SOURCE: "The Anti-heroic Vision," in Sean O'Casey: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Kilroy, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975, pp. 91-112.

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.

An anti-heroic vision of life provides the unity of theme and the diversity of character and action in O'Casey's first four plays, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1925), The Plough and the Stars (1926), and The Silver Tassie (1928).

The first three plays are initially linked by the fact that they are all pacifist plays in which the main characters are not the National heroes actually engaged in the fighting but the noncombatants in a city under military siege, a tragic experience which has by mid-twentieth century become terrifyingly familiar to too many...