History, Autobiography, and The Shadow of a Gunman

Abstract

HISTORY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN Sean O'Casey is said to prefer his first major work, The Shadow of a Gunman, to his next play, Juno and the Paycock. To many of his readers, however, The Shadow of a Gunman has seemed much more limited, local, and topical in appeal. Passing judgement on O'Casey's achievement in this play in The Nineteenth Century and After (April, 1925), Andrew E. Malone has declared that "his characters are taken from the slums of Dublin, and his theme is little more than a commentary upon the warlike conditions of the city during the year 1920." One purpose of this article is to suggest that this verdict is a deceptive half-truth. O'Casey certainly does provide a realistic cross-section of life in a Dublin slum in 1920, and, as will be shown, the play certainly acquires greater significance when it is related to the social and political history of that year. But even where O'Casey's representation is closest to social or historical fact it exhibits a distinctive tone and colouring imparted by his imagination in obedience to a dramatic design . Moreover, a comparison between the play and certain parts of his autobiography, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949) reveals that the personal element in the play is more important that the historical one because it helped to determine its form and the interpretation of life which that form was designed to emphasize. O'Casey dates the period of his playas May, 1920. During this month the bitter struggle between the Crown and the Irish separatist movement known as Sinn Fein ("We Ourselves") reached a critical stage. Before the end of 1919, Sinn Fein and its legislative assembly, Dail f:ireann, had been declared illegal, and Lloyd George had devised his "Bill for the Better Government of Ireland," which recommended separate parliaments for the six northeastern counties and for the other twenty-six counties of Ireland. This scheme for partition at once intensified the struggle between Sinn Fein and the British Executive in Ireland. After the shooting of a policeman in Dublin on February 20th, 1920, a curfew was imposed on the city, making it illegal for any persons other than members of the Crown forces to be in the streets between midnight and 5 a.m. Soon afterwards the curfew period was extended and began at 8 p.m. On March 24th, four days before the Second Reading of Lloyd George's Bill at Westminster, the power of the British Executive was reinforced by the first detachments of a special police force recruited from the toughest ex-servicemen of 417 418 MODERN DRAMA February the First World War. These detachments wore khaki coats with black trousers and black caps and were promptly christened "the Black and Tans" after a well-blOwn Tipperary pack of foxhounds. To combat these forces, the Irish Republican Army split into small groups of fifteen to thirty men who used guerilla tactics to keep their foes under constant strain. Many of its fighters lived on the run, moving continuously from place to place and seldom sleeping at home. By May, 1920, the forces of the Crown were being gradually forced back to their headquarters in Dublin and many Irish Protestants who had previously been strong supporters of the Union with England had become passive spectators of the struggle. Most of these facts are vividly reflected in The Shadow of a Gunman which had an immense local appeal when it was first acted at the Abbey Theatre on April 12th, 1923. Its action hinges on the fact that a poet, Donal Davoren, who has recently come to share a Dublin tenement with Seumas Shields, allows himself to be regarded as a gunman "on the run." On the Run, indeed, was O'Casey's original title for the play and he abandoned it only because a drama of that name already existed. Another character, Maguire, is a real gunman on the run and is killed in a guerilla action not far from Dublin. A third character, Grigson, is an Orangeman and professes loyalty to the Crown, but he is politically passive and assures Davoren that...