sing his
belief in the preface to "The Tinker's Wedding":--

The drama is made serious ... not by the degree in which it is
taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the
degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define,
on which our imaginations live....

We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's or a
dramshop, but as we go to a dinner where the food we need is taken
with pleasure and excitement....

The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything....

Of the things which nourish the imagination, humor is one of the
most needful and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire
calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and
where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are
doing, there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was
morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people,
from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of
life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that
these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind
being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country
have been laughed at, in their own comedies.

In the preface to "The Playboy of the Western World" is this paragraph,
completing his _credo_ as to drama:--

On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that
is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have
grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been
given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb
and wild in reality.

Although there are only about forty characters, all told, in the six
plays of Synge, and ten of these are in "Deirdre of the Sorrows," which
for all its humanity is a play out of a life that is gone, there are men
and women a-plenty to give us this "rich joy found only in what is
superb and wild in reality." Nora is "superb and wild" in her longings,
and Maurya in her sorrow; and old Martin Doul "superb and wild" in his
dream of life in the South; Sarah Casey and Pegeen Mike "superb and
wild" in the most direct sense of the phrase; and these are all real, if
not representative of the poorer peasantry. And in the high way of
romance who has dreamed what is more superb and wilder than the lament
of Deirdre