The Irish dramatist Edmund John Millington Synge (1871-1909), one of the greatest playwrights of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, made the folklore and dialect of the Irish peasantry the subject of his plays.

John Millington Synge was born on April 16, 1871, in Rathfarnham, a suburb of Dublin. He was the youngest of the eight children of John Hatch Synge, a lawyer who died when John Millington was an infant, and Kathleen Traill Synge, the daughter of a Protestant clergyman. As a child, Synge showed signs of the tubercular condition that claimed his life at the age of 38.

Synge attended private schools in Dublin and was awarded a bachelor of arts degree by Trinity College in 1892. He then traveled to Germany, intending to study the violin; but after a year of wandering, he joined the diversified group of Irish expatriates then studying in Paris. There Synge lived an almost ascetic life in...