Word: dublins
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SEAN O'CASEY'S play, The Plough and the Stars, begins with a lock on a door. In a Dublin tenement, Fluther Good has just installed the new lock on the flat occupied by Nora and Jack Clitheroe. Nora's lock is resented by her neighbors, Bessie Burgess (upstairs) and Mrs. Gogan, the charwoman who lives below. But the newlywed Mrs. Clitheroe persists in her efforts to shut out the slum around her; when the play opens, in November 1915, she has almost created an island of grace and quiet in the middle of the dirt and violence. Nora...
Nora, however, cannot lock out the crescendo of revolution in the streets of Dublin outside her window, an uprising that would culminate in the Easter revolution of 1916. At the end of the play, having lost her husband and child to the violence of the revolt she was trying to shut out, Nora escapes the madhouse that Dublin has become by refusing to acknowledge it, by creating a fantasy world in which she imagines herself walking with her Jack in the country...
...Casey sees the Plough and Stars (the flag of the IRA) from the window of a Dublin flat, and through women's eyes. This view of the Easter Revolution was cynical enough to cause riots when it first was staged. In O'Casey's portrayal, the Irishmen in the Citizen Army died shitting with fear; their wives went mad trying to keep them safe at home. The only heroes in The Plough and Stars are those who neither fight nor spout rhetoric: Fluther Good, the working man whose honest dignity defies the British to do their worst, though...
...useful introduction to this new edition provides an account of Childers' tragic later career in the Irish Rebel lion. An Anglo-Irishman educated in England, Childers was a driven and complex idealist whose life ended in front of a firing squad near Dublin in 1922. Along with his Bostonian wife Dorothy, Childers had run arms into Ire land by sailboat before World War I. After serving with distinction in the Royal Navy, he again took up the cause of Irish liberty. Childers, in fact, pressed so hard for total Irish independence after the Free State compromise that he became...
...leave because the reality of tempest, poverty, Gaelicism and tradition is "too tempestuous putrid, poor, Gaelic and traditional." The "distinguishing marks of the true Gael" emerge more slowly out of the humour of the story. He is identified by the various oppressions inflicted on him by the English, the Dublin Irish, and fate, listed in order of decreasing responsibility and increasing blame. Myles' satire is funniest and most bitter here; on O'Coonassa's first day of school the master beats a new name into him: "Jams O'Donnell." When he gets home his mother explains that such is fate...