The Playboy of the Western World

Book excerpt: Comedy in three acts by J.M. Synge, published and produced in 1907. It is a masterpiece of the Irish Literary Renaissance. This most famous of Synge's works fused the patois of ordinary Irish villagers with Synge's sophisticated rhetoric and enraged Irish playgoers with its satire of Irish braggadocio. The play follows the mercurial rise and fall of the character Christy Mahon, whose self-reported murder of his father earns him much admiration until his father shows up alive and in pursuit of his cowardly son. --The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature.