Abstract
THE WRITING OF A GENUINE TRAGEDY is a rare literary achievement. Sean O'Casey offers Juno and the Paycock to us as a tragedy and one of the main aims of this short essay is to justify its claim to this high distinction. All tragedies reveal universal truths through their treatment of particular conflicts. Just as some of the finest Greek tragedies, like Aeschylus's Oresteia, move us more deeply if we know how their characters and events have been conditioned by the ten years' war between Greek and Trojan, so the tragic quality of Juno and the Paycock can be experienced in its fulness only if we know and appreciate the military and political background of this highly topical drama, which is set in the last year of a violent and revolutionary period of Irish history, extending from 1912 to 1922. The Irish refer to the most disastrous events of these years as 'the Troubles,' and 'troubles' is a keyword in Juno and the Paycock.
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