Playboy of the Western World

Last class we were able to unpack a lot of "Pot of Broth." Through looking at classmates' blogs, we found that the type of literature that was released and circulated during the beginning of the 1920s was meant to stir up the Irish public. The Irish were portrayed as naive to the trickery from the Church of England as demonstrated by the couple's acquiescence to their house visitor.  Irish hospitality was cast in an unfavorable light when put along side the local community's religious politics surrounding feeding the priest. They were practicing their religion but had inadvertantly stripped it of its meaning by putting earthly concerns on a higher priority than spiritual ones. In this way, the Irish might as well have been pagans again. And that was how Yeats wanted to portray them: to get the public angry. He needed a piece of literature that everyone would go see and that would ignite the fire of rebellion by calling attention to the negative way the Irish were portrayed.
Originally, I had seen Yeats' work as an example of oral storytelling, purely an example of the culture's artistic tendencies. I ascribed no real, penetrating meaning until we looked closer at the Christian concepts of hospitality which then brought us to the differentiation of earthy and spiritual concerns, comedy and tragedy, low and high order art forms.  

Reading "Playboy of the Western World" post-binary discussion allowed me to look for lines of dialogue that said more than just what the characters thought.  In this play's case, the Irish were portrayed as a non-unified people. "Slaying his da" is what earns the Playboy fear and respect in his new community and is what allows Pegeen to even consider marrying him (although they just met). This play has another wise widow that helps the younger generation male in his quest to gain respect and affirmation from his generation and his father's. The widow, in her fairy godmother-way, always regarded the boy as better than what he really was. His father was convinced that the boy was a dunce, could not talk to girls, and would therefore die alone with nothing to show for his name. Widow Quin says, "I am your like, and it’s for that I’m taking a fancy to you,..." (Act 2) Oddly enough, the widow tells Christy that he has to handle his daddy issues on his own; she cannot help him with that dispute.
The culture of the play values daring and courageous youth, which makes me believe that it is  another nationalistic work, but slightly less than Yeats'.  As Michael says in act 2, "A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man did split his father’s middle with a single clout, should have the bravery of ten, so may God andMary and St. Patrick bless you, and increase you from this mortal day." Similarly the widow says, "...isn’t it a great shame when the old and hardened do torment the young?" It is the act of killing his father that makes Christy so attractive to Pegeen. But once she finds out that he indeed failled at his attempt (multiple times), she immediately loses interest and returns to the more earthy concerns of marrying a stable man with money.