Life, Times and Influences (1880–1964)

Abstract

Sean O’Casey is emphatically a working-class writer. It is part of his originality that we feel, in his best plays, that the insulted and injured are allowed to speak in their own voice, perhaps for the first time in our literature. His work derives from the popular melodrama and the music hall; but one can also detect the influence of Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible. His first plays were presented in a minority elitist theatre (in our time there is no other). When he writes badly, one feels that quite an ordinary writer would have more sophistication and taste, more humanity even, and one tends to put this down to a lack of education, a lack of tradition.