This chapter considers Synge’s controversial, riot-inducing masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Playboy, as a form of discursive retribution against certain restrictive politics, deploys a drama of sexual selection in a degenerated landscape in order to posit ironic humour, imaginative freedom, and ‘savage’ violence as a revitalizing impulse. Beginning with a curious phonetic letter sent to Synge by his friend, this chapter explores the themes of evolutionism, degeneration, and irony discussed in previous chapters, showing how Synge’s writing interacted with contemporary eugenicist discourses but posited the case for social and economic regeneration (rather than ‘race improvement’) as an antidote. Against this background, the chapter demonstrates that The
Playboy is the apotheosis of Synge’s increasingly modernist, increasingly political, drama. For him, nationalist orthodoxies and certain forms of economic and social modernization were degenerative, and The
Playboy purposefully acts as a sort of ironic protest against this. The chapter concludes by showing that writers such as W. B. Yeats, and later the playwright Teresa Deevy in her The King of Spain’s Daughter (1937), recognized Synge’s literary and political radicalism before he was effectively canonized as a cultivator of a Romantic cult of the peasant. Synge’s modernism, as The Playboy of the Western World shows most clearly, is simultaneously a form of political and literary protest. Rooted in his socialism and informed by his long-standing engagement with modernization, it is the apotheosis of his tendency towards a literary experiment which works in tandem with an ever-developing political, social, and aesthetic consciousness.