It is often difficult for twenty-first century readers to understand why John Millington Synge’s masterpiece,

, was so controversial. The play may seem surprisingly violent or even a bit crass in places, but it hardly reads as “an unmitigated, protracted libel against Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood,” as the nationalist paper

suggested it was. Nonetheless, the fact remains that when the Irish National Theatre unveiled

for the first time on January 26, 1907, it sparked one of the most famous theatrical controversies in modern history.

Forewarnings of the events to come appeared well before the play itself. Three years earlier, Synge’s one-act play, The Shadow of the Glen, had drawn the

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Citation: Cusack, George. "The Playboy Riots". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 November 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1515, accessed 23 November 2024.]