The Harvest Festival (1918–19): an Ironic Melodrama

Abstract

O’Casey’s earliest extant play — an ironic melodrama focusing on class struggles in the strife-ridden atmosphere of Dublin in 1913, the year of industrial turmoil — is of historic importance in that it established in the thirty-nine-year-old Irish labourer the unflinchable resolve to continue his repeated efforts to attain recog¬nition as a major, universal dramatist in the well-sprung traditions of Shaw, Strindberg and O’Neill — and even no less a luminary than Shakespeare himself.