.

It is the extravagance and grotesquerie, of both language and situation,
that is the most immediately arresting of the qualities of Synge. And
this extravagance and grotesquerie have marked his writing from the
start. The old husband playing dead, that he may catch his young wife
with her lover, of his first play, "In the Shadow of the Glen," is a
very old motive, and familiar in the meliorized form that made it known
to the theatre in "Conn the Shaughraun" (1875). Before that, Crofton
Croker had given it currency, in "The Corpse Watchers," among those
outside of the circles in which it was a familiar folk-story. It might,
indeed, be said of "In the Shadow of the Glen" that it begins in the
manner of Boucicault and ends in the manner of Ibsen, for Nora Burke is
in a way a peasant Hedda Gabler. Such a criticism would, of course, be
very superficial. The story is a folk-story of many countries and Synge
was told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaan
whom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands." At moments the play
approaches farce, as when the supposed corpse rises from the bed where
he is stretched and drinks whiskey with a tramp who has happened in
while Nora is gone to meet her young man. From such a situation it turns
to keen pathos, as Nora sits with tramp and lover and the old husband
she thinks dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through the
high glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her,"
and the old passing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl such
sardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the passing of
youth? Nora speaks as she pours out whiskey for her young man:--

Why would I marry you, Mike Dara? You'll be getting old and I'll be
getting old, and in a little while, I'm telling you, you'll be
sitting up in your bed--the way himself was sitting--with a shake
in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking
out round you like an old bush where sheep do be leaping a gap.

(_Dan Burke sits up noiselessly from under the sheet, with his hand
to his face. His white hair is sticking out round his head. Nora
goes on slowly without hearing him._)

It's a pitiful thing to be getting old, but it's a queer thing
surely. It's a queer thing to see an old man sitting up there in
his bed with no teeth in him, and a rough word in his mouth, and
his chin the way it would