Christopher Collins

Integrated micro-machined antenna for 200 GHz operation

A new integrated micro-machined slotted horn antenna is reported which has been fabricated on a GaAs substrate. The far-field pattern has been simulated and measured showing good agreement, and the antenna has been used to successfully couple power in and out of a micro-machined rectangular waveguide.

Use of novel photoresists in the production of submillimeter-wave integrated circuits

A new technique is reported for micro-machining millimeter and submillimeter-wave rectangular waveguide components using an advanced thick film UV photoresist known as EPONTM SU-8. The recent introduction of this resist has been of great interest to the millimeter-wave and terahertz micro-machining communities, as it is capable of producing features up to 1 mm in height with very high aspect ratios in only a single UV exposure. It therefore represents a possible low-cost alternative to the LIGA process. S-parameter measurements on the new rectangular waveguides show that they achieve lower loss than those produced using other on-chip fabrication techniques, they have highly accurate dimensions, are physically robust, and cheap and easy to manufacture.

A Sort of Saint: The Well of the Saints

This chapter reconsiders the character of the Catholic Saint in The Well of the Saints. Analysis in this chapter suggests that the Saint in this play is a Protestant tramp with pre-Christian beliefs that has the unique ability of harnessing miraculous powers from pre-Christian groundwater. The chapter concludes by foregrounding the pertinence of Synge’s decision to dramatize the Saint as a Protestant because it marks his first solipsistic retreat to his Ascendancy class as he began to withdraw under the increasing attacks on his plays made by the Catholic bourgeoisie.

A Christless Creed: In the Shadow of the Glen

This chapter is concerned with Synge’s dramatization of the strange and mercurial powers of the Natural landscape that he understood to be a residue of pre-Christian pantheism. From a young age Synge was, by his own admittance, ‘a worshipper of nature’ and his knowledge and worship of pre-Christian pantheism is explored in The Shadow of the Glen. Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and Synge’s knowledge of Schopenhauer is used to explore the dramatist’s understanding of pre-Christian pantheism. The chapter concludes by considering Synge’s classed position that allowed him to use a highly esoteric philosophy to explore pre-Christian pantheism.

The Cries of Pagan Desperation: Riders to the Sea

This chapter is concerned with Synge’s dramatization of magical realism in Riders to the Sea. The chapter juxtaposes Synge’s staging of pre-Christian magical rituals with his knowledge of Herbert Spencer and James Frazer’s comparative social science. The chapter suggests that it is with significance that Synge utilized magical realism because it cajoled the Catholic, bourgeois spectator into developing a respect for pre-Christian cultural residue because the dramatic action was presented within the framework of realism.

Savage Paganism: The Playboy of the Western World

This chapter interrogates The Playboy of the Western World in relation to Synge’s scientific analysis of fairy changeling folklore. This chapter proposes an alternative reading of the infamous disturbances that greeted the opening of the performance by looking at the relationship between the play and the ‘Clonmel horror’ of 1895. In March of that year Bridget Cleary, a successful twenty-six year-old dressmaker from South Tipperary, was ritually immolated because she was feared to be a fairy changeling. The chapter tracks the relationship between the Clonmel horror and the dramaturgy of the play, and also the shocking ramifications that the dramaturgy of a play based on the Clonmel horror had in performance when one member of the audience explicitly identified the relationship.

Synge’s Life: Religion, Class and When the Moon Has Set

This chapter explores religion and class in Synge’s Ireland through the lens of Synge’s first, and unfinished, play: When the Moon Has Set. Analysis of this play is read in conjunction with Synge’s life: the play is acutely biographical. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates how pre-Christian residual culture begins to emerge in Synge’s life and plays as a means to transcend the strictures of Anglo-Irish/Catholic class and Protestant/Catholic religion in the Ireland of his time.

Flagrant Heathens: The Tinker’s Wedding

This chapter considers the clash of pre-Christian residual culture in Synge’s play The Tinker’s Wedding. The chapter considers how pre-Christian culture came to be a residual culture in Synge’s Ireland. With this analytical framework in place, the chapter considers how The Tinker’s Wedding can be seen as the blueprint for Synge’s dramatization of pre-Christian culture. The play poses an anti-structural culture (pre-Christian beliefs) with a structural culture (Catholic beliefs). This chapter is integral in explaining what was at stake for Synge when dramatizing residual culture and in many ways it establishes the overarching concern for the analysis offered in the following chapters.

Synge’s Death: The Otherworld

The book concludes by answering this question: did Synge dramatize the residue from pre-Christian Ireland to negotiate the Ascendancy’s anxiety over their Irish heritage, or was it because he had difficulty accepting that the wanton cultural imperialism that was articulated by the Catholic Church and its newly enfranchised bourgeois laity exploited the residue from pre-Christian Ireland? The book answers this question by exploring the final days of Synge’s life and the reaction to his death that was mythologized by W.B. Yeats into a pre-Christian fantasy.

Introduction: Theatre and Residual Culture

The Introduction contextualizes religion and politics in Catholic Ireland, and the dramatist’s relationship to these two ideologies. The term that this book repeatedly refers to—‘pre-Christian residual culture’ is theorized in relation to Raymond Williams’s understanding of cultural materialism. Pre-Christian residual culture is then considered in relation to modernity, and what it meant to be ‘modern’ at the dawn of the twentieth century in Ireland. Synge as a political playwright is foregrounded in relation to his reading of socialism. A chapter breakdown is offered.