Sean O'Casey was not born as Sean O'Casey. He recieved the name John O'Casey when christened by his Protestant and English-loyal family. He was one of thirteen children and the youngest of the five to survive past infancy. His father died six years after his birth, creating the circumstances that raised O'Casey in poverty. O'Casey was personally acquainted with the miseries of the Irish working class; he was raised and resided in the slums of Dublin for forty years.
Because he had cataracts, Sean O'Casey was nearly blind, blind enough to keep him out of school. Reading escaped Sean until he was a teenager and this he taught himself. Theater came to O'Casey through an older brother who temporarily served as an actor. As an adolescent, O'Casey went through the typical series of odd jobs to earn a sustenance except "at age fifteen he played Henry VI in an amateur production that later became Abbey Theatre."
His interest turned to Ireland and its worries in his early twenties. Somewhere between the age of twenty and thirty he learned Gaelic and became involved with the Gaelic League and an assortment of other patriotic, less known groups.. He renamed himself in Gaelic as Sean O'Cathasaig during a spurt of romantic patriotism which he soon toned down to simply Sean O'Casey. He worked during this time on the railroads and continues to do so until the age of thirty one.
In 1913, at age 33, Sean joined James Larkin's Irish Transport and General Worker's Union while it is involved in the strike/lock-out with Dublin's employers. (Darin 2) The following year he assumed the post of secretary of the Irish Citizen Army and took on the task of drawing up its constitution. Several months later he quit the organization because of his disagreement with the leaders over class interaction. The new union leader got the Irish Citizen Army, consisting of primarily working class, and the Irish Volunteers, a paramilitary group composed of middle and upper class people. Allowing dual membership was doing an injustice to the Irish Citizen Army through his logic, and he resigned in protest. He complained that "the fight for Irish was being transformed into a fight for collars and ties." (Foster 241)
During the Easter Rebellion, O'Casey was arrested as a suspected instigator of the violence. He was released when the conflict was over. Here commences the material for the focus of many of O'Casey's plays. Other events that O'Casey focuses on ensue, such as the Irish-Anglo war and Irish Civil War. He had several poetry collections and pamphlets published before finally having a play accepted on his fourth attempt for production by the Abbey Theatre. Shadow of a Gunman marked his entry into the world of drama.
Drama is defined in Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as "a state, situation, or series of events involving interesting or intense conflict of forces." Sean O'Casey engaged primarily in play writing as a means for communicating his views. Juno and the Paycock, his first big success, and it communicates a sour outlook on the Irish struggle for independence.
Gabriel Fallon wrote of his interactions with O'Casey at the time: "I recalled O'Casey's insistence that he was writing a play about a young man called Johnny Boyle." (Harrington 503) Though Johnny's personal tragedy is only one of many in the play, it is the one that inspired O'Casey to write because it allowed him to deal with the most pressing matters on the Irish agenda.
Johnny is made out to be a valiant youth gone wrong. Mrs. Boyle says of her son "I don't know what's goin' to be done with him...I knew he was makin' a fool of himself." (Harrington 207) She is referring to his involvement and the injuries he incurred during Easter Week. Johnny himself comes across as a strong supporter of the fight despite the appendage losses he suffered. "Ireland only half free'll never be at peace while she has a son left to pull a trigger." (Harrington 220) Because the violence incurred losses that did not conform to O'Casey's idealism, he found it difficult to support the nationalist cause.
However, despite this statement, Johnny is not quite so loyal to the "Diehards" as he attempts to portray himself. He betrayed Commadant Tancred. The men identified as two "irregulars" come for Johnny and address him as Sean O'Boyle. "Come on, Sean O'Boyle, you're wanted; some of us have a word to say to you." (Harrington 251) The sympathy is then to be bestowed on Mrs. O'Boyle and the other mothers of dead Irish youths. "He wasn't a Diehard or a Stater, but only a poor dead son" (Harrington 253) O'Casey casts a light of imperfection on the paramilitary groups and brings the focus away from their cause and down to the lives detrimentally affected by their actions: the mothers, sisters, daughters, and those who simply want to live in peace. If his mission is to portray the nastiness of the truth, he does so effectively. However, one must ask why he would write such things that influence Irish minds away from their nemesis, England.
The play The Plough and the Stars is named after the banner of the Irish Citizen Army and is far more unpatriotic than anything contained in Juno and the Paycock. Where Juno and the Paycock pointed out the unpleasantness of war and the misery of the victims, The Plough and the Stars portrayed the members of the Irish Citizen Army as drunken dreamers who are big talkers and accomplish little. The sole reason they participate in their acts of violence is out of fear of being viewed as a coward by their peers. The soldiers make a fuss over fancy uniforms, abuse and abandon their families, and mock one another throughout the play. They are easily moved to fury by patriotic proclaimers, exercising no more freewill than their leader's shadows.
The Irish public was outraged and branded O'Casey a traitor. "[This play] caused rioting at the Abbey Theatre on its first production in 1926." (Foster 271) O'Casey perceived his persecution as wrongful and expressed his thoughts in his third person autobiographical Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well.
"For the first time in his life, Sean felt a surge of hatred for Cathleen ni Houlihan sweeping over him. He saw now that the one who had the walk of a queen could be a bitch at times. She galled the hearts of her children who dared to be above the ordinary, and she often slew the best ones. She had hounded Parnell to death, she had yelled and torn at Yeats, at Synge, and now she was doing the same to him. What an old snarly gob she could be at times; an ignorant one too." (Atkinson 780)After this blatantly suicidal play was produced, Dublin and all of Ireland became a most unfriendly place for O'Casey to reside.
He moved to England at age forty-six and never returned. In England, he married an admiring American actress and fathered three children: Breon, Niall, and Shivaun. The middle son, named after the acclaimed High King of Ireland, died at twenty. "Some saga writers place Niall's son . . . as a contemporary of Cuchulainn in the story of the intoxication of Ulster." (Ellis 182) One should note that all three names are strongly Irish names and that despite his self-imposed exile, O'Casey did not consider himself anti-Irish. If he admired the mythological and perhaps historical figures of Ireland, what caused him to abandon the fight in the physical sense? Cuchulainn, Finn Mac Cuhall, or any other of the story would not have done the same as O'Casey.
During the remaining years of his life O'Casey produced many more plays, autobiographies, short stories, and articles for publication. The majority did not pertain to Ireland. He became infatuated with communism and considered many to be communist by his definition. "Jesus was a Communist, by O'Casey's standards." (Atkinson xviii) His daughter Shivaun claimed "Sean was a humanitarian, a Communist and a pure spirit, he saw a long way into the future...and he saw that his ideals were being arrived at quicker [among communist nations] than in other countries, particularly the capitalistic ones." (Atkinson xviii) O'Casey even went so far as to write a propaganda play called The Star Turns Red promoting communism.
Other themes that O'Casey dabbled with were sexuality, humanitarianism, and the oppressiveness of the Church. At the age of fifty four he wrote a short story entitled I Wanna Woman. It is the tale of the sexual excursions he pursues on a weekend evening and the mental agony he faces from oppressions of society and the Church.
There is no doubt that Sean O'Casey was a good playwright and made at least a minor mark on literature. Regardless of a viewer's/reader's stance on the political messages in his works, they fulfill the objective of drama and make an impact on the audience. As for what he did for Ireland, he was little more than born there. He abandoned the national cause in favor of sympathy for the individuals involved. The Irish seeking independence were not perfect, and this made them uncompatible with his idealism. This shift of focus to the tragedy of the subunits distorts the overall picture dealing with the pride of nationalism. He endorsed humanity for all mankind, took up the calling of Communism, and left the land of his origin. Sean O'Casey added a name to the list of Irish citizens respected as literary accomplices, but he did little to remedy their wrongs. O'Casey was born a John' and remained a John,' as did his character Johnny (Sean) Boyle in Juno and the Paycock.
Darin, Doris. Sean O'Casey. New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1976.
Ellis, P. B. A Dictionary of Irish Mythology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Foster, R.F. The Oxford History of Ireland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
O'Casey, Sean. Juno and the Paycock in Modern Irish Drama Ed. John P. Harrington. New York: Norton, 1991. 204-254