# Short Plays — Character guide

> Key figures in Short Plays by J. M. Synge.

- [Nora Burke](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/nora_burke.md): Nora keeps a wake-house at the head of a long glen, tending a shrouded body and a stocking of money while the wind cries outside. Married to a man she calls queer and cold, she has grown used to being lonesome and now me
- [Sarah Casey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/sarah_casey.md): Sarah Casey, the self-styled Beauty of Ballinacree, sits by a stick fire at a chapel gate while Michael Byrne files at a tin ring and grumbles that she is dragging him to the priest. She wants a decent marriage to stop t
- [Mary Byrne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/mary_byrne.md): Mary Byrne arrives at the roadside camp with porter and opinions, mocking Michael for being a black born fool to marry a woman who would wander anyway. She needles Sarah with hard-won talk of grand ladies in silk who suf
- [Micheal Dara](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/micheal_dara.md): Micheal Dara is the young man the Tramp passes on the road, driving mountain ewes and heading toward the cottage beyond the sea. He is the one Nora sends for in the dark, the one who walks round to see what must be done 
- [Tramp](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/tramp.md): The Tramp walks to Brittas from the Aughrim fair and knocks at the last cottage in the glen, hoping for milk and a corner to sleep. He takes the needle Nora gives him and stitches his coat while murmuring the De Profundi
- [Dan Burke](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/dan_burke.md): Dan Burke is the body under the sheet in the glen cottage, an old man who cursed his wife that morning and forbade her to touch him when he died. He keeps a black stick in the cupboard for a bad wife, and he lies still t
- [Cathleen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/cathleen.md): Cathleen runs the household's small logistics — rope, bread, pig, kelp — while her mother Maurya keens and her brother Bartley readies the red mare for the Galway fair. She is caught between practical defiance and inheri
- [Michael Byrne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/michael_byrne.md): A tinker man involved in the wedding preparations.
- [Maurya](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/maurya.md): Maurya sits at the fire raking turf and prophesying doom while her son Bartley saddles a horse for the fair and her daughters hide a bundle from her. Her grief is not decorative — it is a lived arithmetic of drowned men,
- [Bartley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/bartley.md): Bartley moves through the cottage issuing small commands — sell the pig, gather kelp, watch the sheep — because the house now runs on one man's labor and he knows it. He is neither cruel nor heedless, only a young man do
- [Priest](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters/priest.md): A local priest who appears briefly in the plays.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_2_se/characters