Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: Disillusionment to delusion

Abstract

Sean O'Casey is best remembered for his engagement, artistic and otherwise, with Irish history during a crucial period of turmoil and revolutionary change. His most famous and enduring drama – the Dublin Trilogy of The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), and The Silver Tassie (1928) which followed it – concerns politically derived suffering: The War of Independence, the Civil War, the Easter Rising and World War One. Formed by these events O'Casey's vision is also manifest in his dramatic representation of them. From the bitter parodies of the Dublin Trilogy to his blistering depiction of the sanctimonious, priest-ridden new state in Th..