EIGHT VOLUME MATCHING SET: DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS (1911), A WELL OF THE SAINTS (1911), IN WICKLOW AND WEST KERRY (1912), PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD (1911), POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS (1912), THE ARAN ISLANDS PARTS I & II (1912), THE ARAN ISLANDS PARTS III & IV (1912), THE TINKER'S WEDDING / RIDERS TO THE SEA / THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN (1911)

Dublin, Ireland: Maunsel & Company, Ltd, 1912. Vellum. Very Good / Near fine (Box). Matching set of eight books in custom slipcase: 12mo., 7 in. x 4.5 in. Contemporary quarter vellum with olive-brown paper-covered boards. Gilt title to front and to spine. Gilt topstain. Untrimmed fore-edges. Light soiling to vellum. Light wear on top/bottom of spines. Bit of spotting on s0pine of "The Tinker's Wedding." Age-toning to pages. Previous owner's tidy signature, dated 1919, to front free endpapers. Slipcase in matching olive-gray cloth, with interior in textured rose. J M Synge (1871-1909) was born in a suburban village near Dublin, the youngest of five children of a Protestant upper-class family. He was raised by a fervently religious mother, after his father died when Synge was only a year old. Due to ill health Synge was educated mainly by private tutors, until he entered Trinity College, Dublin, at age seventeen. There he won prizes in languages (Irish and Hebrew), while also studying music and beginning to write poetry.

In 1893 Synge went to Germany to pursue his musical studies, and moved to Paris the next year. In Paris in 1896 he met William Butler Yeats, who was to have a profound influence on his career. Yeats complained that Synge's writing so far exhibited "that conventional language of modern poetry which has begun to make us all weary." He recommended that Synge spend some time in the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. This suggestion provided the impetus and the background for the six plays that Synge was to write.

Also in 1896, Yeats and Lady Gregory began to discuss the possibility of creating a new theatre to develop a native Irish drama. As a result, they founded the Irish Literary Theatre, which put on annual productions from 1899 to 1901. In 1902 they joined forces with actors Frank and William Fay to form the Irish National Dramatic Society, which the next year produced Synge's first two plays, Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen. A brief London appearance by this company persuaded tea heiress Annie Horniman to finance the company... Synge's first full-length play, The Well of the Saints, premiered at the Abbey in 1905; so did his masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, two years later.

But by the time The Playboy opened amid controversy, with Synge's nineteen-year-old fiancée Molly Allgood (Maire O'Neill) in the leading role, Synge had become ill with Hodgkin's disease. He died in March 1909, a few weeks short of his thirty-eighth birthday. His other two plays, The Tinker's Wedding and Deirdre of the Sorrows, were produced posthumously. (from Shaw Festival Theatre).