Cambridge Companions Online http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/companions/ The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge Edited by P. J. Mathews Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105 Online ISBN: 9781139002721 Hardback ISBN: 9780521110105 Paperback ISBN: 9780521125161 Chapter 4 - The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding pp. 41-51 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge University Press 4 MARY BURKE The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding In John Millington Synge’s dramas The Well of the Saints (1905) and The Tinker’s Wedding (published 1907), peripatetic characters unconscious of ageing, sinfulness or ugliness live in a pre-lapsarian state that is disrupted by contact with the fallen realms of the Church and proprietorship. At the close of both, the by now tainted nomads reject any further dealings with the corrupting and implicitly entwined ideologies of capitalism and established religion and attempt to return to their original condition. The plays both centre on the loss of innocence of the wanderer foolish enough to initiate dealings with God’s representative and the earthly values that he is ultimately seen to uphold. In a reversal of the folkloric associations of the rambler from which the plot of The Tinker’s Wedding derives,1 worldliness is represented by the dogmatic churchmen and their nominally pious congregations, naivety and a genuine closeness to real divinity and pre-capitalist artlessness by the animistic peoples of the road. In short, despite their mythic echoes, both of these plays are deeply engaged with Revival-era debates on religious practices, economic transformation, and cultural difference, and constitute significant responses by Synge to the wider cultural shifts of late nineteenthcentury Ireland. At the outset of The Well of the Saints, Mary and Martin Doul share an unselfconscious contentment, dwelling in what they alone perceive to be an Arcadian idyll. However, their fall to knowledge on being cured of blindness by the saint reveals their own moral corrosion as well as that of the wider community, and they come to understand that the capitalist misfortunes of illpaid labour and hunger will supplant their former pre-modern ease. In like manner, the tinkers who had functioned predominantly within the precapitalist barter system are drawn more deeply into the modern financial nexus by the priest’s demand for cash payment for the wedding vows he will perform in The Tinker’s Wedding. The dramas’ shared theme of the clash of an upwardly mobile, propertied and increasingly standardised contemporary Ireland with an earlier and more individualistic cultural and economic order 41 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 mary burke is exemplified by the difference between the wandering Michael Byrne in The Tinker’s Wedding and the ambitious and sedentary Timmy in The Well of the Saints: both are smiths, but the former operates in a haphazard exchange economy while the latter can boast of business premises and a paid employee. The Well of the Saints has been unduly disregarded, though it should rank as a primary Synge text in light of its likely influence on Samuel Beckett’s absurd tramp characters and its unrecognised engagement with the overt themes of Synge’s more canonised drama. Beyond the obvious thematic pairing with The Tinker’s Wedding, the play also echoes the unambiguous depiction of the unhappiness caused in the marriage relationship by the entwined strictures of property and propriety of The Shadow of the Glen and, to a lesser extent, The Playboy of the Western World. However, The Well of the Saints does so in a manner that is too subtle for critics to have recognised that it is of a continuum with Synge’s overall concern with the challenge to individualism presented by cultural homogenisation. The consistent inattention to The Well of the Saints may be ultimately traced to its inauspicious first production in February 1905, when attendances were poor and reviews were negative,2 though the drama never gained the ultimately beneficial notoriety of The Playboy of the Western World and The Shadow of the Glen. In addition, The Well of the Saints has also suffered from the weight of critical consideration given to W. B. Yeats’s famous preface and to the play’s sources, at the expense of detailed engagement with both the text itself and its creative dialogue with The Tinker’s Wedding. Nevertheless, The Well of the Saints has not suffered the degree of neglect of its sister drama: the response to Synge’s most difficult play has been either crude or non-existent, and it has commonly been regarded as his least significant work – when considered at all. Daniel Corkery’s damning summation, that ‘the play is scarcely worth considering either as a piece of stagecraft or as a piece of literature’, is characteristic of most twentieth-century deliberations on The Tinker’s Wedding.3 The fact that Corkery even bothered to refer to the play is in itself unusual: a glance at the index of the standard essay collection concerning Synge’s drama often yields no reference to the play whatsoever. The Tinker’s Wedding was published in 1907 and premiered in London two years later (and after Synge’s death) at the Afternoon Theatre Company at His Majesty’s Theatre. Poignantly, Synge’s only two-act play finally made its Abbey debut in April 1971 on the centenary of his birth, and even then it was paired with Riders to the Sea rather than with its obvious companion piece. Although it was the perceived anti-clericalism of The Tinker’s Wedding which led to initial fears regarding its potential offensiveness, uneasiness about the play’s seemingly crude and farcical action and incendiary title likely mitigated against its being staged in the wake of the political mobilisation of 42 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding Irish Travellers during the 1960s; prior to this period, the term ‘tinker’ was uncontroversially deployed in dominant culture to refer to the population currently known as Travellers, though it has since been considered pejorative.4 However, a work such as Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats suggests that dramatic treatments of Traveller culture utilising the term ‘tinker’ or its cognates do not inevitably offend actual members of that community, as critics and theatre directors fearful of the implications of Synge’s play may assume. Indeed, Synge’s depictions of tramps and tinkers is clearly admiring of peripatetic culture in a manner that foreshadows the more nuanced literary depictions of Travellers that begin to emerge after that community’s radicalisation. The erroneous nature of the assumption that The Tinker’s Wedding is inevitably offensive to the minority portrayed is underlined by the ironic fact that the drama has been staged by Traveller amateur acting troupes on a number of occasions since the 1970s.5 In addition, the lack of critical consideration of the subtly subversive nature of Synge’s sympathetic representation of peoples of the road in The Tinker’s Wedding has further contributed to its being disregarded. This neglect is not a reliable indication of the play’s innate insignificance, since it has yet to be fully appreciated as a work that both queries the prejudice of the settled against the unsettled, and presciently celebrates minority identity. The acclaim that greeted the coupled productions of The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding by DruidSynge (the Druid theatre company’s 2005 marathon of all of the dramatist’s work), intimates that their humour and skilful construction is more apparent on the stage than on the page; implicitly, the very dearth of productions of The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding throughout much of the twentieth century has successively reinforced the hasty early consensus that the works concerned were Synge’s least successful dramas. Most importantly, DruidSynge’s double bill allowed the hitherto unacknowledged conversation that exists between The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding to finally find its voice. This all suggests that the time is ripe for a reassessment of the plays’ centrality to Synge’s oeuvre, to recent Irish drama that depicts marginalised Irish identities, and to the active engagement of Irish minorities themselves with their representation by canonical writers. This examination of The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints as companion pieces is ultimately predicated upon earlier beliefs regarding the shared culture of diverse peripatetic populations such as tinkers and tramps. Travellers are members of a historically nomadic indigenous community that has provided seasonal labour, trading, entertainment, and smithing services to the settled population for generations. At present, the culture is regarded as being ethnically and culturally distinct both from majority society and from 43 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 mary burke other historically nomadic groupings. However, The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints have arguably suffered from a critical misunderstanding of both the perception of itinerant subcultures in the period in which Synge was writing and the profound transformation such communities have undergone in the era after the dramatist’s lifetime. This lack of knowledge of both the literary construct and historical reality of peripatetism in twentiethcentury Ireland has shaped ahistorical and apolitical critical responses to The Tinker’s Wedding that present it as a naturalistic portrayal of an actual and unchanging Traveller temperament. Aoife Bhreathnach’s groundbreaking study of twentieth-century government policy and the Travellers posits that a complex set of post-partition welfare, school attendance and zoning policies gradually led to the disappearance of all historically unsettled populations other than Travellers, thereby rendering them the only visible antithesis of settled mores in the public sphere.6 Additionally, a sense of when this population became culturally distinct to begin with is difficult to pluck out from Irish written sources in many instances, since, for the most part, tinkers tend not to be evenly differentiated from similarly nomadic and occupationally overlapping groupings prior to the Revival. Furthermore, Traveller culture is historically non-literate, so the community itself does not possess a written archive. A nascent sense of the Traveller ethnicity enshrined in British law since the close of the twentieth century is doubtlessly iterated in Revival writings about tinkers and arguably contributed to this later official recognition of difference. Nevertheless, until the early twentieth century, a variety of itinerant subcultures were often enfolded within a broadly allied peripatetic class that included tinkers. Despite the fact that in Synge’s period tinkers were still often collated with what were then other equally visible peripatetic groupings under a broad umbrella of the ‘unsettled’, it should be stressed that members of that community were often considered to be a particularly distinctive population segment. Folkloric beliefs such as those detailed by Lady Gregory7 suggest that the early twentieth-century farming class believed tinkers to be a largely untrustworthy population descended from those forced onto the roads by the famines and political upheavals of earlier eras. These narratives veered from intimating that tinkers possessed supernatural powers to dismissing them as unproductive, promiscuous and heathenish rogues. In short, they and other peripatetic groupings were always outsiders to the dominant culture’s overlapping values of sexual continence, frugality and religiosity. In defiant contrast to this popular discourse, Revival-era scholars such as Kuno Meyer and Eóin MacNeill theorised that tinkers were a throwback to the archaic Irish, which rendered the minority an alluring literary theme at a time when attempts were continually being made to recover traces of a lost aboriginal 44 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding culture.8 The chasm between the beliefs regarding tinker origins and status in agrarian society and their elevation as the remnants of an idealised precolonial order by elite Revivalists informs the depiction of nomads in The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding: Synge’s tinkers and tramps partake of the folkloric tradition of the roguish wanderer even as his sympathy for such communities places him squarely in the camp of educated peers who considered tinkers to be the living vestiges of an ancestral dreamtime. The scholarly theory that tinkers embodied an archaic or essential Irishness underlines Synge’s attempts to uncover the unacknowledged ties that bind peoples of the road to the settled majority in The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints. If The Aran Islands gradually yields to a profound despair regarding the encroachments modernity has made into island society, then the unregimented and non-literate nature of peripatetic communities allows Synge to celebrate them as the last living relics of a once-widespread culture of rural non-conformity in the plays concerned (and in short prose pieces such as ‘People and Places’ (CW II, 193–201) and ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’ (CW II, 202–8)). Nevertheless, The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints ostensibly pit settled culture and broadly allied and implicitly admirable ‘unsettled’ subcultures in opposition, since both culminate in shockingly irreverent clashes of wanderer and Church representative: the nomads attack a priest in the former and violently strike a can of holy water from a saint’s hand in the latter. Of course, even the motif of a tin can upon which much physical action centres is repeated from one play to the other. Significantly, however, both plays ultimately illustrate that the contending settled and ‘unsettled’ populations have more in common than either realise: Synge destabilises sedentary stereotypes of the nomad and reveals that the perceived moral chasm between the minority and majority communities is largely constructed. Indeed, well-intentioned liberal humanist readings that have praised the wanderers’ lack of piety and civility as proof of the yawning gap between an unadventurous sedentary order and an inherently colourful peripatetic culture have tended to reinforce a breach that Synge attempts to seal. The folkloric belief of his era which suggested that peoples of the road were the descendants of those who had been expelled from orderly society implied that contemporaneous tinkers had no connection whatsoever to majority culture. However, for Synge, tinkers and tramps are the custodians of local and autonomous values within a broader rural order that is acquiescing in the conformity and homogeneity required by modernity, prosperity and the Catholic Church’s imposition of standardised devotional practice after the mid-nineteenth century. Synge’s critique of settled aspirations in The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding challenges the sense of sedentary superiority that underlines 45 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 mary burke the dominant culture binary of immoral wanderer and upstanding member of rooted society. In order to highlight the sublimated bond between spaces usually understood to symbolise the antithetical values of sacred and profane, the opening stage directions of both plays place the wanderers’ temporary resting place in close proximity to a church, and this juxtaposition serves to deconstruct the link between church membership and rootedness implied by the very word ‘parishioner’. Although prospective groom Michael Byrne speaks of the clergyman as ‘playing cards, or drinking a sup, or singing songs, until the dawn of day’ (CW IV, 13), critical readings of The Tinker’s Wedding that interpret the man of God as the antithesis of the tinkers have downplayed the irregularity of the priest’s conduct. For instance, seemingly unconcerned about the spiritual consequences for the sinfully cohabiting Michael Byrne and Sarah Casey should they not be able to afford the fee, the clergyman initially demands the substantial sum of one pound for performing what is his priestly duty. He also voices his suspicion that Sarah was never christened, but does not suggest rectifying a situation that would, according to Church teaching, endanger the young woman’s soul. Moreover, the initial teasing banter between God’s representative and the raucous Mary Byrne suggests that he has finally met his match in capacity for alcohol and seditiousness. The tinker matriarch urges drink upon the priest with the playful suggestion that he is as much of a sinner as she is, revealing that she is aware of his secret taste for the substance. His tongue loosened by the alcohol, the clergyman subsequently reveals his envy of Mary’s autonomous existence and his impatience with the demands of his pious parishioners. Even more audaciously, Synge intimates that this intrinsic like-mindedness makes the older man and woman sexually compatible: Mary flirtatiously places her hand upon the priest’s knee during this exchange, and implies that her drinking companion is romantically available by referring to him as a ‘single man’ (CW IV, 19). In both The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding, men of God are drawn into a bodily realm traditionally associated with the wanderer: the tinkers’ adversary is described by Sarah as being ‘near burst with the fat’, while the saint has a ‘big head’ and ‘welted knees’ (CW IV, 43; CW II, 149). The binary opposition of holy priest and unholy itinerants is further challenged when the dramas concerned are read side by side: the ‘villain[y]’ of Martin and the ‘villainies’ of the tinkers are referred to by others, but the latter have the final word when they brand the priest ‘an old villain’ (CW III, 147; CW IV, 45–9) at the close of the action in The Tinker’s Wedding. Finally, and in contrast to the commonplace Irish folkloric trope of the woman or man of the road’s capacity for casting curses, it is God’s representative who threatens maledictions upon the wanderers in both plays. 46 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding The tinkers and tramps of The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints have not internalised the negative beliefs concerning their peripatetic subculture that circulate in the dominant society, and their pronouncements suggest that they even consider their own lifestyle to be superior to that of the economically productive house-dwellers: Martin derides Timmy’s abode as a ‘shanty’ (CW III, 111), and when forced to work for wages rather than rely on begging, the Douls scorn the restrictions placed upon the individual by capitalism. The symbiotic relationship of such Church-endorsed virtue with the capitalist work ethic is suggested in the opening scene of The Tinker’s Wedding, when Sarah urges Michael to solder her wedding ring in the priest’s presence, ‘for it’s great love the like of him [the priest] have to talk of work’ (CW IV, 13). Moreover, the Christian metaphors of ‘light’ and ‘dark’ are invoked in a subversive manner in The Well of the Saints. Once Martin has been led ‘into the light’ – which involves being cured of blindness and forced to take a stake in the religio-capitalist order – he labels the world of work, property and propriety as ‘dark’. Similarly, the Douls only begin again to notice the sunlight and the joys of nature with which they were first associated once they are about to be expelled from the community. Given the use of the plural noun in the title of a play concerned with an individual Church representative and with the muddying of moral hierarchies, the ‘saints’ referred to can only be the Douls. In ‘People and Places’, Synge explicitly links Irish beggars’ physical and mental robustness to their nationality: These vagrants have no resemblance with the mendicants who show their sores near the churches of Italy, for … the greater number that one sees are vigorous women and men of fine physique … [The] freshness of wit which is equally sure in the women and the men … is a peculiarity of Irish tramps and distinguishes them, I think, from the rural beggars of other countries of Europe. (CW II, 196–7) Here, and in The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding, Synge elevates the wanderer as the noble remnant of a threatened native culture that had valued expression and freedom over social climbing, avariciousness and close-mouthed conformity. The writer’s ability to envision the world through the eyes of the outsider suggests a personal identification with a grouping that, like his own class, could not be contained within the narrowest contemporary definitions of Irishness, which excluded both ‘heathenish’ tinker and Protestant Anglo-Irishman alike. This empathy with the nomad in a writer whose background was continually invoked in critiques of his ‘unpatriotic’ plays draws attention to Ireland’s cultural and religious diversity in an era in which elements within nationalism were attempting to claim the term 47 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 mary burke ‘Catholic’ as an equivalent of ‘Irish’. In a further sense of his personal identification with the marginalised, the display of individual conscience of peoples of the road in The Well of the Saints takes on overtones of the evangelical Protestant tradition within which the young Synge had been raised; despite his predilection for cures, the austere wandering saint who does not intend to charge a fee to wed Molly and Timmy is a sympathetic figure drawn both from traditions of the ‘uncorrupted’ Celtic Church from which Irish Protestantism claims lineal descent and from Biblical narratives of desert-dwelling ascetics. Though he was predictably hostile, Arthur Griffith incisively deployed the term ‘Calvinistic’ in his review of the play, and Synge’s ‘Protestantisation’ of the saint was foregrounded in the DruidSynge production.9 Thus, the ‘Protestant’ saint is implicitly contrasted with the house-dwelling and rapacious Catholic priest, even if equally implicated in the religious establishment’s enforcement of sedentary norms in the end. As represented in the numerous Revival writings in which the values of propertied middle-class and farming existence are rejected, free-spirited tinkers and tramps embodied the bohemian values with which the more liberal writers of the period identified. Synge’s plays and prose works centred on itinerant groupings exist within a huge constellation of comparable pieces concerned with wandering musicians, tramps, beggars and tinkers by diverse contemporaneous writers.10 Even as Synge utilises the purported paganism and anti-materialism of peoples of the road as a stick with which to beat the religiosity and acquisitiveness of the upwardly mobile petit bourgeois class, his depictions are more humanising, personally resonant and explicitly seditious than those of his peers, however, who often deploy wanderers as undifferentiated and romanticised symbols of a free-floating non-conformity. For instance, the commonplace trope of tinker heathenism that goes unquestioned in most other depictions is revealed by Synge in The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding to be more admirable than the self-serving professions of piety of a corrupt settled culture. This message is consistent with Synge’s critique of the Church for bolstering the sectional interests of nationalist middle Ireland: in this respect both plays are deeply political, despite Yeats’s claim that the playwright was incapable of thinking a political thought.11 Synge was commissioned in 1905 by the Manchester Guardian to write on the distressed state of the Congested Districts of the west, and he subsequently excoriated the stifling social cohesion that emanated from the relationship between the Catholic Church, the professions, and commercial interests in that region, a consensus that excluded those who had no wish to partake of rooted capitalist society. ‘There are sides of all that western life … that are horrible,’ he wrote, ‘in one place the people are starving but 48 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding wonderfully attractive and charming and in another place where things are going well one has a rampant double-chinned vulgarity I haven’t seen the like of’ (CL I, 116–17). In Synge’s reading of post-Famine culture, the more affluent or aspirational the smallholder or businessperson, the more likely he or she is to conform to an orthodox Catholic doctrine and practice that overlaps with economic self-interest. In The Tinker’s Wedding, the young cohabiting couple who have had children together obviously subvert the institution of marriage, attitudes towards which had become intrinsically entwined with the acquisition and passing on of assets by the Revival period. It seems plausible, too, that Mary and Martin Doul of The Well of the Saints are also possibly a common-law rather than a legally married couple if the name Doul (from the Irish dall, ‘blind’) is understood as a nickname rather than a shared surname. However, even if Mary and Martin have cemented their union in the eyes of the Church, the couple’s casual partings, reconciliations and their insistence on the necessity of the sexual partner’s youthful appearance still undermine an institution that relied on strict sexual chastity and the pairing of elderly grooms with fertile brides in order to ensure patrilineal inheritance; in the turn-of-thetwentieth-century Irish context, the Catholic rhetoric of the necessity of chastity both within and without marriage conveniently reinforced the economic advantageousness of that decree to agrarian culture, which often relied on the delayed marriage of the inheriting son and the celibacy of stay-at-home siblings to maintain the economic viability of smallholdings. In particular, women whose primary role was to provide the heir bore the brunt of the pressure to maintain sexual continence at all costs, a fact illuminated by the outrage that greeted Nora Burke’s decision to abandon her elderly but financially secure farmer husband for a penniless tramp in The Shadow of the Glen. Moreover, even if the Douls really are married, then this merely serves to underline further the rejection of settled rural values inherent in Mary’s refusal to provide her husband with offspring, a subversiveness echoed by the landless Sarah Casey’s choosing to have children outside of wedlock. Nevertheless, the hasty manner in which the never-seen children of Sarah and Michael are referred to in passing by their father in the opening scene of The Tinker’s Wedding and the fact that two child characters included in an early draft were cut in the final version suggests that a playwright who had been subject to excoriation in relation to The Shadow of the Glen had come to understand that nationalist audiences had little tolerance for the overt undermining of normative sexual mores. The implicit nature of Synge’s critique of the marriage institution’s absolute subservience to economic concerns in The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding contrasts with the explicit critique of a social configuration that commonly trapped young women in 49 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 mary burke loveless marriages with older smallholders in The Shadow of the Glen. Synge’s necessary caginess regarding the Byrne–Casey children and the precise legal status of the Douls’ relationship may be yet another reason why the thematic connections of the works concerned to Synge’s more highly regarded plays are not fully appreciated. The youthful Molly may briefly dally with the silver-tongued Martin, but acts in her own best interests by choosing the equally aged but financially stable Timmy the smith in the end. The recurrent condemnation of rural marriage custom in Synge’s dramas both illuminates the stress that is placed throughout The Well of the Saints on the vivacious Molly’s choice of the ugly but solvent Timmy as her groom and elucidates the ironic tone of its ending. The drama closes with the expulsion of the Douls as preparations for the wedding of Timmy and Molly are being made, and it becomes apparent that the tramps’ banishment from the community is necessary for the restoration of the sedentary values called into question by their refusal to conform to normative work and matrimonial practices. This further explicates Timmy’s seemingly odd complaint that Martin’s harping upon the weathered nature of Mary’s visage has made the whole community begin to self-consciously examine their faces: the Douls’ insistence on the necessity of the attractiveness of the sexual partner (echoed by Sarah Casey’s repeated avowal of the value of her beauty) draws attention to the elision of such human concerns within a discourse of marriage compatibility that insisted upon economic security and the protection of patrilineal inheritance above all other considerations. Thus, Synge’s celebration of the unorthodox alliances of both The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding is not so much to reinforce the stereotype of itinerant promiscuity that has become a critical given, as to highlight the profound link between marriage and economics in the rural Ireland of his time. It is striking that despite flirtations with others, the wandering couples in both plays make the conscious decision to stay together in the end, which contrasts with the obligatory nature of the partnership in which property is at stake in The Playboy of the Western World and The Shadow of the Glen. In response to Martin’s insinuation that Molly is far too attractive for the ageing Timmy, the smith responds that she has ‘no call’ (CW III, 111) to mind his looks, given that he will provide his bride with a freshly built four-roomed house upon their marriage: part of an emerging Catholic propertied class, Timmy fully expects this real estate to ensure his chances in the matrimonial market. The theme of the clash of a newly upwardly mobile Ireland and those whom the changed economic order excludes that is shared across The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding makes these companion plays strikingly relevant to a globalised Ireland of recent years in which the demands of the Celtic Tiger work ethic created social, cultural and economic 50 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016 The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding homogenisation akin to the conformity enforced by the nineteenth-century standardisation of religious practice. From the early 1990s onwards, property speculation became a prime source of new Irish wealth, and those with no access to the capital required to enter the fray emerged as the latest disenfranchised class. Had The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding received their due critical attention, the contemporary resonance of dramas in which the danger of the unthinking acquiescence required by economic prosperity is explored might have been foregrounded in the landmark DruidSynge production. NOTES 1. A priest agrees to marry a tinker couple for a low fee on condition they provide him with a tin can, but when they subsequently forget the offering the enraged clergyman refuses to perform the vows and calls them ‘a pair of rogues’. See ‘At a Wicklow Fair’ (CW II, 228–9). The tale is predicated upon Irish folkloric traditions of the tinker’s dishonesty and lack of piety. 2. The Freeman’s Journal review of 6 February 1905 complained that Synge knew ‘nothing of Irish peasant religion’ (5), while the Evening Herald of the same date suggested that no ‘such types of the Irish peasant’ as the Douls could be found in ‘any part of Ireland’ (3). 3. Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland, 1931), p. 149. 4. My utilisation of the term ‘tinker’ in this analysis is not intended to be derogatory, but is deployed to differentiate between the literary representation and pre-1960s concept of the Traveller and the actual Traveller. 5. My thanks to Pat Burke of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, for this information. 6. Aoife Bhreathnach, Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State 1922–70 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006). 7. Lady Gregory, ‘The Wandering Tribe’, Poets and Dreamers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) pp. 94–7. 8. Kuno Meyer, ‘On the Irish Origin and the Age of Shelta’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 2.5 (1891), p. 260; Eóin MacNeill, Phases of Irish History (Dublin: Gill, 1919), respectively. 9. Arthur Griffith, ‘All Ireland’, United Irishman, 11 February 1905, p. 1. 10. See, for instance, W. B. Yeats’s Where There is Nothing (1902), Douglas Hyde’s An Tincéar agus an tSídheóg (1902), and Lady Gregory’s The Travelling Man (1910). 11. W. B. Yeats, ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 319. 51 Cambridge Collections Online University 2010 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online© byCambridge IP 137.99.31.134 on Tue FebPress, 02 16:00:24 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521110105.004 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2016