The Irish dramatist Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) is considered the greatest of the Irish playwrights who began writing after World War I. Sean O'Casey was born John Casey on March 31, 1880, the youngest of a large family living in a Dublin slum. He...

Sean O'Casey's considerable literary achievements have been overshadowed by the contentious political circumstances which informed much of his art as well as his life. Long recognized as the first and best dramatist of the Dublin tenements during the...

In the following essay, which was originally published in a different form in Krause's Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work (1960), Krause argues that O'Casey's first four plays articulate an antiheroic condemnation of war.

In the following essay, Kleiman argues that O'Casey's plays express an absurdist view of life, but in a more humanistic tone than is registered in the works of Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and other playwrights associated with the "Theater of the Absurd."

In the following excerpt, Krause describes the historical and religious contexts of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy in relation to the comedic themes expressed in the play.