First published in 2004. In the stormy years before Ireland at last gained her independence a brilliant revival of Irish drama took place and culminated in the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. Of those who helped to create it—W.B.Yeats, Lady Gregory, the Fay brothers, and Miss Horniman—it was J.M. Synge as much as anyone who made the new Irish drama the force it quickly became in the theatres of the world. In his plays, as in his rich, tumbling comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, or in the tragedy of classic simplicity, Riders to the Sea, he succeeds more than any other dramatist in miraculously distilling the Irish spirit