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Contrary to the common belief that Lady Gregory and Synge were literary comrades dedicated to the Irish Renaissance, a few recent significant studies suggest the relationship between the two dramatists involved strain and competitiveness from the start. Lady Gregory, conscious of Synge’s expertise in the culture of the Aran Islands, must have found some form of potential rivalry with him in writings on the islands. Her lifelong possessive literary focus on Yeats continued to remain a key limiting elements in her relationship with Synge. Nonetheless, many literary and dramatic connections between Synge’s plays and Lady Gregory’s from 1902 onwards reflect complex cross-influences and elliptically-expressed rivalries between the two writers. In addition, both of them made use of a disturber figure with superior power of imagination and language, who challenges the everyday materialist concerns of the inhabitants, thereby bringing them to a moment of crisis or revelation. While Gregory’s artist-disturber figure generates the hope of concord rather than loss and political rupture, Synge’s heroes serve to reveal unpleasant fundamental truths. Her lifelong feelings and judgement of Synge show the mixture of admiration and distaste at her heart. This ambivalent attitude derived from her partiality for Yeats, but it also drove her to firmly support Synge’s literary achievements.
