The Playboy of the Western World Lesson Plan

J.M. Synge wrote The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, to be produced at Ireland's Abbey Theatre, which he had helped to form. Though it is today one of the English-language drama's most widely-anthologized works, it was hardly a success at the time. In fact, the play was originally marked failure: the Dublin audience of 1909 jeered and disrupted each performance of Playboy's one-week run at the newly minted Abbey Theatre. For that week, the Abbey became the place for nationalistic, God-fearing Irishmen to display their outrage and indignation over Synge's unsavory portrait of rural Irish life and values. To top it all off, the play received almost uniformly terrible reviews in the...