SOURCE: Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. “Reading a Riot: The ‘Reading Formation’ of Synge's Abbey Audience.” Literature and History 13, no. 2 (autumn 1987): 219-37.

In the following essay, Cairns and Richards argue that the nationalist ideology and mythologized nostalgia that produced the Irish Literary Revival to some extent “scripted” the ways in which the early twentieth-century Dublin audience responded to Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World.

The Playboy ‘riots’—along with those of Hugo's Hernani, Jarry's Ubu Roi, O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars—are among the few undisputed ‘facts’ of literary history. A pleasing confirmation to the literary critics that the object of their attention has, at some time and place, actually engaged with society. The fact of the riots is even recognized in the book of that very title—The Playboy Riots—which meticulously records the dispute as it swung to and fro through the Dublin...