From Ritual to Romance in Within the Gates and Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy

Abstract

SEAN Q'CASEY SIMULTANEOUSLY MIMICS and modifies some distinguishing dimensions of myth, both Christian and pre-Christian, in his Within the Gates (1934), a modern morality set amidst the vanishing greenness of a crowded London park, and in his Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), an Aristophanic allegory situated' in a drought-seared, fence-enclosed Irish garden. Indeed, O'Casey's mythopoeic imagination achieves a marriage of myths in these two dramas as Christian clerics collide with fertility figures, maypole dancing challenges formal Christian worship, and ancient fertility symbols like the silver shaft and the cock's crimson crest contrast with the pious parishioners' cross and rosary beads. O'Casey's basic intent, however, seems to be a desire to use myth both structurally and satirically: (1) to employ myth as a means of organizing his dramas into ritual sequences, and (2) to employ myth as a satiric stratagem which accentuates the difference between the function of mythico-ritualistic elements in the lives of ancient and modern man. Emphasizing the degenerative adaptation of antique mythical patterns — patterns designed to restore potency to people and provinces — O'Casey apparently laments modern man's reluctance to enter joyously into the rites of revivification which could redeem and revitalize both self and society — the sick soul and the modern wasteland.