The Well of the Saints
A blind beggar and his blind wife are cured by a saint, and discover that sight makes them less able to live together. Synge wrote the play as a comedy and it is often performed as one, but the joke is at the expense of everyone who assumes that improvement is straightforward.
The couple's relationship depends on a shared story about how beautiful they are, and the miracle destroys it. Like Riders to the Sea, the play draws on the speech patterns Synge recorded in the west of Ireland, and the apparent simplicity is the result of a great deal of listening.
Public-domain status
First published in 1905. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; John Millington Synge died in 1909, so this work has been free to republish there since 1980.
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Keep reading
- Pygmalion — Bernard Shaw, 1913
- Riders to the Sea — John Millington Synge, 1904
- The Aran Islands — John Millington Synge, 1907
- The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde, 1895
- Galway — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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