Conclusion

Returning to Synge’s first completed play, the Conclusion shows that despite its clunky construction and heavy-handed didacticism, When the Moon Has Set (1900–3) contains the kernels of many of the concerns traced throughout this book. When the Moon Has Set illustrates Synge’s basic values before they were politicized, and thus acts in this Conclusion as an apt comparison by which to judge the increasing modernism of Synge’s work after his pantheism, mysticism, and socialism were mobilized and ironized by the Revival and its concomitant pressures. Touching on Synge’s final uncompleted play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, the conclusion suggests that the trajectory traced in this book does not find a satisfactory conclusion in this work, which Synge himself admitted might be too removed from real social and political concerns to be successful. It was, for him, both his final play and a new departure, and suffered from the pressure of the adverse reaction to The Playboy of the Western World. Finally, by tracing the afterlives of Synge in writers such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and Flann O’Brien, the book closes by suggesting the new ways in which our understanding of modernism and Revivalism (and the relationship between the two) can be reconfigured in the light of Synge’s work, positing Synge not only as an early leftist modernist but also as a writer of radical literary and political potential.