O'Casey's Shakespeare

O'Casey's Shakespeare ALICE FOX BLITCH IN READING SEAN O'CASEY'S PROSE WORKS, one is struck by his frequent allusions to Shakespeare's plays. In his earliest essays, which appeared in The Irish Worker and Irish Opinion between 1913 and 1918, brief quotations from Macbeth, 3 Henry VI, Coriolanus, and Julius Caesar served as highly functional introductions to O'Casey's polemic; and he was to resort to the same device in "The Sacrifice of Thomas Ashe" and "The Story of the Irish Citizen Army."l Shakespeare was, in fact, so much a part of O'Casey's thinking that one hesitates to label "allusion" his frequent Shakespearean echoes. And this is true not only of the earlier works, but the later ones as well, essays and the many-volumed autobiography written after his fame had been established. Were O'Casey to have enjoyed a standard education, there would be little noteworthy in such recognition of Shakespeare; and had he not been influenced as a writer by Shakespeare's methods, the entire matter would be at best academic. But in fact O'Casey was self-educated and, as I shall demonstrate, he was decidedly influenced by Shakespeare's ways of creating character. O'Casey's earliest plays, one-act undertakings of varying merit, seemed to Lady Gregory promising but lacking in fullness of characterization. She suggested to O'Casey that he develop what was clearly a talent for character, and he proceeded to do just that. He later commented that following his interview with her, "I threw over my theories and worked at characters.,,2 His immersion in Shakespeare showed him a way to handle character, and as he turned his attention to a time of civil strife in Ireland it would have been natural for him to remember Shakespeare's dramas of rivalry and insurrection , the two Henry IV plays. Juno and the Paycock, his second full-length play and the one which established his place in the Irish Renaissance, clearly illustrates the formative influence of the two parts of Henry IV. Significantly, 283 284 ALICE FOX BLITCH in describing the room in which he wrote Juno O'Casey tells us that "Shakespeare had often come there, had sat by the fire. He had brought Mistress Quickly with him, and Doll Tearsheet leaning on the arm of the panting Falstaff.,,3 The importance of such singling out of characters from the Shakespeare canon cannot be overstressed. It was not Othello or Lear who caught O'Casey's attention during this period of his development. Indeed, later in his career O'Casey found in Henry IV a vision of reality capable of guiding men's lives. In an essay written around 1950, a quarter of a century after he had written Juno, O'Casey argues for a realistic facing of life: If we are to mingle with life, if we are to try to fulfil our purpose aere, we mustn't be afraid to handle things liable to' spot our fair hands and stain our purple and finer linen. There's no use of pleading our gentility or a higher sensitiveness: it won't do. Like the scented fop wrangling with Hotspur, sweating on a steamy battlefield, sniffing aromatic powder up his lordly nose to deaden the smell of burned-out saltpetre, and railing at the rough soldiers for bringing slovenly, unhandsome eorses betwixt the wind and his nobility; and telling Hotspur that he himself would have been a soldier, but for these vilely-smelling guns.4 In another essay written at the same time, O'Casey again refers to Henry IV, citing Shakespeare's practice to give weight to his own subordination of theme in the drama. He argues that great drama need not dwell on such classic themes as marital jealousy and filial relationships: "... Falstaff, probably the greatest character ever thrust upon a stage, had no relationship with a mother ... nor had he a wife to be jealous of.,,5 For O'Casey the interest of Falstaff centered on the brilliance of his characterization, not on his exemplification of Aristotelian themes. It is evident that the modern playwright, like most modern readers, saw the historical matter...