The Sources and Themes of The Plough and the Stars

THE SOURCES AND THEMES OF THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS THOUGH SEAN O'CASEY did not fight in the Easter Rising of 1916, he helped to organise the Irish Citizen Army and was a shrewd and passionate observer of life in Dublin before, during, and after the most fateful week in the history of his native city. His autobiographical record of this period, Drums Under the Windows (1945), and his The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919) are important historical documents. They are also of much literary interest because they reveal some of the sources of his tragedy, The Plough and the Stars, and elucidate some of its main themes. In The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, O'Casey describes the origins of the Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers, the two patriotic organisations which combined and fought the forces of the Crown during the Easter Rising. In 1912, the political leaders of Ulster organised the army known as the Ulster Volunteers as part of their opposition to the Bill for the institution of an Irish Parliament sponsored by the Liberal Party under H. H. Asquith and supported by John Redmond, leader of the Irish members of the Westminster parliament . In October, 1913, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union formed the Irish Citizen Army. Not long afterwards, O'Casey became secretary of the Council in charge of this army. In November , 1913, another army, the National Volunteers, was inaugurated at a meeting in Dublin attended by representatives of such patriotic organisations as Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish National Foresters, and the Gaelic Athletic Association. In 1914, John Redmond's political party was allowed to have twenty-five representatives on the committee in control of the National Volunteers, but when Redmond spoke in favour of Irish participation in the First World War, the leaders of Sinn Fein denounced him and formed an army of their own, the Irish Volunteers. The Irish Volunteers marched under the green, white, and orange flag of the Sinn Fein organisation. The flag of the Citizen Army, as described in Drums Under the Windows (pp. 270-71), had a blue base on which was represented the formalised shape of a golden-brown Plough and the constellation of Stars which bears the same name. It thus symbolised the reality and the ideals of labour. The play for which it provided a title also portrays a relationship between the ideal and the real, but it is a tragic relationship. O'Casey's treatment 234 1961 SOURCES AND THEMES OF THE PLOUGH 235 of the militant patriotism of the Easter Rising is critical and ironical. The patriotic ideal represented in The Plough and the Stars is that of a sacred war of national liberation. It is expounded in Act IP by the anonymous orator whose silhouette is seen through the windows of a public-house. The four passages declaimed by this orator are adapted from speeches by Padraic H. Pearse, who was a leader of Sinn Fein and the commander of the Irish Volunteers in the Easter Rising. The nature of O'Casey's borrowings and omissions is worth examining in some detail. The first speech by O'Casey's orator runs as follows: It is a glorious thing to see arms in the hands of Irishmen. We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, we must accustom ourselves to the use of arms. . . . Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. ... There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them! The italicised sentences in this passage are all borrowed from a speech on "The Coming Revolution" which Pearse delivered in 1914.2 Pearse, however, prefaced his description of bloodshed as "a cleansing and sanctifying thing" with the confession, ''We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people. . . ." By omitting this admission of the possibility of errors and unnecessary killings, O'Casey makes his orator even more dogmatic in tone and oracular in attitude than Pearse. In his next speech, O'Casey's orator draws a lesson for patriots...