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.

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 people in all parts of the world. O'Casey's "open city" is Dublin during the Irish War of Independence; the setting of The Gunman is 1920 during the guerrilla warfare between the insurgent Irish Republican Army and the British forces, mainly the ruthless Auxiliary troops known by their uniforms as the Black and Tans; the setting of Juno is 1922 during the Civil War between the Irishmen who supported the Free State Settlement and the die-hard Irish Republicans who rejected partition; the setting of The Plough is 1916 during the Easter Rising against the British. The action in each succeeding play is built around an ever-expanding radius of involvement. In the first play the conflict arises when a poet and a pedlar inadvertently become involved in the war; in the second play a whole family is caught in the crossfire of the battle; and in the third play all the people in the tenements are trapped by the war that now covers the whole city which is in flames at the end of the play.

In all these plays the theme revolves around a series of illusions of heroism which point to the basic conflict. Donal Davoren in The Gunman thinks he is a lofty poet, his neighbours think he is a brave "gunman on the run." But he is actually a "shadow" of a poet, a "shadow" of a gunman—a shadow-man who doesn't know who he is. All the tenement-dwellers in the play suffer from a variety of dreams and deceptions which serve as contrasts to Davoren's self-deception and self-discovery. When his neighbours mistake him for an I.R.A. gunman he foolishly encourages the deception and vainly enjoys it, especially when he is with the impressionable Minnie Powell—"the Helen of Troy come to live in a tenement"—who has fallen in love with the romantic image of the poet-gunman she thinks he is. But Davoren isn't much of a poet either, for most of the time he sighs like a "stricken deer" trying to flee from the stupid "herd," trying to isolate himself from his neighbours and the war in order to write his sentimental verses in a watered-down imitation of Shelley. Throughout the play he indulges his mock-heroic fancies as masquerading gunman and romancing poet, with the result that his vanity and detachment defeat him and lead to the tragic death of Minnie Powell.

Davoren tries to see himself as a dreamy poet who "lives on the mountain-top." O'Casey had borrowed Davoren's romantic idealism from Louis Dubedat's creed in Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma: the belief in "the might of design, the mystery of colour, and the belief in the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting." Davoren repeats these words when he tries to escape to his mountain-top, but the world in which he lives will not allow him to assume the romantic attitudes of the grandiloquent and dying Dubedat. It is only the shock of Minnie Powell's death that makes Davoren see himself and his world with terrifying clarity.

It is his droll pedlar friend Seumas Shields who really understands that poetic and patriotic poses will not help, even though he is in his own way just as ineffectual as Davoren, for he is a lazy, blustering, amiable coward who resorts to the efficacy of prayer or the comfort of his bed when trouble comes. Yet he understands and is the ironic Chorus character in the guise of a bumbling clown, a wisefool who sees the truth. He has better reasons than Davoren for not becoming involved in the war since he was once active in the Irish Republican movement but left it when the fanatical nationalism and the terror of indiscriminate bloodshed began to destroy the people it was supposed to save. Seumas makes this point in an episode which thematically links the plays of the trilogy.

SEUMAS. I wish to God it was all over. The country is gone mad. Instead of counting their beads now they're countin' bullets; their Hail Marys and paternosters are burstin' bombs—burstin' bombs, an' the rattle of machine-guns; petrol is their holy water; their Mass is a burnin' buildin'; their De Profundis is "The Soldier's Song," an' their creed is, "I believe in the gun almighty, maker of heaven an' earth"—an' it's all for "the glory o' God an' the honour o' Ireland."

DAVOREN. I remember the time when you yourself believed in nothing but the gun.

SEUMAS. Ay, when there wasn't a gun in the country; I've a different opinion now when there's nothin' but guns in the country—an' you daren't open your mouth, for Kathleen ni Houlihan is very different now to the woman who used to play the harp an' sing "Weep on, weep on, your hour is past," for she's a ragin' divil now, an' if you only look crooked at her you're sure of a punch in th' eye. But this is the way I look at it—I look at it this way: You're not goin'—you're not goin' to beat the British Empire—the British Empire, by shootin' an occasional Tommy at the corner of an occasional street. Besides, when the Tommies have the wind up—when the Tommies have the wind up they let bang at everything they see—they don't give a God's curse who they plug.

DAVOREN. Maybe they ought to get down off the lorry and run to the Records Office to find out a man's pedigree before they plug him.

SEUMAS. It's the civilians who suffer; when there's an ambush they don't know where to run. Shot in the back to save the British Empire, an' shot in the breast to save the soul of Ireland. I'm a Nationalist meself, right enough—a Nationalist right enough, but all the same—I'm a Nationalist right enough; I believe in the freedom of Ireland, an' that England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin' about dyin' for the people, when it's the people that are dyin' for the gunmen! With all due respect to the gunmen, I don't want them to die for me.

For Seumas as for the women in Juno and The Plough, for Juno Boyle and Nora Clitheroe, life is more sacred than patriotic slogans; human realities are more meaningful than fanatical abstractions, particularly when in the name of the national honour the revolution devours its own children. When Juno's son Johnny, who had his hip crippled in the Easter Rising and lost an arm fighting with the I.R.A. in the Civil War, boasts about the sacred "principles" and insists he would sacrifice himself again for Ireland, she promptly offers her opinion about such heroics.

JOHNNY. I'd do it agen, ma, I'd do it agen; for a principle's a principle.

MRS. BOYLE. Ah, you lost your best principle, me boy, when you lost your arm; them's the only sort o' principles that's any good to a workin' man.

Juno sees life in terms of the essential human situation—bread on the table and love in the heart; these are the only realities that have any meaning for her and she fights for them without any heroics. And when she loses her son, when Johnny is finally shot, she follows Mrs. Tancred and keens the heartbreaking lament of the universal mother for a dead son.

MRS. BOYLE…. Maybe I didn't feel sorry enough for Mrs. Tancred when her poor son was found as Johnny's been found now—because he was a Die-hard! Ah, why didn't I remember that then he wasn't a Die-hard or a Stater, but only a poor dead son! It's well I remember all that she said—an' it's my turn to say it now: What was the pain I suffered, Johnny, bringin' you into the world to carry you to your cradle, to the pains I'll suffer carryin' you out o' the world to bring you to your grave! Mother o' God, Mother o' God, have pity on us all! Blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets, when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets? Sacred Heart o' Jesus, take away our hearts o' stone, and give us hearts o' flesh! Take away this murdherin' hate, an' give us Thine own eternal love!

But the men go on sacrificing themselves for principles and the "murdherin' hate" continues. In the second act of The Plough, Commandant Jack Clitheroe and two of his comrades, after listening to the speeches about "the sanctity of bloodshed … and the exhilaration of war," drink a toast to Ireland before they go out to battle. The stage directions indicate that "they speak rapidly, as if unaware of the meaning of what they say. They have been mesmerized by the fervency of the speeches."

CLITHEROE. You have a mother, Langon.

LIEUT. LANGON. Ireland is greater than a mother.

CAPT. BRENNAN. You have a wife, Clitheroe.

CLITHEROE. Ireland is greater than a wife.

But the mothers and wives of Ireland think otherwise, and in the third act when the pregnant Nora Clitheroe returns from a desperate search for her husband, she replies for all Irish women, for women of all countries who lose their men in wars.

NORA. I could find him nowhere, Mrs. Gogan. None of them would tell me where he was. They told me I shamed my husband an' th' women of Ireland by carryin' on as I was—They said th' women must learn to be brave an' cease to be cowardly—Me who risked more for love than they would risk for hate—My Jack will be killed, my Jack will be killed! He is to be butchered as a sacrifice to th' dead!—an' there's no woman gives a son or a husband to be killed—if they say it, they're lyin', lyin', against God, Nature, an' against themselves!… I cursed them—cursed the rebel ruffians an' Volunteers that had dhragged me ravin' mad into th' sthreets to seek me husband!… An' he stands wherever he is because he's brave? No, but because he's a coward, a coward, a coward!…—At th' barricades in North King Street I saw fear glowin' in all their eyes—An' in th' middle o' th' sthreet was somethin' huddled up in a horrible tangled heap—His face was jammed again th' stones, an' his arm was twisted round his back—An' I saw they were afraid to look at it—An' some o' them laughed at me, but th' laugh was a frightened one—An' some o' them shouted at me, but th' shout had in it th' shiver o' fear—I tell you they were afraid, afraid, afraid!

Juno and Nora are against war not Ireland. As wives and mothers they realize there can be no victory in war for them if they lose their men and homes. They repudiate war and the illusion that the soldiers alone are the chief sufferers, the illusion that the soldiers die bravely and beautifully for their country, the illusion that the women willingly send their men out to die. For centuries romantic Irishmen had nurtured these illusions by celebrating in poems and stories the glorious deeds of rebel patriots who kissed their beloved colleens farewell and went off to sacrifice themselves for a greater love, Kathleen ni Houlihan. But now O'Casey was mocking all these illusions by looking at the brutality of war through the realistic eyes of working-class Irishwomen instead of through the haze of sentimental patriotism.

This is O'Casey's underlying theme; and yet his anti-heroic vision of life encompasses infinitely more than an argument against war and the illusions of Irishmen. Because he is sceptical about rampant heroism, he is at heart more concerned about the individual nature of his people than the causes they are heroic about. He creates a unique and diversified world, a human comedy, as well as an incisive theme. Once he establishes his controlling theme he moves freely and even discursively around it, playing tragi-comic variations on it, developing it broadly through an ensemble of characters rather than closely through a few central characters. The structural pattern of his plays is loose not tight, contrapuntal not dialectical.

O'Casey's world is chaotic and tragic but his vision of it is ironically comic. It is in this war-torn world of horrors and potential tragedy that he finds the rowdy humour which paradoxically satirizes and sustains his earthy characters: they are the victims of their follies yet they revel in their voluble absurdities. And it is clear that O'Casey himself enjoys his people no less for their follies, as he intends his audiences to enjoy them. There is a sharp tone of outrage in his Daumier-like portraits of life in the slums of a beleaguered city, and this tone becomes even stronger in his later plays, but he was not dramatizing case histories. His plays do not follow the documentary principles of Naturalism—of Hauptmann's Weavers or Galsworthy's Strife. Low comedy is not one of the handmaidens of Naturalism. Even when he is in a serious mood O'Casey is likely to be satiric not solemn, poignant not pathetic. And when the tragic events or consequences of war and poverty become most crucial he will open up the action and counter-balance the incipient tragedy with a music-hall turn or a randy ballad or a mock-battle. While everyone awaits a terrifying raid by the Black and Tans in The Gunman the well-oiled Dolphie Grigson parades into the house spouting songs and biblical rhetoric in drunken bravado. Just when Mrs. Tancred is on her way to bury her ambushed son in Juno the Boyles have launched their wild drinking and singing party. While the streets ring with patriotic speeches about heroic bloodshed in The Plough the women of the tenements have a free-for-all fight about respectability in a Pub.

This pattern of ironic counterpoint is maintained as a tragi-comic rhythm throughout the plays. For each tragic character there are comic foils who constantly bring the action round from the tragic to the comic mood; for Davoren there is Seumas Shields, for Juno there is the "Paycock," for Nora there is Bessie Burgess. Actually, Bessie and Nora exchange roles in the last act of The Plough when the mad Nora is reduced to ironic babbling and the previously sardonic Bessie achieves tragic dignity. For all the mock-heroic clowns in the plays there is a retinue of boisterous drunkards, liars, cowards, braggarts, parasites, hypocrites, viragos, and snobs; in The Gunman there is Tommy Owens, Mr. and Mrs. Grigson, Mr. Mulligan, Mrs. Henderson, Mr. Gallogher; in Juno there is Joxer Daly, Masie Madigan, Needle Nugent; in The Plough there is Fluther Good, Peter Flynn, the Covey, Mrs. Gogan, Rosie Redmond. In a turbulent world crowded with these broadly comic and satiric characters it is not surprising to find that the comic spirit often dominates the action. But O'Casey would have it so precisely because the humour in his plays reveals a native vigour and shrewdness in his characters which ironically becomes a means of survival in a shattered world. It is this attitude which keeps his plays from becoming melancholy or pessimistic. His humour saves him and his characters from despair. In the midst of anti-heroic laughter there can be no total catastrophe. Where there is suffering and death no happy endings are possible, but where there is also laughter life goes on.

War and poverty create the terrible conditions that force O'Casey's people to reveal their resourcefulness in wild scenes of tragi-comic irony in which the grotesque laughter seems to mock at death. For instance, the third act of The Plough is set among the crumbling tenements during the week of the Easter Rising; now the speeches about "the glory of bloodshed" in the previous act have been transformed into a terrible reality. The streets are a battlefield and the sickening whine of bullets fills the air. The British gunboat Helga has begun to shell the city. The hysterical Nora Clitheroe collapses after her unsuccessful attempt to find her husband at the barricades. The shrivelled little Mollser, unable to get proper food or medical care, is dying of tuberculosis. Lieutenant Langon is carried in dying of a stomach wound. And in the midst of this chaos O'Casey presents the looting of the shops by the ragged and hungry slum-dwellers who scramble amid bursting bombs and bullets to grab the only trophies that have any meaning for them—food and clothing. These people have been deprived of the bare necessities for so long that those who are not shot stagger away from the shops overburdened with luxuries and strange assortments of ridiculous items. Rushing in with a new hat, a box of biscuits, and three umbrellas, Bessie Burgess sets the tone of humour amid horror with her breathless announcement:

They're breakin' into th' shops, they're breakin' into th' shops! Smashing windows, battherin' in th' doors, an' whippin' away everything! An' th' Volunteers is firin' on them. I seen two men an' a lassie pushin' a piano down th' sthreet, an' th' sweat rollin' off them thryin' to get it up on th' pavement; an' an oul' wan that must ha' been seventy lookin' as if she'd dhrop every minute with th' dint o' heart beatin', thryin' to pull a big double bed out of a broken shop-window! I was goin' to wait till I dhressed meself from th' skin out.

With this call to action the Covey soon reels in carrying a huge sack of flour and a ham, and Fluther, as might have been expected, comes in roaring drunk after having launched a raid on a Pub. Bessie is about to go out for another haul with a neighbour's pram when she is intercepted by the eager Mrs. Gogan, and the two women rage at each other in a mock-battle over which of them has the proper right to use the pram for looting. Their intentions with the pram are equally set on plunder, yet both women assume an indignant legal attitude, characterized by Mrs. Gogan's sense of outage: "Moreover, somethin's tellin' me that th' hurry of inthrest you're takin' in it now is a sudden ambition to use th' pram for a purpose that a loyal woman of law an' order would stagger away from."

The comic absurdity of this fight between two viragos over the jurisdiction of the pram, like the similar brawl in the Pub in the previous act, when contrasted with the fighting at the barricades, irreverently mocks the "holiness" of war. The heroes at the barricades are deflated by this profane farce in which the pram and the looting take precedence over patriotism, and thus the anti-heroes of the tenements become heroes by comic proxy.

But before long these anti-heroes begin to earn their ironic heroism. The two women finally go off together with the pram, and as the intensity of the war increases a significant change occurs among these people. Although they all continue to quarrel and "twart" each other with reckless delight, they also begin to unite against what they gradually recognize as their common enemy—the war. Fluther, before he gets drunk, risks his life to find Nora and bring her back safely from the fighting area. The sharp-tongued but compassionate Bessie Burgess—who grows larger in stature as the play progresses and might finally be said to earn the role of main hero, as the Juno of this play—silently gives the suffering Mollser a bowl of milk, helps the prostrate Nora, whom she has so bitterly abused, into the house, and then risks her life in the machine-gunned streets trying to get a doctor for Mollser, the daughter of her favourite sparring-partner, Mrs. Gogan. And in the last act, when Mollser has died and the disconsolate Nora has lost her baby prematurely, all the people in the house take refuge in Bessie's attic flat. It is Fluther again who dodges the bullets to make arrangements for the burial of the two children, and it is Bessie who nurses the deranged Nora through three sleepless days and nights, only to be shot trying to protect Nora. Finally, it is Ginnie Gogan who carried on and takes Nora down to Mollser's empty bed.

In this manner the women who are the main victims of the war rise to become the main heroes. This pattern is repeated in all the plays as some of the women die for their neighbours and others live to rebuild a new life out of the ruins. Minnie Powell dies trying to save Donal Davoren, and Bessie Burgess dies trying to save Nora Clitheroe; Juno Boyle and Ginnie Gogan endure everything. This is the only kind of untainted heroism that O'Casey recognizes. These women are his Ireland. They are not the patriotic Ireland that made an exhilarating epiphany of the ritual of bloodshed. They are not the romantic Ireland that idealized Kathleen ni Houlihan of the beautiful green fields and the harp. They are not the sweet blushing colleens whose fabled existence is exalted in the guise of the Stage Irishwoman. They are the Ireland of tenacious mothers and wives, the women of the tenements—earthy, shrewd, laughing, suffering, brawling, independent women. O'Casey found them in the Dublin slums, but they have their counterparts in Synge's peasant woman, like Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World and Mary Byrne in The Tinker's Wedding: in Joyce's Molly Bloom; in Yeats's Crazy Jane; in the eighteenth-century Brian Merriman's peasant girl of "The Midnight Court."

Juno Boyle has the name of a classical heroine, and she has many of the qualities of that Roman goddess, but O'Casey uses the allusion in such a way as to give her the heroic stature of her namesake and the earthy reality of a Dublin housewife of the tenements. When Bentham hears her name he is reminded of the "ancient gods and heroes," however, the Captain explains how she got her name: "You see, Juno was born an' christened in June; I met her in June; we were married in June, an' Johnny was born in June so wan day I says to her, 'You should ha' been called Juno,' an' the name stuck to her ever since." Furthermore, O'Casey was aware of the fact that the classical Juno was always associated with peacocks, the patron birds who are often near her or draw her chariot, but he used this aspect of the legend in a completely ironic way by giving his Juno a peacock of a husband who takes his name from the common association of strutting vanity. Thus, the "Paycock" becomes Juno's parasite not her protector.

The women in O'Casey's plays are realists from necessity, the men are dreamers by default. The men are frustrated and gulled by dreams which they are unable and unwilling to convert into realities. And as if in mock-defence of those dreams they revel in their romanticizing and bragging and drinking. In John Bull's Other Island Shaw may have gone to the root of the Irishman's curse when he made Larry Doyle pour out his embittered confession.

O'Casey's Irishmen suffer from the symptoms of this outcry, and as a result there is an undercurrent of tragedy in the plays. But most of O'Casey's Irishmen possess the grotesque symptoms without Larry Doyle's awareness of them, and as a result there is also an abundance of comedy in the plays. Herein lies one of the many differences between tragedy and comedy: the tragic figure becomes truly tragic when he is able to see his own image; the comic figure becomes absurdly comic when he is unable, or pretends to be unable, to see his own image. When the women in O'Casey's plays finally see themselves and their world clearly they become tragic figures, like Juno Boyle and Bessie Burgess. Of the men, only Davoren as the self-confessed "poltroon" makes Larry Doyle's discovery, at the very end of the Gunman after he has fully indulged his aery dreams, but he is the only non-comic character in the play.

There is, however, one unique figure who dominates all three plays, the mock-heroic character who proudly wears his motley and is satisfied to see as much of himself and the world as he expediently chooses to see. This character is first formulated in Seumas Shields in the Gunman, and he is fully developed in Captain Jack Boyle in Juno and Fluther Good in The Plough—those two Falstaffian rogues who epitomize the triumphant anti-hero.

Captain Jack Boyle may lack the girth of Captain Jack Falstaff, but he has the same flamboyant humour and glorious mendacity, the ingenious sense of self-indulgence and self-preservation. Both men are bragging scoundrels whose disrespect for the truth stems not only from an instinctive love of license but from an empirical conviction that a virtuous life invariably leads to dullness and an heroic life often leads to death. Falstaff can point to a corpse on the battlefield and say, "there's honour for you," or counterfeit death because "The better part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life." Boyle, living like Falstaff in a time of Civil War when men's lives are valued cheaply, sets too high a price on his own sweet skin to care about honour or become involved in the fighting. And he has his counterfeit game for saving himself from the deadly virtues of work: he automatically develops a powerful pain in his legs at the mere mention of a job. When Jerry Devine goes looking for him in all the Pubs with news of a job, his discretionary wrath erupts and protects him: "Is a man not to be allowed to leave his house for a minute without havin' a pack o' spies, pimps an' informers cantherin' at his heels?… I don't want the motions of me body to be watched the way asthronomer ud watch a star. If you're folleyin' Mary aself, you've no pereeogative to be folleyin' me. (Suddenly catching his thigh.) U-ugh, I'm afther gettin' a terrible twinge in me right leg!" Furthermore, Boyle has what he considers a good reason to regard a man like Devine with suspicion: "I don't believe he was ever dhrunk in his life—sure he's not like a Christian at all!"

Captain Boyle's account of his adventures on the sea has that comic touch of fantastic imagination which characterized Captain Falstaff's version of his exploits on Gadshill. Juno Boyle knows her husband for the "struttin' paycock" that he is, and she pointedly explains his seafaring record: "Everybody callin' you 'Captain', an' you only wanst on the wather, in an oul' collier from here to Liverpool, when anybody, to listen or look at you, ud take you for a second Christo For Columbus!" But this fact does not prevent the "Captain" from telling his "buttie" Joxer what it was like to be an adventurous sailor on the high seas.

BOYLE. Them was days, Joxer, them was days. Nothin' was too hot or too heavy for me then. Sailin' from the Gulf o' Mexico to the Antanartic Ocean. I seen things, I seen things, Joxer, that no mortal man should speak about that knows his Catechism. Often, an' often, when I was fixed to the wheel with a marlin-spike, an' the wins blowin' fierce an' the waves lashin' an' lashin', till you'd think every minute was goin' to be your last, an' it blowed, an' blowed—blew is the right word, Joxer, but blowed is what the sailors use—

JOXER. Aw, it's a darlin' word, a daarlin' word.

BOYLE. An' as it blowed an' blowed, I often looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question—what is the stars, what is the stars?

JOXER. Ah, that's the question, that's the question—what is the stars?

A clever parasite full of comic platitudes, the ingratiating Joxer is a perfect foil for the braggart Captain; he spaniels at the Captain's heels most of the time, but he too sees as much of himself and the world as it is profitable for him to see. Joxer is capable of reversing the game and fooling the Captain when he has something to gain. Together they insulate themselves from the world of terrible realities by living in an illusory world of fantasies and drunken bravado. O'Casey satirizes them unsparingly for the shiftless rascals that they are, yet because he also sees the amusement of a universal frailty in them—they are fools not knaves—he is able to laugh with as well as at their hilarious mischief. And audiences laugh with as well as at them because they too recognize the common frailties of man in the Boyles and Joxers of this world—Boyle the universal braggart-warrior, Joxer the universal parasite-slave, both of them derived from the well-known clowns of Roman and Elizabethan comedy. It is also possible that many men are more than amused by the "paycock's" game and secretly envy the Captain and his "buttie" their merry pranks. The average man who realizes he cannot cope with his besetting problems on an heroic scale may well have an unconscious desire to get rid of his problems entirely by emulating the Captain in his irresponsible and therefore irresistible dreaming and singing and drinking. A frustrated non-hero might if he dared forsake his responsible suffering and seek the uninhibited pleasures of a clowning anti-hero; however, he probably settles for the vicarious pleasure of sitting in a theatre and watching a Captain Boyle thumb his red nose at responsibility. Much is made of the frustrated clown who yearns to play Hamlet, but the average man is more likely a frustrated Hamlet who if he had the strength of his weakness would cheerfully assume the role of an uninhibited Falstaff or Boyle.

The women in O'Casey's plays may be uninhibited creatures, too, but they always remain close to the realities of life and when there is a call for responsible action they put aside self-gratification and act. Even Juno has her fling. When the Boyles have their wild party Juno joins the celebration on borrowed money and time, and after the mourning Mrs. Tancred interrupts them, Juno temporarily agrees with the Captain and remarks that maybe Mrs. Tancred deserved to lose her die-hard son. But when her own son is killed, when her daughter is seduced, Juno assumes her burdens; she repeats Mrs. Tancred's prayer and rejects the Captain. When her daughter cries out against a God who would allow such tragic things to happen, Juno replies: "These things have nothin' to do with the Will o' God. Ah, what can God do agen the stipidity o' men!" And she abandons the Captain. When Prince Hal becomes King he assumes the burdens of state and rejects the dissolute Falstaff.

        I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers:
        How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
        I have long dream'd of such a king of man,
        So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane.
        But being awak'd, I do despise my dream.

In a somewhat similar manner, Juno, being awake, forsakes all dreams and rejects her foolish jester of a husband. Her elegaic prayer brings her to a condition of tragic awareness.

Yet, O'Casey does not end the play with Juno. Maintaining the anti-heroic theme and contrapuntal rhythm of the whole work, he concludes on a tragi-comic note by contrasting Juno's heroic condition with the Captain's mock-heroic condition. For it is his play as well as Juno's; together they represent the tragi-comic cycle of O'Casey's world; together they reveal the ironic cross-purposes of life. As Juno and Mary leave to start a new life, the Captain and Joxer stagger drunkenly into the barren room, roaring patriotic slogans as they collapse in a state of semicoherent bravado. It is a final scene of horrible humour. The Captain remains the "struttin' paycock" in his glorious deterioration; even in his drunken raving he remains a magnificently grotesque anti-hero. Juno must reject him, yet we can forgive him, for he maintains his falstaffian spirit to the end.

Fluther Good is also drawn in the Falstaffian mould, but he is sufficiently different from Captain Boyle to emerge with the stamp of his own individuality. He too is a roistering fellow, a drinking and bragging clown, but he is more impetuous than the Captain, more aggressive and daring, in his guarded way. He is more of a blustering gamecock than a "struttin' paycock." He has more stomach for a fight than the wily Captain, though his fighting is discreetly confined to rhetorical invective. He has no trouble annihilating little Peter Flynn—that ridiculous "patriot" clad in the full-dress uniform of a National benevolent association—when "oul' Pether" brags about never having missed a pilgrimage to Bodenstown to the shrine of Wolfe Tone. But he has to "sing on the high notes" of his ignorance when he gets into a shouting contest with the clever Covey (a "covey" is Dublin slang for a "smart aleck") who dumbfounds Fluther with materialistic catechisms from his vade-mecum, Jenersky's Thesis on the Origin, Development and Consolidation of the Evolutionary Idea of the Proletariat, a tome which understandably fills the Covey with a proletarian fervour that makes him impervious to the protests of Fluther, patriots, and prostitutes.

And yet the windy Fluther is capable of courageous deeds where women are concerned, for he is a knight-errant of the tenements—he rescues pregnant women in distress and defends the honour of insulted prostitutes. All the women had a good word for Fluther. Mrs. Gogan praises him for risking his life to arrange the decent burial of poor Mollser: "An' you'll find, that Mollser, in th' happy place she's gone to, won't forget to whisper, now an' again, th' name o' Fluther." When he gallantly protects Rosie Redmond and her venerable profession from the "twarting" Covey, she describes him as a man "that's well flavoured in th' knowledge of th' world he's livin' in." Perhaps Nora Clitheroe, who is constantly in his debt, pays him the highest compliment when she calls him "a whole man."

Taken in his "wholeness," Fluther the "well-flavoured" man is a magnificent mixture of contradictions. He has the heart of a Don Quixote but the hide of a Sancho Panza. Among the ladies he is a protector and a peace-maker, but with the men he is full of himself and his inimitable flutherian wrath, or full of Irish whiskey. His roar is worse than his bite; he starts more arguments than he can settle; he rages and boasts, lies and threatens when he is cornered; he swears abstinence then drowns himself in drink when the shops are looted, crying "Up the Rebels" and "th' whole city can topple home to hell" in the same drunken breath; he can defend a prostitute's good name, and then go off to spend the night with her—"wellflavoured" man that he is, Fluther knows that there are times when Dulcinea must give way to Doll Tearsheet.

As a man of many frailties and fine parts, as a prince of buffoonery as well as errantry, Fluther the Good is the mock-hero of the play. In a terrible time of war, he is too shrewd to be a patriot, too wise to be an idealist; yet in his comic anti-heroism he plays the fool for man's sake. In his vitality and humour there is a hope that man may endure.

Harry Heegan, the symbolic hero of The Silver Tassie, is a herculean young athlete and infantry soldier who dominates and provokes the action of the play, even when he is not on the stage. Before he makes his victorious appearance from the football field late in the first act, the other characters, particularly Harry's father Sylvester and his old "buttie" Simon, exalt the legend of Harry's impulsive courage and strength. Like two comic chorus-characters the old codgers offer a vivid catalogue of Harry's fabulous deeds as champion runner, strong-man, fighter, and football hero. And from the moment Harry bursts on the stage, surrounded by his admirers and carrying "the silver tassie," the trophy which he has almost single-handedly helped the Avondales win, he is the play.

In the first act Harry's tumultuous spirit shines through the mundane world like the image of a legendary hero. He is an open-hearted primitive, an instinctive hero who glories in the joy of his uninhibited emotions and the vigour of his powerful limbs. Like Synge's Christy Mahon, he is a conquering "playboy of the western world," victor in all games, races, and fights, and the darling hero of all the girls. O'Casey, however, introduced his tragic hero at the point where Synge's comic hero departed. Christy had discovered his primitive powers at the conclusion of The Playboy of the Western World. At the beginning of The Silver Tassie Harry has already gone "romancing through a romping life-time," and he is in the full flush of a new victory when we first see him. Harry is on the heights from which he will soon fall when he is wounded in the war and abandoned by his friends and the girl he loves. Christy, however, is only able to become the real "playboy" when he is abandoned by his friends and the girl he loves. The comic movement of Christy's life goes from impotence to liberation and triumph; the tragic movement of Harry's life goes from liberation and triumph to impotence.

Symbolically Harry is the universal soldier destroyed in a world war, but he is also a particular Irishman; except for the second act, which takes place in the war zone in France, the other three acts are set in Dublin. Thus although the play is in a sense a morality play—a conflict between the good life that Harry represents and the evil of war—O'Casey avoids the allegorical abstractions of the old morality plays by allowing his universal theme to develop out of individualized characters in a particular time and place. With this particularized locale he is also able to reveal in the last half of the play how the people who stay at home are spiritually wounded by the war.

As in his previous works, O'Casey begins this play on a broad comic note, but with an undercurrent of tragic implications that will presently emerge and darken the mood of the last three acts. The first act is a comic-ironic prologue that builds up to the moment of Harry's triumphant arrival. Much of the satiric humour grows out of a running quarrel between the two old men and Susie Monican. Sylvester and Simon are continually defending the natural joy and exuberance that Harry represents against what Sylvester calls Susie's "persecutin' tambourine theology." Susie is a fire-and-brimstone religious fanatic with a thoushalt-not fear of life, largely a result of her frustrated love for Harry, and the more she hurls her hysterical warnings at Sylvester and Simon—"I can hear some persons fallin' with a splash of sparks into the lake of everlastin' fire"—the greater their excitement flares over Harry's heroic deeds. And later Susie's fanaticism will be contrasted with the genuine religious feeling of the soldiers.

As rambunctious clowns Sylvester and Simon have the hilariously vulnerable traits of the roguish Captain Boyle and Joxer, and they are not immune from O'Casey's satire, for he laughs at as well as with them. They appear to be shrewd enough to cope with Susie's attempts to "claw" them into the kingdom of heaven, but their own attitude toward religion is a kind of genial hypocrisy characteristically illustrated in the following scene:

SIMON. In a church, somehow or other, it seems natural enough, and even in the street it's alright, for one thing is as good as another in the wide-open ear of the air, but in the delicate quietness of your own home it, it—

SYLVESTER. Jars on you!

SIMON. Exactly!

SYLVESTER. If she'd only confine her glory-to-God business to the festivals, Christmas, now, or even Easter, Simon, it would be recommendable; for a few days before Christmas, like the quiet raisin' of a curtain, an' a few days after, like the gentle lowerin' of one, there's nothing more—more—

SIMON. Appropriate—

SYLVESTER. Exhilaratin' than the singin' of the Adestay Fidellis.

Harry and his neighbour Teddy Foran are home from the trenches on furlough, and while Harry is out on the football field, Teddy has a brawl with his wife who seems too glad to see him go back to the war. In an uproarious scene, after he has smashed all the dishes in the upstairs Foran flat, Teddy chases his wife into the Heegan rooms where the bold Sylvester protects her by hiding under the bed with her. And Simon, still excited about the way Harry stretched out a Bobby with a right to the jaw, had gone upstairs to take care of the raging Teddy—"Phun, I'll keep him off with the left and hook him with the right"—but after a discreet reconsideration of the odds he disappeared.

All these preludes to Harry's entrance serve to create the vivid background of his life, and they are also ironic pointers of what lies ahead of him. Teddy Foran's relationship with his wife is a foreshadowing of what will later happen to Harry and his girl Jessie Taite. The religious theme will reappear in a more serious vein throughout the play as the dazed soldiers struggle to find comfort and understanding. And Sylvester and Simon by exalting Harry's natural powers establish a norm with which we can contrast the tragic consequences of the when he comes back wounded.

When it is almost time for the troopship to take the men back to France, Harry's teammates carry him and his girl Jessie on their shoulders through the streets and the chant of the crowd is heard outside—"Up Harry Heegan and the Avondales!" Harry comes in explaining excitedly how he kicked the winning goal, and he and Jessie celebrate by kissing and drinking wine from the tassie, which Harry calls the "sign of youth, sign of strength, sign of victory." Before they march off, Harry and Barney, another of his soldier friends, sing the Scottish ballad by Robert Burns, "The Silver Tassie"—"the song that the little Jock used to sing … the little Jock we left shrivellin' on the wire after the last push":

        Gae bring to me a pint of wine
        And fill it in a silver tassie;
        That I may drink before I go,
        A service to my bonnie lassie.
 
        The boat rocks at the pier o' Leith,
        Full loud the wind blows from the ferry;
        The ship rides at the Berwick Law,
        An' I must leave my bonnie Mary.
 
        The trumpets sound, the banners fly,
        The glittering spears are ranked ready;
        The shouts of war are heard afar,
        The battle closes thick and bloody.
 
        It's not the roar of the sea or shore,
        That makes me longer wish to tarry,
        Nor shouts of war that's heard afar—
        It's leaving thee, my bonnie lassie.

The first stanza is from an old folk ballad and Burns added the remaining stanzas. There is a legend that Burns composed the song after seeing a young soldier part from his sweetheart on the pier of Leith; and while O'Casey introduces the song in a generally similar situation at the end of the first act, he associates the tassie itself with Harry in a special way, as the cup of victory as well as love. And in the rest of the play the tassie is used as a symbol of Harry's lost love and forgotten triumphs.

Ironically, there is no protesting or keening as the men leave for the trenches. The lassies in the play seem to be glad that their men are going back to the war. Harry is too intoxicated by his victory in the game and the wine he has drunk to see through Jessie, who merely regards him as a prize catch and hates his mother for preventing her from marrying him to get his allowance cheques. Susie and Mrs. Heegan are fiercely jealous of Jessie, and Mrs. Heegan's greatest concern is that her son should not miss the boat, in which case she might miss his allowance cheques. When the justifiably outraged Teddy Foran turns on his flighty wife and smashes the dishes, it is Mrs. Heegan who remarks: "You'd imagine, now, the trenches would have given him some idea of the sacredness of life." But none of the women in the play seem to understand "the sacredness of life" or the tragedy of war. O'Casey here departs from his earlier sympathetic treatment of women because he is writing about an aspect of war which is not directly their tragedy, the holocaust of the battlefront. Also, the insensitivity of the women increases the tragic isolation of the soldiers, for it is their tragedy, their play.

We feel the full impact of this tragic isolation in the second act when we are suddenly brought into the no-man's land of the war zone. There is a violent change of technique to parallel the violent change of mood—from comic reality to tragic surreality. Here O'Casey creates the shock of the war in a horrible transfiguration scene. In the second act of The Plough he had been confronted with a somewhat similar problem but he solved it by using off-stage devices, a huge shadowy figure and a loud-speaker voice to blare out exhortations of bloodshed; and later in that play he had a number of characters rush in from the barricades to describe the gory street fighting. But these methods were now too limited for his new play. Instead of telling the audience through exposition that war is hell, he had found in the techniques of Expressionism a way of showing them a symbolic nightmare of that hell—a new method of developing the tortured figure that the once herculean Harry has become in the last two acts. There are many variations in the Expressionistic methods of Strindberg, Toller, Kaiser, and O'Neill, and they have been very accurately summarized by Allardyce Nicoll in the following statement [from World Drama, 1949].

Short scenes took the place of longer acts; dialogue was made abrupt and given a staccato effect; symbolic (almost morality-type) forms were substituted for "real" characters; realistic scenery was abandoned, and in its place the use of light was freely substituted; frequently choral, or mass, effects were preferred to the employment of single figures, or else single figures were elevated into positions where they became representative of forces larger than themselves.

With some modifications O'Casey incorporated most of these elements in his second act. He used one long act with a fixed set instead of a series of short tableaux. The symbolic soldiers are very close to morality types. Several figures stand out above the choral mass of soldiers and lead the antiphonal chanting of songs and staccato phrases, especially the Croucher who is on a ramp above the other men. Predominantly red lighting and the black barrel of a huge howitzer gun create the representational battlefield just behind the front lines beside the ruins of a monastery which now serves as a Red Cross Station. When the enemy breaks through at the end of the act the firing of the gun and the general barrage of shells is simulated by wild flashes of light, without sound effects. In one of the jagged monastery walls there still remains a single unbroken stained-glass window of the Virgin, and just above it, a life-size Crucifix, one arm of which has been loosened by a shell and now leans outstretched toward the Virgin. The symbols of the Virgin and the Gun stand out as opposing forces. While an organ is heard from behind the ruined monastery wall, where a celebration of the Mass is in progress, the Croucher, a half-crazed soldier, dreamily intones his litany as the act begins. The Notes explain that "The Croucher's make-up should come as close as possible to a death's head, a skull; and his hands should show like those of a skeleton's. He should sit somewhere above the group of soldiers."

In the Croucher's prophetic speeches O'Casey has ironically paraphrased but reversed the meaning of the biblical passages from the Book of Ezekiel. In Chapter 37 of that Book, the Lord offers the wandering Israelites a prophecy of hope and renewal; their dried bones shall be revived and they shall arise a "great army." Ezekiel 39:9 actually reads: "… come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live." And Ezekiel 37:10 reads: "… and a breath came into them and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army." But the Croucher, intoning through his death-mask, sees only a wasted battlefield of dried bones.

For a contrasting treatment of the same biblical allusions—in this case an orthodox view—one can turn to T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday." In this poem of renewed faith Eliot used these same phrases from Chapter 37 of Ezekiel, but of course he does not reverse the meaning. He wrote this poem in 1930 (two years after O'Casey's play) after his conversion, when he no longer saw the modern world as a sterile valley of dead bones. However, in "The Waste Land" (1922) where he had also used an allusion from Ezekiel—this time in a context of despair—there is a closer parallel to what O'Casey does in the above scene. Perhaps the second act of The Silver Tassie might be called an "objective correlative" for O'Casey's "waste land," Eliot's line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" might have been spoken by the Croucher.

At the same time that the Croucher intones his fateful dithy-rambs, the incantation of the Kyrie is heard—the plea to God for mercy. But the only response is the bitter chant of the exhausted soldiers, an ironic antistrophe. In their chanted cockney diction, here and throughout the act, O'Casey creates a special mock-lingo which fixes the mood of the action at a strident non-realistic pitch and reinforces the grotesque anonymity of the soldiers. And yet there are some deeply poignant links with the outside world of reality, as for example in the 1st Soldier's dream of his missus and his little girl Emmie wanting a balloon. The Soldiers try to reject the hopeless prophecy of the mad Croucher, the death's head figure; they try to pray, they try desperately to convince themselves that they can escape from this valley of death. The 1st Soldier insists, "There's a Gawd knocking abaht somewhere." But though they have not been able to find Him on the battlefield, they go on believing in Him, and in the weapons of war that might save them. Just before the enemy breakthrough at the end of the act the Soldiers sing their songs to God and the Gun—"We believe in God and we believe in thee." And it is the Wounded on the Stretchers, the mutilated and dying, who remind us that "the image God hath made" and the war is destroying, is the image of "power and joy" which Harry Heegan symbolized in the first act:

        The power, the joy, the pull of life,
        The laugh, the blow, and the dear kiss,
        The pride and hope, the gain and loss,
        Have been temper'd down to this, this, this.

There are four songs and five extended chants in the act. In the Notes, O'Casey explains that all the chanted passages are to be intoned antiphonally in the simple Plain Song of Gregorian chant, with the traditional three-part division, the Intonation, the Meditation, and the Ending. Thus, by following the responsive pattern of the Mass at the beginning, and the recurring intonation of Gregorian chant throughout the act, O'Casey sets the traditional rituals of the church against the terrible rituals of the war in a dissonant struggle between the forces of good and evil. In this manner he was able to develop his anti-war theme as an organic part of his symbolic form.

In the second act, the dehumanizing forces of war win the tragic struggle, and in the last two acts we see the realistic consequences of the war as the wounded soldiers also lose the struggle on the home front. Absolute war corrupts absolutely—those who ignored it at home as well as those who were crippled by it in the trenches.

The third act takes place in a hospital ward back in Dublin with all the individualized characters of the first act now in a new situation. Harry was wounded in the spine and is confined to a wheelchair, paralysed from the waist down. Teddy was blinded. Susie Monican has become a nurse, but her patients are little more than bed-numbers to her and she releases her repressions in love games with the young doctor. The fickle Jessie Taite has abandoned the invalid Harry for the healthy Barney, who has now won Harry's girl as well as the Victoria Cross for carrying him out of the line of fire. Harry's mother now finds great comfort in the knowledge that she will get the maximum disability allowance.

Sylvester and Simon are also patients in the hospital, and their imaginary pains and fears represent a series of comic contrasts to the tragic condition of Harry and Teddy. The two old clowns are given many opportunities to create an atmosphere of sheer theatrical fun with their capers. Their bath episode in the third act and telephone episode in the fourth act are excellent examples of the tour de force comedy that is such a characteristic part of every O'Casey play. Once he sets the direction of his main plot, he often steers a circuitous course of action with his comic subplots. It is his way of maintaining contact with the hurlyburly traffic of life, and what he called the "Ta Ra Ra Boom Dee Ay" element of the drama.

Gradually, however, the tragic implications of the main plot dominate the action as the abandoned and bitter Harry tries to fight back. When the operation he is to undergo in the third act proves a failure, he turns up at the Avondales' War Victory Dance in the final act, his once powerful body now impotent in a wheelchair. The unfaithful Jessie deserts him for Barney, and Harry calls for red wine, remembering the wine of victory he had earlier drunk when he was the hero of the Avondales. Now he drinks an ironic toast:

To the dancing, for the day cometh when no man can play. And legs were made to dance, to run, to jump, to carry you from one place to another; but mine can neither walk, nor run, nor jump, nor feel the merry motion of a dance. But stretch me on the floor fair on my belly, and I will turn over on my back, then wriggle back again on to my belly; and that's more than a dead, dead man can do!

The red wine of life has lost its meaning for the crippled Harry, and he speaks for all the sad-mad soldiers wounded in body and spirit by the war. Later he drinks wine from the symbolic tassie and cries out to everyone, to the world:

Red wine, red like the faint remembrance of the fires in France; red wine like the poppies that spill their petals on the breasts of the dead men. No, white wine white like the stillness of the millions that have removed their clamours from the crowd of life. No, red, wine; red like the blood that was shed for you and for many for the commission of sin. (He drinks the wine.) Steady, Harry, and lift up thine eyes unto the hills.

Implicit in the second act, the martyred soldiers are now directly associated with Christ in the blood-and-wine ritual "for the commission of sin." All the symbolic rituals in the play are eventually exposed to tragic irony—the ritual of the triumphant hero, the ritual of the Mass, the ritual of the war, the ritual of red wine drunk from the tassie. And at significant points in the semi-realistic last two acts there are ironic echoes of the symbolic chanting in the second act. For example, the older people try to calm Harry by asking him to play his ukulele and sing a Negro spiritual, and the scene is presented with antiphonal voices:

SYLVESTER. An' give him breath to sing his song an' play the ukelele.

MRS. HEEGAN. Just as he used to do.

SYLVESTER. Behind the trenches.

SIMON. In the Rest Camps.

MRS. FORAN. Out in France.

HARRY. I can see, but I cannot dance.

TEDDY. I can dance, but I cannot see.

HARRY. Would that I had the strength to do the things I see.

TEDDY. Would that I could see the things I've strength to do.

HARRY. The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away.

TEDDY. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

MRS. FORAN. I love the ukelele, especially when it goes tinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the nighttime.

Softly Harry sings his Negro spiritual—it is "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in the text, although there is a suggestion in the notes that "Keep Me From Sinkin' Down" might be more suitable to Harry's present frame of mind—and the song is a preparation for Harry's stoical exit. He has one more burst of rage in a fight with Barney, and then he goes off with the blind Teddy. The two of them are finally prepared to conquer their self-pity as they leave:

HARRY. What's in front we'll face like men! The Lord hath given and man hath taken away.

TEDDY. Blessed be the name of the Lord!

Harry changes one significant word, and it is man and man-made war that have destroyed what God created. God is the guardian, but man is the measure. This conclusion reminds one of Juno Boyle's reply to her daughter: "Ah, what can God do agen the stipidity o' men."

While Juno is the universal mother and Harry is the universal soldier, she is above all a realistic character who finally becomes symbolic in the most general sense, he is above all a symbolic character who is at all times both realistic and representational. Juno speaks for all mothers in a war-time, Harry speaks for all soldiers; but O'Casey felt he had to use different stories. O'Casey realized that the dramatist cannot limit himself to a single approach; he must suit the theme and character to the form, and the particular emphasis and technique depend upon the total intention. In Juno and the Paycock the character defines the theme; in The Silver Tassie the theme defines the character. The methods and forms are different, and the result is that in the one play he created a noble woman, in the other a noble theme.

Among the important discoveries O'Casey made in his new experiment, he found that it was not only possible but necessary to combine realistic and non-realistic techniques, as he had already combined comic and tragic material in his previous work. He found that he could set a large theme in a framework of reality and at the same time develop it allegorically through the methods of Expressionism. He found that he could bring a sharper tone of moral passion to his theme by projecting it through the symbolic second act, as well as through Harry Heegan in the other three acts, thus making his play an ethical as well as an emotional spectacle, giving it moral as well as imaginative power. As a result The Silver Tassie is one of the most original and powerful anti-war plays ever written—a passionate morality play for modern man.