Deirdre of the Sorrows

About

Synge's final play, left unfinished at his death in 1909, retells the great Irish mythological tragedy of Deirdre — the most beautiful woman in Ireland, fated to bring ruin to her love — in the Irish-English dialect he used so brilliantly in his other plays. The play has the quality of a valediction: Synge knew he was dying as he wrote it, and the lovers' embrace of death while still young and beautiful has a personal weight his earlier plays lack. Lady Gregory and Yeats prepared it for publication from his manuscript. It is perhaps the most beautiful failure in Irish drama — achieved in its lyric passages, incomplete as theatrical structure.