J. M. Synge Lecture: Prof. Nicholas Grene (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), "Synge and Wicklow: Places to Plays"

I grew up in the area of rural Wicklow where Synge set three of his plays: The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints.  For me, encountering them for the first time as a child, these were local plays, featuring familiar places in my own home ground. The aim of this lecture will be to explore how Synge came to shape these places into an imaginative geography, drawing not only on his experience of the Wicklow hills and valleys, which were to him also to some extent home territory, but combining  that experience with very different elements such as a story heard on the Aran Islands, or a medieval French play studied in Paris.

Nicholas Grene is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin, a former Senior Fellow of the College, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has been an invited lecturer in many countries and visiting professor at the University of New South Wales, Dartmouth and the Sorbonne. He has written extensively on Synge and for ten years was the Director of the Synge Summer School. His books include The Politics of Irish Drama (1999), Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (2002) Yeats's Poetic Codes (2008), Home on the Stage (2014), Farming in Modern Irish Literature (2021) and, most recently, Irish Theatre in the Twenty-first Century (2024).

Registration 

If you are interested in participating in this online event, please sign up by submitting this registration form or by sending an email with the subject line “SYNGE” to irishstudies@uni-wuerzburg.de by April 19, 2026. Please include your full name and affiliation. Online participants will receive a zoom link to the event in due time. Please note that the above given email address is used solely for registration purposes. If you want to contact ISWÜ, please use the contact information given below.

Contact
Irish Studies Würzburg (ISWÜ)
Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann & Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann
ina.bergmann@uni-wuerzburg.de,  maria.eisenmann@uni-wuerzburg.de