Synge's Unfinished Deirdre

One of the greatest difficulties which faced the dramatists of the Irish Renaissance was how to write heroic plays in peasant dialect. Although the language of the Irish countryman was ideal for the little farces which mirrored the living Ireland, it turned out to be the severest of limitations when used to exploit the ancient Ireland of the sagas. “But Grania is a King's daughter”, protested George Moore when Yeats insisted that Diarmuid and Grania be written in peasant dialect. And if we are to believe the story that Moore tells in Hail and Farewell, Yeats even went so far as to ask Moore, who knew not a word of dialect, to write the play in French. Lady Gregory would then turn it into English, an Irish translator would render it in Irish, and Lady Gregory would then turn the Irish literally into English. Although Yeats never got a peasant Grania from Moore, he very nearly realized his ideal when he induced Synge, the acknowledged master of peasant dialect, to attempt a peasant Deirdre. Synge, like Moore, might well have protested against the difficult task his master had set him. “I am not sure whether I shall be able to make a satisfactory play out of it”, he wrote to an American friend. But he plunged on, creating his Deirdre in the image of a Wicklow peasant girl. We can surmise that she gave him considerable trouble, for he rewrote the play more than fifteen times, working on it more energetically than on any other of his plays. We have Moore's testimony that Synge finally began to feel that peasant speech was impossible and started to weed it out of his play. However, the mass of MSS which represent Synge's work on the play up to his death indicate that no such weeding process had begun.