Sean O’Casey was born John Casey in 1880 in Dublin and baptized in the Church of Ireland. After the death of his father, in 1886, the family sank into the poverty of the Dublin tenements. Throughout the beginning of the twentieth century, O’Casey was politically active, becoming a nationalist, joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood (forerunner of the Irish Republican Army), and also a socialist, joining a union in 1911 and participating in a major Dublin strike of 1913. The Shadow of a Gunman was accepted for production by the Abbey Theatre in 1923. In the following year, the Abbey produced Juno and the Paycock. Though the play established his reputation in Ireland, O’Casey would ultimately find that in order to draft the plays he was interested in writing, and see them produced, he would have to leave Ireland. His next major play, The Plough and the Stars, set in the 1916 Rebellion, caused riots in Dublin, and the following play, The Silver Tassie, written in 1928 and set in World War I, was rejected by the Abbey as too experimental. By that time, O’Casey was living in England. He would be buried there in 1964.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 4,839 words (approx. 16 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Juno and the Paycock Access Pass.
