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My Pegeen Mike

Molly Allgood’s contributions to Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, this chapter argues, are overdue for a reconsideration, and a close reading of their letters with the development of the play shows that there would have been no Playboy without Molly. This chapter follows the earlier discussions in highlighting the ways that current and Revival readings of theater are informed by assumptions about authorship that privilege men and how these concerns are bound up with gender roles. For example, Synge likely burned Allgood’s part of their correspondence due to his worries about her reputation; nonetheless, this chapter reads Allgood’s responses both in the handwritten notes she wrote in the margins of his surviving letters and in the context of Synge’s responses. In particular, the way that Molly brings her physical female body and the work of that body onto the stage and into the text are major contributions she made to The Playboy.