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This dissertation has been 65-9757 microfilmed exactly as received SMITH, Bobby L ., 1930- SATIRE IN THE DRAMA OF SEAN O’CASEY. The University of Oklahoma, Ph. D ., 1965 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE SATIRE IN THE DRAMA OF SEAN O'CASEY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree o f DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY BOBBY L. SMITH Norman, Oklahoma 1965 SATIRE IN THE DRAMA OF SEAN O'CASEY APPROVED BY c y'i> r- -U)JiUfrwv lA-. DISSERTATION COMMITTEE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am especially indebted to Dr. A. J. Fritz for his professional aid and his personal encouragement during the several years since he first introduced me to the dramas of Sean O'Casey. In addition, I am grateful to him for directing this dissertation and for offering a recent seminar which concentrated on the development of modern Irish drama. I am also grateful to Dr. Calvin G. Thayer, Dr. Bruce I. Granger, and Dr. William H. Maehl, Jr., who courteously consented to serve as a reading committee and whose teaching and personal friendship have been invaluable through out my career as a graduate student. i i i TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i i i C hapter I . INTRODUCTION....................................................................................... 1 I I . THE IRISH PLAYS .............................................................................. 13 The Shadow o f a Gunman ..................................................... I3 Kathleen Listens In ............................................................ 25 Juno and th e Pay cock .............. .. ............................... 31 Nannie's Night Out .............................................................. 40 The Plough and the Stars ................................................ I I I . TRANSITIONAL PERIOD ..................................................................... 59 The Silver Tassie .................................................................. 6 l Within the Gates ......................................... 78 The End of the Beginning ................................................. 96 A Pound On Demand ................................................................ 99 Purple Dust ............................................................................... 100 The S ta r Turns Red .............................................................. II3 Red Roses For Me ..................................................................... 120 IV. THE FINAL PERIOD ........................................................................... 134 Oalc Leaves and Lavender ..................................................... 135 Cock-A-Doodle Dandy .............................................................. l 4 l Hall of Healing ....................................................................... I56 Bedtime Story ........................................................................... 160 Tirae to Go ............................................................................... l6 ^ The Bishop's Bonfire ............................................................ 166 The Drums o f F ath er Ned ..................................................... 174- Encore .......................................................................................... V. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................ 198 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................... 207 SATIRE m TEE DRAMA OF SEAÏI O’CASEY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon — laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution — these can lift at a colossal humbug — push it a little — weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. Mark Twain Sean O'Casey, like Mark Twain, recognized laughter as the only effective weapon against sham, hypocrisy, and totalitarian regimentation. Through laughter, he attempts to restore some semblance of order to the sick society, the "chassis," created and nourished by the stand-patters, the profiteers, and the "Down-and-Outs". He is disliked and attacked by the ctand-patters who see nothing wrong with the way the world is now and by the profiteers whose inordinate profits depend on maintaining the status quo. Typically, the "Down-and-Outs" ignore O'Casey as they ignore every other challenge. But like their fellow targets, the "Down-and-Outs" have an aversion to change. O'Casey, on the other hand, equates change with progress and sees both as inevitable in a social order that is alive ^Mark Twain, "The Mysterious Stranger," The Family Mark Twain (New York: Harper & Bros,, 1935)^ P« 12^ 5 . ^Sean O'Casey, Collected Plays, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1963), I, pp. 20, 42, 88- 8 9. 1 2 just as he sees both as impossible in a social disorder that is dead. O'Casey, as satirist, offers something vital to replace that which he seeks to destroy. He is neither a universal cynic nor a "demoli tion expert", as Kenneth Tynan labels Shaw.^ He is sensitive, perhaps "abnormally sensitive to the gap between what might be and what is."^ What he offers in lieu of the mental rigidity, moral apathy, and automaton living which he seeks to destroy is life itself —life as it csua be when no longer controlled by a dead past, by "business as usual" stand-patters, or by those who consider mortification of the flesh a pre-requisite to joy. O'Casey's concern is not with the past nor the future, but with the here and now. This is the world he seeks to correct, to save from its own foolishness. "After all," as Shaw notes in his Quintessence of Ibsenism, "the salvation of the world depends on the men who w ill not take evil good-humoredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.O'Casey's writing identifies him as a man much concerned with what Shaw calls "the salvation of the world." Few things are consistent in the canon of Sean O'Casey, who shares Whitman^ nonchalant attitude toward consistency as well as Emerson's dis trust of it. But among those few things that are consistent are his penchant for laughing at the ridiculous wherever he finds it and his insistence upon revealing the distorted ugliness of any system that dehumanizes or destroys 3as quoted by James Sutherland, English Satire (Cambridge Univer sity Press, 1958), p. 1 . Ibid., p. k. ^George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York: Brentano's, 1^29) , P- IB6. 3 the people Involved in it --whether the people are involved hy choice or otherwise. He directs his satire at such systems whether they are innately evil or simply seem so due to the manipulations of the inelastic manikins who control them and their victims. O'Casey's people, from those in his earliest to those in his latest plays, are involved in desperate sometimes fatalistic struggles against tradition, materialism, religion, nationalism: against forces which, in their uses of human beings, would lesson or obli terate the joys of life. O'Casey's rebels declare their independence with Avril, who says, "I'm fed up carrying things about to get this foolish old house in order.They recognize with the workman that "there is sweet music in the land, but not for the deaf; there is wisdom too, but it is not in a desk it is; but out in the hills and in the life of all things rovin' round, undher the blue sky."^ In his own terms, O'Casey held that man is responsible for the "chassis" of the universe and he attempted from lS 2h to to answer g Juno's question, "Oh, What can God do agen the stupidity of men?" The answers vary from the drunkenness and joy of Joxer Daly and Jack Boyle to the political involvements of Ayamonn and Red Jim Larkin to the dancing and cavorting of the Cock and Main Marion. Partial answers are gained by a ll who try to see into Heaven through the wrong windows of drink and abandon; a prophecy of order restored is implicit in the actions of the young people in The Drums of Father Ned who would replace the hate and 6 Collected Plays, III, p. 92. ^Ibid., p. 100. Q Collected Plays, I, p. 86. 4 hypocrisy-laden government of their fathers; momentary victories are won by Nannie and the young whore who^ in affirming their joy of life, dance to their deaths. Nothing but distress and continued anguish are gained by O'Casey's cowards who are content to thump their craws and say, either in a whine or a self assured bellow, "I am what I am." O'Casey's villains are generalized rather than specific. They are business men, quarrelsome Irishmen, newly powerful politicians, officers of the church, army personnel, and domineering parents. They are, in short, those who would (by choice or through ignorance) halt change or deny the Joys of life to the living. In bis drama, O'Casey attacks stupidity as readily as he attacks any organized clerical or secular power that represses what was for him the essence of human e x iste n c e . As satirist, he uses virtually every device ever used in satire to attack the repressive ideas and institutional pride of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, politics in general, and the basic economic structure of the world. The world in his drama is rarely restricted to the three walls on the picture-box-stage but extends to include the audience in a specific theatre and to include

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