what emerges is something far more unsettling than death: a marriage suffocating in its own silence. A tramp seeks shelter from the rain, and his presence becomes the catalyst that forces Nora to see her life with terrible clarity. Synge builds his entire drama in a single room, in a single night, with the rain as relentless as the weight of tradition pressing down on everyone inside. The play asks what it means to be alive when you've never been allowed to live. It is dark, wry, and devastating in its brevity. There is no hero, only people caught in the shadow of old customs that demanded women's obedience and men's silent suffering. For all its gentleness, the play cuts like a blade.
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“Don’t touch me. I thought to stay your hand with my stories till Fergus would come to be beside them, the way I’d save yourself, Conchubor, and Naisi and Emain Macha; but I’ll walk up now into your halls, and I’ll say it’s here nettles will be growing, and beyond thistles and docks. I’ll go into your high chambers, where you’ve been figuring yourself stretching out your neck for the kisses of a queen of women; and I’ll say it’s here there’ll be deer stirring and goats scratching, and sheep waking and coughing when there is a great wind from the north. I’m going, surely. In a short space I’ll be sitting up with many listening to the flames crackling, and the beams breaking, and I looking on the great blaze will be the end of Emain.- Lavarcham; Deirdre of the Sorrows””
— J. M. Synge
“For what good is a bit of a farm with cows on it, and sheep on the back hills, when you do be sitting looking out from a door the like of that door, and seeing nothing but the mists rolling down the bog, and the mists again, and they rolling up the bog, and hearing nothing but the wind crying out in the bits of broken trees were left from the great storm, and the streams roaring with the rain.- Nora; In the Shadow of the Glen””
— J. M. Synge
“If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?-Maurya; Riders to the Sea””
— J. M. Synge
“They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me. . . . I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I’ll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.- Maurya; Riders to the Sea””
— J. M. Synge
“It’s destroyed we are from this day. It’s destroyed, surely.- Cathleen; Riders to the Sea””
— J. M. Synge
