Hiberno-English and beyond in J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World A Literary Linguistic Analysis of its Dramatic Significance Nursen Gömceli & Allan James The Hiberno-English employed by J.M. Synge in The Playboy of the Western World has been the source of controversy ever since the play’s premiere at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1907. While its very linguistic hybridity between Irish and English was not deemed by all literary nationalists at the time to be a suitable medium for the expression of a newly emerging Irish cultural identity, the main protagonist of the play, Christy Mahon, nonetheless transforms his own personal identity through his skilful manipulation of the very same language. This paper, by means of a close interpretation of the play’s development, aims to show that the hybrid Hiberno-English indeed functions as a language of liberation. It will provide a detailed literary linguistic analysis of the different levels of dramatic meaning expressed by Synge’s language as code and text, demonstrating how ‘primary text’ (i.e. dialogue) and ‘secondary text’ (i.e. stage directions) work in tandem to effect the characterisation of Christy. 1. Introduction The literary linguistic analysis of Anglophone play texts of the classic ‘bourgeois’ era of drama of the late 18 th , 19 th and earlier 20 th centuries has not been pursued with great intensity, on the whole leaving close textual analysis firmly in the hands of literary scholars. Much of the more linguistically focussed analysis of drama of the modern age has tended to either concentrate on Shakespeare’s plays or to engage with later 20 th century plays (e.g. Stoppard, Pinter, Wesker, Ionesco in translation). In a modest attempt to adjust this state of affairs, this paper analyses the 1907-premiered and much vaunted The Playboy of the Western World AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 40 (2015) · Heft 1-2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 106 (PWW) by John Millington Synge. The aim is to show that this play, marked by its eminent stageability, its intense narrative and its literarytextual richness within the conventional bourgeois mode of drama, provides fertile ground for an in-depth linguistic analysis: PWW owes its historical significance for the Literary Revival Movement in Ireland, its position on nation and identity of the time, and not least its continuing literary and dramatic acclaim of over a hundred years mainly to its remarkable language. 2. Controversial language (still) PWW is a three-act play which tells the story of a young man whose repugnant account of patricide turns him into a hero in the Mayo village where he arrives as a stranger taking refuge. The play has been revived numerous times worldwide since its first production in 1907. It has been translated into German, French, Mandarin Chinese, has been turned into a film, a musical theatre (e.g. Tennessee Playboy by Triad Stage 2013), and it has been adapted various times more recently, where the protagonist Christy Mahon has appeared in diverse images and identities such as a Nigerian asylum seeker in a suburb in West Dublin, as in Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun‘s production of 2007 at the Abbey Theatre; a Chinese fugitive in urban Beijing, as in the 2006 production of the Irish Pan Pan Theatre; or as the Playboy of the West Indies who lives in Trinidad and ‗speak[s] English spiced with a Creole dialect‘ (Lincoln 2014), as in Mustapha Matura‘s version of 1984. Owing this continuing interest and reputation over the decades also to its scandalous premiere at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin at the turn of the 20 th century, PWW is today widely accepted as one of the masterpieces of Irish drama, and it continues to be staged regularly worldwide, also in the second decade of the 21 st century: For example, it has been staged by The Old Vic in London in 2011 (London Theatre Guide 2014), by The Lyric Theatre in Belfast in 2012 (Maguire 2012), by The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in Madison in 2013 (Shakespeare Theatre 2014), and by The Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland in 2014 (Artists Repertory 2014). Interestingly enough, despite the great appreciation of the play in the world of drama, PWW has mainly been received negatively by theatregoers, which is shown in the reactions to one of the latest productions of the play in the mainstream theatres, The Old Vic performance in London, directed by John Crowley. While most of the reviews of the play by theatre critics are positive, their attitudes to its language are often ambivalent and some of the reviews even reflect dissatisfaction with the play. For instance, the theatre critic and scholar Karen Fricker (2011), writing for The Irish Theatre Magazine, describes the language employed in the play as an ―unfamiliar dialect‖ and comments that ―[i]t was [. . .] risky to Irish Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 107 it up so much as to risk Oirishness‖, while adding that ―the integrity of the musical, linguistic, and stylistic choices, and the commitment of the performers to characters‘ emotional lives and relationships compels and sustains audience credulity.‖ Similarly, Henry Hitchings (2011) in the London Evening Standard comments that ―the vividness of Synge's poetic language comes across well, though some will find it obstructively odd‖ (What‘s On Stage 2011). Indeed, for most of the audience ―the decision to use such a strong Irish accent was a bad one. The cast may as well have been speaking in Russian for all [they] could understand‖ (What‘s On Stage 2011). As can be seen, most of the reaction to the play in the cited reviews centres on its language, the ‗Irishness‘ of which is heftily discussed, as was the case with the first group of audiences at its premiere in 1907. Synge‘s Playboy was originally written as part of the Irish Literary Revival Movement and introduced to Irish audiences as the first Irish play of the Abbey Theatre, which started as the domain for the national representation of Ireland and was established with the aim of promoting Irish language and Irish culture by bringing the history and lives of Irish people onto stage in the early 20 th century, a time when Ireland was declaring its wish for independence from Britain. Thus, the play created a shock effect on its contemporary audiences, which even caused a riot in the theatre during the third act of the play. From then on, the closing scenes were performed as in a dumb show. In a telegram that Lady Gregory sent to William Butler Yeats, with whom she had founded the Abbey Theatre, at the end of Act I, she wrote ―Play a great success‖ (Ellis 2003). Her second message, however, sent during the performance of Act III, reads as follows: ―Play broke up in disorder at the word ‗shift‘‖ (Ellis 2003). Performed in the national theatre at a time when there was a growing sense of nationalism and Ireland was trying to build a new national and cultural identity for itself, the play was regarded as a piece which far from promoting Irish culture had debased the Irish people in front of the whole world ―in the foulest language [they had] ever listened to from a public platform‖, as Arthur Griffiths (cit. in Foster 2000: 91), the leader of Sinn Fein, fulminated. According to the nationalists of the time, the language of the play was not Irish at all, and its so-called ‗hero‘ Christy Mahon was a disgrace to the Irish nation and the notion of Irish heroism. The opinion was that the Irish people could not be so misguided as to make a man who tells them stories about how he killed his father their hero, nor could the Irish girls be so indecent to appear in their ‗shifts‘, i.e. petticoats, in front of a man, as was implied by Synge through the words of his protagonist Christy Mahon, in the scene where he declares his love for Pegeen: ―It‘s Pegeen I‘m seeking only, and what‘d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World? ‖ (3.54). Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 108 It was this particular use of the word ‗shifts‘, which was associated with adultery and prostitution at the time that caused the riot in the theatre. Thus, soon after his first encounter with Irish audiences, Synge was attacked not only as a ―faker of peasant speech‖ (qtd. in Kiberd 1979: 59), but also as a ―moral degenerate‖ (qtd. in Foster 2000: 91) and ―outside agitator‖ (Harrington 2000: 10) who had betrayed their Movement and their national values. Indeed, Synge‘s hero did neither speak a pure Irish, but a hybrid of English and Irish, nor was he representative of a true Irish hero who would arouse the nationalistic feelings of the Irish people and make them proud of their ‗Irishness.‘ However, according to the playwright, this was the very intention of his material, which was perceived by his audiences as a ‗betrayal‘ of his own nation, while in fact it was his ―revolutionary‖ (Kiberd 1993: 203) contribution to the Irish nationalistic cause aimed at revealing the essence of the Irish spirit. As Cusack (2009) clearly explains in his work The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama, in contrast to the nationalists who worked for the Gaelic League and were linguistically conservative in their views, such as e.g. Douglas Hyde, Patrick Pearse, and Arthur Griffiths, Synge did not regard the English language and culture as an ―impurity in Irish identity that had to be removed‖ (121). Quite the contrary, he was ―specifically attracted to the discontinuities created when Irish and English cultures intersected‖ (Cusack 2009: 119). Furthermore, as Kiberd (1995) notes, while the nationalists/ revivalists were strongly attached to the precolonial past only to have control of it in the present, Synge‘s ―deepest desire was to demonstrate the continuing power of the radical Gaelic past to disrupt the revivalist present‖ (187). Thus, as Cusack (2009) claims, he would be able to ―disrupt the colonial identity projected onto Ireland by England‖ (121). To this end, however, Synge did not choose to be part of a violent political revolution, even though he defined himself as a ―radical [. . .] who wanted to change things root and branch‖ (cit in Kiberd 1995: 175), but chose to ―work in [his] own way‖ (cit. in Murray 1997: 67) for Irish independence, as he wrote to Maud Gonne in his 1897 letter of resignation from L‟Association Irlandaise, which she had established: ―I wish to work in my own way for the cause of Ireland, and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary or semi-military movement‖ (qtd. in Murray 1997: 67). Having thus put an end to his short-lived attachment to a semi-military movement, Synge indeed continued to work for the Irish cause ―in [his] own way‖ (cit. in Murray 1997: 67) , which was ‗acting through words‘ rather than following any violent action. Eventually, the outcome of such an approach was the prominence of language in the work of the playwright, which was dedicated to the Irish Literary Revival and to meet the Irish audiences at the Abbey, the national theatre of Ireland. Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 109 The language of the play which was highly criticised by its audiences was the outcome of Synge‘s attraction to the intersection of Irish and English cultures, which in the end led him to develop the linguistic hybrid of Irish and English, known as Hiberno-English (cf. 4.1. below). As described by Cusack (2009), this dialect ―was a fusion of two entirely familiar languages, his audience‘s declared ‗native‘ tongue and the tongue they most commonly spoke and understood‖, yet ―the actual product was unlike anything Synge‘s audience had heard before‖ (132). Hence, Synge was seriously attacked by his nationalist audiences who "could not embrace the new hybrid language which [he] was magnifying in its carrier Christy‖. Overlooking the political significance of this dialect from a critical perspective, they debased Synge as an ―unapologetic ascendancy parasite, stocking up his tourist‘s notebook with self-serving studies in a dying culture‖ (Kiberd 1995: 174) and his dialect as a ―hopeless half-way house‖ (cit. in Kiberd 1995: 174). 3. Christy Mahon’s liberation through language In the play Christy Mahon, the most prominent projector of Synge‘s Hiberno-English among all the other characters, arrives in the village situated ―on a wild coast of Mayo‖ (1.2) in the dark, as a mysterious stranger who looks ―very tired and frightened and dirty‖ (1.8), who only reveals that he is running away from the police, but fails to articulate otherwise even the reason for this escape to the curious villagers in the public-house (shebeen) he first goes into - despite the insistent curious and suspicious questions of the people he encounters there, namely, Pegeen, her fiancé Shawn, her father Michael and his farmer friends Philly and Jimmy. When he is finally confronted by Pegeen, who truthfully remarks, ―You did nothing at all. A soft lad the like of you wouldn‘t slit the windpipe of a screeching sow‖ (1.10), he feels insulted yet continues to deny this truth, whereupon Pegeen reacts resorting to a violent deed, though in a ―mock rage‖: ―Would you have me knock the head of you with the butt of the broom? ‖ (1.10). Feeling truly threatened by Pegeen, Christy in a flash responds ―in a sharp cry of horror‖, seeking protection behind a lie: ―Don‘t strike me. I killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that‖ (1.10). With this reply, however, he instantly magnetises the villagers, who now approach him not only with curiosity but also with great respect and admiration, declaring him a ―daring fellow‖ (1.10) who heroically killed his father ―in a windy corner of high, distant hills‖ (1.11). As Christy becomes more conscious of the villagers‘ growing admiration for him, he begins to feel stronger, flirts with Pegeen, at which he ―expand[s] with delight‖ since this is his ―first confidential talk he has ever had with a woman‖ (1.15), and prides himself on that false identity: Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 110 ―Up to the day I killed my father, there wasn‘t a person in Ireland I knew the kind I was‖ (1.15). ―I a seemly fellow with great strength in me and bravery of...‖ (1.16), he continues, yet just at that moment, a knock on the door terrifies him, reducing him to his former self as a shy, timid, fearful boy: ―Oh, glory! it‘s late for knocking, and this last while I‘m in terror of the peelers [the police], and the walking dead‖ (1.16). Thus, not only his instant reaction, but also his choice of vocabulary reveals how incongruous he is with the heroic identity he gains from his invented story about the murder of his father. Indeed, when Widow Quin enters to take Christy to her own place for the night since ―it isn‘t fitting [. . .] to have his likeness lodging with an orphaned girl‖ (1.17), Christy feels insecure and begins to talk ―shyly‖, ―doubtfully‖, and ―timidly‖ (1.17), at which Widow Quin suggestively comments: ―Well, aren‘t you a little smiling fellow? It should have been great and bitter torments did rouse your spirits to a deed of blood. [. . .]. It‘d soften my heart to see you sitting so simple with your cup and cake, and you fitter to be saying your catechism than slaying your da‖ (1.17). In this scene, we also witness the rivalry between Pegeen and Widow Quin over Christy. While Pegeen insists that she ―will not have him stolen off and kidnabbed while himself‘s abroad‖, Widow Quin claims that not only her place located on ―rising hill‖ but also she herself as a woman who has ―buried her children and destroyed her man‖ will be a ―wiser comrade for a young lad than a girl‖ (1.18) like Pegeen. Act I comes to an end with Christy‘s words of self-satisfaction in the privacy of his room: ―[T]wo fine women fighting for the likes of me - till I‘m thinking this night wasn‘t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by‖ (1.20). The following act of the play, Act II, is the part where we observe Christy gradually developing into a poet-like figure, eloquent and fluent in his speech, through which he gains the admiration of the women in the village. As the second act opens, we see the girls Susan, Sara, Nelly and Honor in Pegeen‘s shebeen, strongly wishing to ―set [their eyes] on a man killed his father‖ (2.20). Discovering through his boots that Christy is at home, they ask him to come in, upon which he does so ―as meek as a mouse‖ (2.23). Showered with gifts like eggs, butter, cake and pullet, all of which the girls offer him by showing their concern for a man who must have fallen weak ―since [he] did destroy [his] da‖ (2.23), Christy finds himself in an astounded state. Just at this moment, the arrival of Widow Quin, who orders the girls to make Christy‘s breakfast ready and then invites Christy to start telling them how he killed his father, puts Christy back into a self-confident mood since he is aware that his story of this violent but brave act will keep him in his socially respected position among the women, too. So ―beginning to be pleased‖ (2.24), he makes a start to his narration, which indeed soon turns him into a hero among his listeners who admire him for his brave deed and wonderful speech. Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 111 Soon afterwards, however, the unexpected arrival of Christy‘s father Old Mahon, who has been looking for him everywhere in his anger and frustration with his head in bandages and plaster, instantly takes Christy back to his insecure and timid state. ―[C]owering in terror‖ (2.35) behind the door in the shebeen, he fears that his father will reveal to the villagers his true nature as a coward, lazy and irresponsible man, as a result of which, he thinks, he will fall from Pegeen‘s grace. So he begs Widow Quin, the only witness to his father‘s arrival, to keep Old Mahon‘s arrival a secret and help him to preserve Pegeen‘s interest and love for him. As he expects, he receives Widow Quin‘s support in return for a ―mountainy ram and a load of dung‖ (2.37), and so he joins the girls waiting for him and leaves for the mule race. In the race, which takes place in the last act of the play, Christy turns out to be the fastest jockey, and is admired even more by all the villagers, both men and women, whose great cheering of him makes Old Mahon suddenly see and recognize his son. Determined to have his revenge of him, Mahon leaves the crowd and rushes to beat him. In the meantime, Christy is announced as the champion winner of the race and is given three gifts: a bagpipe, a three-horned blackthorn and a fiddle which was previously played by a poet. Indeed, parallel to this symbolism, it is in this scene that Christy regains his poetic skills and flourishes in his speech. Especially in the succeeding scene, which is like a love duet between Pegeen and Christy and very rich in romantic imagery, Christy excels in his eloquence. Pegeen is now totally in love with this man who, in her own words, ―has such poet‘s talking, and such bravery of heart‖ (3.46), and announces to her father her decision to marry Christy, not Shawn, and he in the end consents to their marriage. Just at that moment, however, Old Mahon and Widow Quin, followed by a crowd of villagers booing Christy, rush into the shebeen and reveal the truth about him and his invented story of killing his father with a loy also to Pegeen and her father. Thenceforth, like the altered public view of Christy, Pegeen also changes in her approach to Christy, who is now for her ―an ugly liar‖ who was only ―playing off the hero‖ (3.52). Deciding publicly that they should get rid of him in order to save themselves from a future destruction by the law, the villagers headed by Pegeen put a tight rope around his arms and a double hitch over his head, and start pulling Christy on the floor to give him his retribution and have him hanged by the police, which according to Michael James is a sign of their ―pity‖ for him, since ―hanging is an easy and speedy end‖ (3.55). Throughout this scene, where comedy is mixed with tragedy, Christy‘s growing indignation makes him feel much stronger than ever before, and in his anger and desperation he asks Pegeen if he is not a ―proven hero in the end‖ (3.54), after all what he did in the race in front of all people, to which she distantly replies, in her famous most widely quoted words: ―there‘s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed‖ (3.55). Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 112 Observing that Christy does not give up and challenges them all for their ‗dirty deed‘, Pegeen ―blows the fire, with a bellows‖ and ―burns his leg‖ (3.56), as he is still tied up. When Old Mahon comes back exactly at this moment to take his son, all the villagers who had been thinking that he must have already died at his fight with Christy after the race, run away in their shock leaving Christy there. Surprisingly, while Old Mahon, and probably an audience as well, expect Christy to follow his father in order to find security and protection back in his roots in his miserable state, Christy refuses to go with him ―like a gallant captain with his heathen slave‖ (3.57) in his words, and declaring himself as the ―master of all fights from now‖ (3.57), he leaves the Mayo village, heading out to a new future in an unspecified place. As Cusack (2009) remarks with regard to Synge‘s plays, in his work ―only the individual who controls language can control his or her destiny‖ and ―the radical transformation occurs when the individual discovers or is taught to use this speech [which he learns from the community] selfconsciously to redefine himself‖ (120). In this line, it is highly significant in the play that Synge develops his protagonist as a character who ‗constructs‘ an identity for himself ‗through language‘, and thus reaches a state of liberation from the repressive forces in his own community. As shown above in the analysis of the play, when Christy Mahon arrives in the Mayo village as a total stranger with nothing known about his background except that he is escaping from the police, who stood for the British law at the time when the play was written and staged, which in return stands as a reminder of the colonising force, he is a timid and shy person who is in need of help and encouragement to hold a fluent conversation. Yet with the realisation that his momentarily invented lie about having murdered his father, which he in fact develops into an epic story with the massive contribution of the villagers who thus conversely construct this identity as hero for Christy, makes him the centre of attention and a figure of respect and admiration, he develops into an articulate speaker and gradually excels in his speech, talking like a poet, as observed in the second act of the play. Correspondingly, it can be argued that this false identity constructed through language and only existing in words, functions positively for Christy as an instrument to help him gain his confidence, even though it inevitably collapses at some stage. It is through this artificial identity that Christy feels empowered and confident and so wins Pegeen‘s heart and becomes the champion jockey at the mule race. Thus Christy for the first time in his life proves himself a success in front of the people, as a result of which he also ‗acts‘ like a real heroic character, as we see in the third act of the play where his heroism is no longer only reflected in his words, but also in his actions, as emphasised in the stage directions. He talks and acts ―raising his hands‖, ―sharply‖, ―more threateningly‖, ―in low and intense voice‖, ―almost shouting‖, or with ―his voice rising and growing‖ Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 113 (3.52-56). Thus undergoing a considerable transformation in his character through his heroic speech which leads him to gain ―heroic consciousness and heroic action‖ (Cusack 2009: 120), at the end of the play Christy is no longer the meek and insecure young boy who is in need of support and hides behind the power of words to make him feel powerful, but a self-confident and naturally brave man who has become aware of his own capacities and has thus grown into maturity. This development in Christy‘s character is equally reflected in his decision to leave the Mayo village and his father behind, both standing for his past and his old ties, and going into a new future which he himself will shape and determine through his own will. This decision Christy makes at the end of the play is a sign for his determination to liberate himself from his old ties, from a past that has imposed on him an identity which had never been his own. Additionally, it indicates that he will seek his future at a place where he will be allowed to exist freely not only in the identity he himself has discovered as his own but also by ‗using the language he wants to use.‘ Hence, he eventually refuses, in his own words, to be the ―heathen slave‖ of the ―gallant captain‖ (3.57), Christy at the end of the play experiences a transition from restriction and oppression into freedom and liberation. Thus, his ―transform[ed] speech leads to [the] liberation of [his] consciousness‖ (Cusack 2009: 120). Declan Kiberd observes that on a symbolic level this transition Synge‘s protagonist undergoes through Act I into Act III corresponds with Frantz Fanon‘s dialectic of ―decolonisation from occupation, through nationalism, to liberation‖ (1995: 184). Accordingly Act I, with Christy in his father‘s cruel home standing for the Irish self-disgust under colonial misrule, represents Ireland‘s ‗decolonisation‘ process from occupation under British rule. Act II, where Christy discovers an over-flattering image of himself not only in the villagers‘ admiration of him but also in the mirror of Pegeen‘s shebeen, which according to Kiberd represents the ―acme of the Irish pride under the conditions of a self-glorifying revival‖ (1995: 184), stands for ‗nationalism‘. Act III highlights ‗liberation‘ in that Christy goes to his own future in the identity he himself has discovered, refusing the identity given to him by the villagers - in Kiberd‘s words, the hero image in the mirror held up to him by the villagers who themselves are ruled by a distant authority under colonialism. Going back to Fanon, Kiberd further explains that liberation should not be confused with nationalism, since nationalism ―still persists in defining itself in categories imposed by the coloniser‖ (1995: 184), and explains that true liberation would occur only when a nation reaches a self-critical capacity with an awareness of the self and integrates the positive with the negative, and the past with the present (1995: 85). Correspondingly, it can be argued that Synge‘s intended message in PWW, for which he was almost ―crucif[ied]‖ (qtd. in Kiberd 1995: 167) during his lifetime for having misrepresented Irish nationality, was to offer a new Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 114 concept of ‗Irishness‘ that was not based on nationalism or revivalism but on ‗liberation‘. In this line, what Synge offers for true liberation is a new ‗hybrid‘, a creative and innovative way of redefining Irishness, without a complete refusal of the traditional. In the play, this idea of ‗hybridity‘ is reflected at two levels: in the transformed identity of the protagonist Christy Mahon, who symbolically and tellingly becomes the champion winner of not the horse race but the ‗mule‘ race, an animal which itself is a hybrid by its nature, and in the hybrid language Christy uses. While leaving the Mayo village and going into a new future, Christy no longer wants to kill his father - symbolizing the traditional - but instead constructs a new life for himself in his own unique identity as a self-conscious and an independent person in a new future away from the Mayo village under the colonial rule. As for Christy‘s hybrid language, which will be examined in further detail in the subsequent parts of this paper, it could be perhaps argued that on a symbolic level this is the most important element in the play in conveying the playwright‘s message to his audience. Making Christy - the main and most eloquent projector of his hybrid language - the character that reaches liberation, Synge highlights ‗language‘ as the key element in the formation of a unique national identity and a major instrument on the way towards liberation from oppression and extreme nationalism. The language he offers to this end is the hybrid of Hiberno- English, through which Synge emphasises the fact that the new model of language should not exclude the traditional completely but show elements of the new as well, through the use of which not only a ―negotiation between modernity and tradition‖ (Zingg 2013: 80) is possible, but also a unique national identity distinct from the identity imposed by the colonising power can be formed. 4. Hiberno-English: literary dialect as code and as text In the preceding two sections, Synge‘s Hiberno-English has been highlighted: in 2. from a ‗code‘-centred perspective, and in 3. from a more ‗text‘-centred perspective. This means that the language of the play has been considered firstly in terms of its linguistic characteristics as the anglophone ‗variety‘ or dialect in which the work is written as such and secondly in terms of its dramatic function for the play. In addition to considering the play‘s effects on readers and audiences, it was discussed how Hiberno-English is used to signal Christy‘s character transformation(s) within the plot. From a linguistic point of view, the focus of a code analysis is on the grammatical, lexical and orthographic/ phonological characteristics of the play‘s language itself, considering for example, the consistency and appropriateness of the play‘s linguistic realisation on page and stage (including even its pure intelligibility to a Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 115 readership/ audience). The focus of a text analysis is on how certain linguistic choices express the dramatic semiotics of the play, e.g. the development of character, plot and setting. This type of analysis can, for example, pay attention to the varying syntactic complexity and lexical density of PWW‟s main protagonist‘s utterances as his character develops. In the following sections, the literary linguistic interpretation of the play will focus on how the ‗variety‘ is used to achieve various semiotic effects locally in the play text as such. 4.1. Synge’s language as code The language of PWW has been the object of intermittent linguistic analysis since the 1970‘s, with the texts of all six of Synge‘s plays systematically included in the Corpus of Irish English of Hickey (2003). And of course in any case, as has been pointed out in the previous sections, the language characteristics of the play have been at the forefront of its public impact, starting with the Abbey Theatre audience‘s original objection to the word shifts. Critical discussion then and since has partly revolved around issues of the ‗authenticity‘ or ‗verisimilitude‘ of Synge‘s Hiberno- English relative to the dialects found in the west and south-west of Ireland of the time (cf. the playwright ‗as faker of peasant speech‘ - or not; 2. above), but increasingly linguistic analysis has focussed on the structural details of the literary dialect of PWW and other Synge plays with reference to the Irish language and in view of general features of Irishinfluenced English and the cultural values that it signifies (cf. especially Bliss 1971; Kiberd 1993; L‘Hôte 2003). Additionally, Sullivan (1980) traces the history of Hiberno-English as a dramatic medium since Elisabethan times pointing out an increasing preference over time in plays for the use of marked syntactic features of the variety as opposed to the originally favoured phonological ones. With regard to the authenticity/ verisimilitude issue, he sees literary Hiberno-English as a legitimate variety in its own right, noting tellingly that ―[t]he central intention of the playwright is not an isomorphic presentation of the dialect but a theatrical portrayal indicative of certain essentializing social characteristics‖ (Sullivan 1980: 208). Indeed the literary dialect has been labelled a ―heightened‖ ―distillation‖ and ―intensification‖ (Kiberd 1993) of corresponding non-literary varieties. Linguistic studies of Synge‘s Hiberno-English trace its inspiration in the literary work of Douglas Hyde, a leading member of the Gaelic League in the late 19 th century‘s striving for Irish independence and who in his Beside the Fire (1890) and Love Songs of Connacht (1893) translated the original Irish into an ‗Anglo-Irish‘ (Bliss 1971). Whereas in the former ―he was intentionally using the dialect to reproduce not the letter but the spirit of the Irish folk-tale‖ (Bliss 1971: 38) thereby introducing expressions which had no counterpart in the Irish original, in the latter he ―re- Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 116 produced the Irish idioms of the original‖ (Bliss 1971: 38), i.e. literally. These two features combined with the fact that Hyde translated the songs into prose were of great influence on the subsequent shaping of Synge‘s Hiberno-English. One literary linguistic effect was that the playwright ―transformed the language into a code, elaborate in complication, simple in its principle‖ (Deane 1971: 140) - capable of showing the richness of expression of peasant speech as represented in a dramatic medium. The few available accounts of the structural characteristics of the Hiberno-English (H-E) of PWW draw attention to its grammatical, lexical (and, marginally, phonetic) typicalities. Its structural characteristics are on the one hand those shared with the spoken rural Irish English of the late 19 th century, and on the other those which are unique to Synge‘s literary dialect itself. Thus, for instance, the presence of the ‗BE after + V-ing‘ immediate perfective construction is a well-known syntactic feature of Irish English of the 19 th century and since (cf. Shawn: ―Aren‘t we after making a good bargain ...‖, 1.4), as is the Irish-derived morphological feature of the diminutive suffix ‗-een‘ : cf. ‗cnuceen‘ (=‗little knock‘ - hillock), ‗Pegeen‘ (=‗little Peg‘ - Peggy), ‗poteen‘ (=‗little pot‘ - illicit whiskey) , ‗priesteen‘, ‗shebeen‘ (= Irish ‗sìbìn‘ i.e. ‘little jug‘ country pub), and the contemptuously used ‗Shaneen‘ (=‗little Shawn‘). A more complete, but still not fully comprehensive, list of the grammatical typicalities of the H-E of the play would also include: a. subordinating ‗and‘ usually followed by a non-finite verb (cf. Pegeen: ―and I piling the turf‖, 1.6) or a verbless clause altogether (cf. Pegeen: ―and you a fine lad‖, 2.29) b. clefting as ‗it‘ + ‗is‘ + complement + relative clause (cf. Christy: ―It‘s little I‘m understanding‖, 2.29) c. unbound reflexives such as ‗himself‘, ‗itself‘ (cf. Shawn: ―Where‘s himself? ‖, 1.3) d. zero relative pronoun following Subject (cf. Pegeen: ―a fine lad is the like of you‖, 3.47) e. ‗let‘ imperatives (cf. Shawn: ―Let you not be tempting me‖, 1.6) f. ‗is it? ‘ as invariant tag question (cf. Michael: ―You‘d be going, is it? ‖, 1.7). Orthographically, it is only the spellings of ‗divil‘ (devil), ‗kidnabbed‘ (kidnapped), ‗lepping‘ (leaping), ‗riz‘ (raised) and ‗polis‘ (police) that signal a specifically H-E pronunciation, there being no differences indicated in the pronunciation of the characters themselves (e.g. of Christy as coming probably from Munster, Co. Clare, as opposed to the other characters as natives of Co. Mayo in Connaught). The whole play is otherwise written in Standard English spelling, the assumption of Synge being that actors would use H-E pronunciation in any case in performance. Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 117 In summary, Bliss (1979) lists seven types of ‗non-standard words and phrases‘ which characterise the H-E of all Synge‘s plays (but most prominently PWW). With exemplifications added here, they are: a. those adopted directly from Irish (e.g. notably ‗loy‘ - long narrow spade; ‗banbhs‘ - piglets; ‗cleeve‘ - Irish ‗cliabh‘, wicker basket; ‗curagh‘ - frame boat) b. those translated from Irish (most prominently, ‗playboy‘ - Irish ‗buchachaill báire‘) c. ‗mistranslations‘, (e.g. in PWW ‗gaudy‘ for ‗splendid‘, original Irish ‗gréagach‘) d. words and phrases formerly used in Standard (British) English, now obsolete (e.g. ‗for to‘ in PWW; cf. Christy: ―goat‘s milk for to colour my tea‖, 2.23) e. those in general dialect use in England and Scotland (e.g. ‗skelp‘ meaning ‗quick blow‘ (cf. Jimmy: ―Look at him skelping her! ‖, 3.42); negator ‗never‘ for ‗not‘ with past tense (cf. Sara: ―I never seen to this day‖, 2.23), which also illustrates verb past participle as preterite; ‗them‘ as third person plural subjective and demonstrative (cf. Nelly: ―them‘s his boots‖, 2.22, also illustrating nonstandard verb concord) f. those in dialect use in limited areas (e.g. in PWW ‗peelers‘ for ‗police(men)‘) g. those which are unique (see below). 4.2. Synge’s language as text The material identity of the language of literature is text and the properties of the code are of course crafted for particular semiotic effect. Thus, the presence but also the great frequency of the Irish-derived present habitual (durative/ iterative) ‗(DO BE) + V-ing‘ in the play (cf. Christy: ―Is it often the police do be coming into this place […]? ‖, 1.8) is a grammatical marker of ‗code as text‘. Indeed, a count of the occurrence of this verb form in all six plays of Synge reveals that it is most frequent in PWW with 1.7 occurrences per sentence of play text (Bliss 1971: 41). In this respect L‘Hôte (2003: 43-51) highlights the ‗different temporality‘ of Irish peasant culture which Synge expresses by the frequent presence in the text of this habitual construction together with the other habitual ‗DO + V‘, (cf. Sarah: ―Did you never read in the papers the way murdered men do bleed and drip? ‖, 2.22) combined with the immediate perfective construction ‗BE after + V-ing‘ just discussed. With particularly the latter, L‘Hôte asserts that this temporality is captured as ‗circular‘, ‗recurrent‘, but partly ‗linear‘ too (2003: 50). Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 118 At this point it should perhaps be noted that selected linguistic structures which are ‗functionalised‘ for literary purposes do so as ‗defamiliarisation‘ devices (Douthwaite 2000) and via ‗foregrounding‘ (Mukařovsky 1964). They effect value-added meanings contextually, expressed as ‗deviation‘, i.e. unexpected irregularity of structure, and ‗parallelism‘, i.e. unexpected regularity of structure (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010: 31-32). In dramatic text, as ‗implicit‘ cues (Pfister 1993) in protagonists‘ speech (or in speech addressed to them), such structures mainly serve the characterisation of the dramatis personae themselves - in PWW most prominently of Christy Mahon. Given the rich literary idiom of the play, the cues are contextually also ‗poetic‘ in their effect. At a local, text-world level of reference in PWW, there is considerable evidence of crafted structural patterning within phraseology and prosody. With regard to phraseology, increasing syntactic complexity and lexical density characterises Christy‘s speech as he profiles himself favourably, in the first instance to Pegeen. Building his image as a well-travelled man, he produces strings of double-stacked pre-modifying adjectives in his narrative (cf. ―I am walking the world […] into stony scattered fields, or scribes of bog, where you‘d see young, limber girls, and fine, prancing women, making laughter with the men‖, 1.14), clearly evidencing rhythmic harmony, rhetorical parallelism, and alliteration with ―stony scattered [...] scribes […] see.‖ On the other hand, enumeration of verbs in their continuous form characterises Christy‘s depiction of the repetitive monotony of his pre-‗killing‘ existence as ―and I there drinking, waking, eating, sleeping‖ (1.15) and together with alliteration ―And I after toiling, moiling [of Middle English origin], digging, dodging from the dawn till dusk‖ (1.15). However, as the second act progresses, Christy‘s syntax becomes increasingly expansive, as he relates his heroic post-‗killing‘ wandering as a fugitive to Pegeen: It‘s well you know what it‘s a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you‘d hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart (2.28). Within the general paratactic style of utterance, the narration of his journey is expressed in a syntactically continuous mode - Christy on the move with a predominance of ‗V-ing‘ constructions (‗passing‘, ‗going‘), describing the environments of his journey equally via continuous (non-finite) verbs, ―lights shining‖, ―dog noising‖, ―voice kissing and talking‖. Repetition of preposition further links the circumstances as ―with… shining‖, ―with…noising…and…noising‖ to his own personal state ―with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart‖ (2.28). In other words, Synge Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 119 expresses the desolate continuity of Christy‘s journey using the rhetorical impact of the syntactic parallelisms and repetitions. In Act III, Christy‘s language becomes more and more ornamental as he woos Pegeen and imagines their romantic future together. While the syntax is still largely paratactic in style with verbs in their continuous ‗ing‘ form, the lexis densifies in its figurative expression, and includes imaginative metaphor, incorporating especially religious and mythological personifications: It‘s little you‘ll think if my love‘s a poacher‘s, or an earl‘s itself, when you‘ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I‘d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair (3.46). And: If the mitred bishops seen you that time they‘d be the like of the holy prophets, I‘m thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl (3.46). Thus Synge depicts the sublimity of Christy‘s declared love for Pegeen in a concentration of personified heaven-inspired images in close succession which constitute a dense field of lexical semantic hyperbole. Enumeration of ‗-ing‘ verbs also signals a physical dynamism attributable to Christy in Widow Quin‘s ―putting him down […] for racing, leaping, pitching and the Lord knows what‖ (2.24) in the subsequent sports event. Extreme alliteration is used to underscore Sara‘s euphoric toasting of Christy in celebration of his just related murderous deed of heroism: ―Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law‖ (2.26). There is also salient use made of alliteration for foregrounding effect with coordinating phrases such as Pegeen‘s ―(great) powers and potentates‖ (1.13) and ―(every) cot and cabin‖ (1.14) and Widow Quin‘s ―(are you) fasting or fed, young fellow? ‖ (2.24), all in lines addressed to Christy. In Act II, lexical chaining of the key epithet ―lonesome‖ as extreme ‗parallelism‘ occurs in the dialogue between Christy and Pegeen, highlighting the former‘s self-pitying image cultivated to gain the latter‘s favours: CHRISTY. ―[…] and I a lonesome fellow […]‖ PEGEEN. ―What call have you to be that lonesome […]? ‖ Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 120 CHRISTY. ―[…] you know it‘s a lonesome thing […]‖ CHRISTY. ―[…] odd men and they living lonesome […]‖ CHRISTY. ―How would a lovely handsome woman the like of you be lonesome […]? ‖ PEGEEN. ―[…] the like of yourself should be lonesome […]‖ PEGEEN. ―It‘s only letting on you are to be lonesome […]‖ CHRISTY. ―[…]but I was lonesome all times, and born lonesome […]" (2.28-29). Considering the textual use of metre, as Bliss (1971: 52) observes, certain metrical patterns characterise the ends of speeches - e.g. the cadence x x „x x „x, i.e. a succession of an anapest and iamb occurs no less than sixty times in PWW, and the cadence x x „x x x „x, i.e. a succession of two anapests eight times. Moreover, alexandrines (lines of six iambic feet) also occur regularly at the end of characters‘ speeches, for example: ―as naked as an ash-tree in the moon of May‖ ( 1.16, Christy), ―you‘ll wed the widow Casey in a score of days‖ (2.24, Christy), ―you‘d see him raising up a haystack like the stalk of a rush‖ (2.34, Mahon), ―for I‘m mounted on the springtide of the stars of luck‖ (3.50, Christy), ―I‘ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World‖ (3.57, Pegeen). These structural patternings enhance the rhetorical quality of the characters‘ diction as ‗poetic effect‘ via such phraseological and prosodic highlighting, adding impact to the meaning force of the lexicogrammar realised, suggesting that the character‘s ‗final words‘ are indeed just that. Turning to lexical patterning, the most prominent textual cue to characterisation (Culpeper 2001: 182-202), it has been noted that of Synge‘s plays, PWW in particular relies for its effect very largely on its ―exotic vocabulary‖ (Bliss 1971: 42), the lexically striking ‗playboy‘ itself being an idiosyncratic translation by the playwright from Irish (as pointed out by Kiberd 1993: 210). In addition, vocabulary is taken over directly from Irish without it being considered general H-E usage (e.g. as confirmed by non-inclusion in Dolan‘s Dictionary of Hiberno-English (2013)): examples are ―spavindy‖ (lame, lazy - Irish ‗speachan‘) and ―streeleen‖ (discourse flow [mistranslated from Irish ‗straoillin‘ - a swathe]). And most ‗exotic‘ of all are the words which Synge invents himself or uses idiosyncratically: e.g. ―louty‖ (clumsy), ―pitchpike‖ (pitchfork), ―swiggle‖ (swing + wiggle) or ―Mister honey‖ as address form to Christy. Another indication of the striking lexis characteristic of the play is revealed by a rough count of the words and phrases that do not occur in more than one of Synge‘s plays (Bliss 1971: 41), which shows an overwhelming presence of such ‗unique‘ items in PWW - 17.0 per ten pages of play text (e.g. as opposed to 5.5 per ten pages in Deidre of the Sorrows or 1.7 in Riders to the Sea). Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 121 It is indeed in the speech of the main protagonist of PWW that most of the codal and textual features described are manifest. L‘Hôte (2003) observes: ―He plays with words and his fight with H-E syntax is close to heroism‖ (46). This remark succinctly illustrates the fact that language as code and text indeed co-define the character of Christy Mahon, while remembering at the same time that the verbal characterisation of figures in a play text is not exhausted by a summary of the codal and textual structures associated with them. Whereas the analysis of code focuses on the more ‗grammatical‘ - in the classical sense - properties of the language employed, the analysis of text focuses on more the ‗rhetorical‘ properties of the language. Linguistically, syntactic and morphological (and certain lexical) structures dominate as salient for code characterisation, while phraseological and prosodic (and lexical) structures are salient for text characterisation. The former represent preferred paradigmatic structural choices, the latter typify syntagmatic structural patterns. However, it is doubtful whether such an analysis of code and text can, even in practical terms, be ever truly comprehensive (and the features commented on above are of course also only representative). For instance, the textual subtleties of dialogue development, weighting, balancing and harmony of turn structure, word play and humour in the code, etc. might resist strict classification, and in any case a full verbal characterisation of the protagonists is only possible when they speak their lines on stage or screen. The gamut of phonetic and paralinguistic features (accent, voice quality, tone of voice, articulatory precision, tempo, rhythm, pitch, loudness, pause, etc.) which mark characters‘ speech, i.e. their diction and delivery, remains to be specified. As for other aspects of characterisation, the performing protagonists are engaged in a ‗multimodal‘ tableau of movement and posture, body ‗language‘, facial expression, gesture, dress, etc. within a particular spatio-visual scene, all components of which further refine the ‗personae‘ they (re-)present. However, Synge‘s play script does offer explicit clues linking page with stage, literary text and performance text beyond ―the fact that verbal signs in the text are repeated as verbal signs in the performance and that they retain their linguistic code although that materiality changes from graphic to sounded signifiers‖ (Alter 1981: 114). While this is true of the dialogue script, it is the not the case with the stage directions, which do not retain their linguistic code in the conversion from graphic to sounded signification. Rather, the referents of their linguistic code in the text take on a paralinguistic and kinesic interpretation in performance. 5. Primary text and secondary text The analysis of Christy‘s transformation in 3. above highlighted the significance of stage directions as character descriptions. And even within Nursen Gömceli & Allan James 122 the individual acts of the play, Christy‘s moment-to-moment disposition is overtly expressed via the regular descriptions of his moods and emotions. For instance, he moves in Act I from being ―very tired and frightened and dirty‖ on arrival in the shebeen, speaking ―in a small voice‖ (1.8), behaving initially ―dolefully‖, ―bashfully‖, ―peevishly‖ (1.9), and ―shyly‖ with ―his feelings hurt‖ and ―offended‖ (1.10) in the company of Pegeen, Jimmy, Michael and Philly (and Shawn) as he begins his tale, to ―swelling with surprise and triumph‖ (1.12) as his story receives gradual acceptance, to ―expanding with delight at the first confidential talk he has ever had with a woman‖ (1.15) in his tête-à-tête with Pegeen (with Shawn still in the background) to returning uncertainty as he acts ―doubtfully‖ (1.17) and ―timidly‖ (1.19), feeling again challenged in the company of the recently entered Widow Quin. This close analysis of representative character descriptions over a limited stretch of the play‘s action shows again how important the ‗secondary text‘ (cf. Ingarden‘s ‗Nebentext‘ (1973)) of the play is for capturing Christy‘s shifting frame of mind and behaviour. Supplementing the ‗primary text‘ (his actual language, his ‗lines‘, Ingarden‘s ‗Haupttext‘) as the verbal expression of him as character, the information in the secondary text adds a directly behavioural (mental/ physical) dimension to his depiction and thus to a more complete portrayal of the ‗persona‘. From a literary linguistic perspective, it is important to confirm that ‗secondary text‘ is textual as much as ‗primary text‘ is and as such co-determines the linguistic identity of the play. Wales (1994) draws attention to the important narrative role that stage directions fulfil in dramatic text. Of the functions which she attributes to them, ‗kinesis‘ as directions of body movement and body language, ‗facial expression‘ including tone of voice, and ‗paralanguage‘ such as ‗sighing‘, ‗laughing‘, ‗crying‘, etc. are those which contribute to character description and development. As has been indicated, Synge freely employs such stage directions to this effect in PWW. Indeed ‗stage directions‘ hardly seems to be the appropriate designation for these literary devices; as part of the literary text, they constitute ongoing narrative commentary (as opposed to as part of the staging text constituting instructions/ indications to the actors and being ‗remediated‘ in the diction and delivery of the performance text as paralinguistic and kinesic features). Grammatically, these behavioural commentaries with third person and present time reference, as the above description suggests, typically take the form of adverbs (e.g. ―shyly‖), prepositional phrases as adverbials (e.g. ―in a small voice‖), present participles with or without following adverbials (e.g. ―swelling with delight‖) and past participles as adjectives (e.g. ―offended‖). They indicate the characters‘ emotional and attitudinal disposition, i.e. relating to the ‗kinesis‘, ‗facial expression‘ and ‗paralanguage‘ of Wales (1994) above. The stage directions as secondary text are Hiberno-English and beyond in The Playboy of the Western World 123 of course always in Standard English form, in contrast to the Hiberno- English primary text of PWW. The characterisation of the main protagonist, Christy Mahon, is mediated then by both the primary and secondary texts of the play. Whereas the protagonist‘s long-term transformation is from a timid country stranger to a mock hero to an incriminated victim to an emancipated ―likely gaffer‖ who‘s ―master of all fights from now‖ (3.57), which linguistically manifests itself in the primary text (in his own dialogue as well as dialogue addressed to him), his shorter term emotional vacillations (as, e.g. in the first act) are linguistically reflected in the secondary text. Thus, the linguistic properties of both text types, i.e. as Pfister‘s ―implicit figural‖ and ―authorial explicit‖ (1993: 185) characterisation techniques, jointly contribute to the development of this character. 6. Concluding remarks The present analysis aimed to show that a concerted literary linguistic approach to the meaning of dramatic discourse can illuminate the significance of Hiberno-English in Synge‘s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), highlighting its role as code, as a medium for liberation, and as text, as it serves the specific characterisation of the play‘s protagonist. Such a mode of analysis is suitably sensitive to genre-specific features of dramatic text, such as for example the acknowledgement of both dialogue (primary text) and stage directions (secondary text) as contributing to character development and the prominence of prosodic patterning as a cue to the text‘s ultimate oral performance. 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