In Irish literature and drama, the interactions between body and machine are scenes of both creation and production. There is an innate skill and craft to the work at this point of intersection, with the resulting production of a (usually) sustaining output, be it baked bread or woven clothes, feeding or warming the body in their finished form. Riders to the Sea, for example, J. M. Synge’s masterful portrayal of the tragic power of grief and loss, first produced by the Irish National Theatre Society in 1904, opens with first the kneading of bread, followed by the weaving of threads at the spinning wheel, a scene common to many Irish cottages.The engineering of the human body into a machine-like form in itself, in an absurdist act of transformation, is an entirely more startling image. Such an image is centrally present throughout Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s sweeping and fascinating new (and in parts a continuing) study of the intersections and reciprocating influences between, and as the book’s title outlines, Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, and the Dead James Connolly. The thrust of the book examines and uncovers many of the political, textual, and dramatic borrowings and shared points between the three “secular saints” (270) of the book’s study of Shaw, O’Casey, and Connolly.An image in the form of a nightmare had by W. B. Yeats in 1894, and which he later recounted in his autobiographical The Trembling of the Veil (1922), becomes an important touchstone in the book. Having seen the premiere productions of his own play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, and Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Avenue Theatre in London, Yeats described that “presently I had a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually” (11). The insinuation here is that the “perpetually smiling” machine had the face and form of Bernard Shaw. Yeats did not dream of Shaw as a manual spinning wheel, a device that we saw in Synge’s Riders, but rather Yeats’s nightmare depicted a mechanical Shaw—Shaw in the form of a sewing machine that, as O’Ceallaigh Ritschel describes, “represented much more than an affront to Yeats’ artistic vision through its domestic functionality as the machine symbolized, in the industrial age, more than something linear; it was an international embodiment of the industrialized abuse of workers” (13). The mechanics of form between human and machine, between worker and factory, and between politics and the stage are illustrated in great detail in this rigorously researched new book, outlining the moments and continuations of exchange between Connolly, Shaw, and O’Casey, across temporal ripples and long after the execution of Connolly, seated as he was before the firing squad at Kilmainham Jail in 1916. (The cruel details of this act are recounted in the book as a poignant reminder of the brutality of the executions, beyond their act of killing, to the destruction of the body and bones themselves immediately afterward in uncoffined and quicklimed graves, as if moving beyond the reach of human frailty, and even death.)In the opening sections of the book, the image of the Singer sewing machine is a symbol that joins the transatlantic threads of James Connolly (who worked as a young machinist in the Singer factory in New Jersey USA in the early years of the twentieth century having emigrated from Dublin to America in 1903) back to Ireland and to Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey via W. B. Yeats. While Connolly is such an active and vibrant presence in the book, we are reminded that it is the “dead James Connolly” that is at the thrust of the book’s argument, that following Connolly’s execution in 1916 in the key works that followed by both O’Casey and Shaw, Connolly held a position of influence and spectral presence.Shaw lectured on socialist causes in Scotland in 1910 (alongside Beatrice and Sydney Webb) and 1911, respectively, at a time when Singer’s Scottish-based factory (in Clydeside and which held seven thousand workers) was approaching strike action and general labor unrest in the large industrial cities of Scotland. O’Casey encountered Shaw’s foremost Irish-based play, John Bull’s Other Island, in the so-called Home Rule edition published as a cheap six-pence paperback copy published in 1912, while working as a railway laborer in Dublin. It was after the Strike and Lock Out of 1913 engulfed Dublin city, its workers, and their families that the circles of the Venn diagram of Connolly, Shaw, and O’Casey drew more concentric.As Connolly, Shaw, and the poet George Russell delivered speeches in Dublin in 1913 against the Lock Out and other agents of authority, from the Dublin Metropolitan Police to the courts system, O’Ceallaigh Ritschel saliently identifies their speeches as being “arguably, among the most important of Ireland’s revolutionary period” (24). At the same time, O’Casey was helping to feed families of the striking workers from a food kitchen in Liberty Hall. O’Casey’s own role with the newly formed Irish Citizen Army (whose members, we are reminded, were discussing Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the time of its foundation) saw O’Casey draft the ICA’s constitution in March 1914.Given that Shaw’s energy, as a playwright, a socialist, a public commentator, a pamphleteer, and through all other hats and guises he wore in his lifetime, was spent in the cause of the eradication of poverty, Connolly too, in the same vein, recognized the cause of concern for workers in an industry of clothing manufacturing. Writing in Workers’ Republic, 3 June 1899, on the “sweating industry” of tailoring, Connolly likened such “sweating” as “the natural child of capitalism” and for which “socialism is indeed the only permanent remedy.”1 Chapter 4 covers the years of O’Casey’s arguably greatest period of influence and impact on the theater with the production of his Dublin trilogy of plays through the decade at the Abbey Theatre. Crucially here, O’Ceallaigh Ritschel points to a perhaps neglected point in Irish political historiography—the “lack of Labour candidates in the 1918 election was to dominate Ireland’s 1920s” (110). As later described by W. B. Yeats as those who gleefully “fumble in the greasy till,” the Bourgeoisie positioning and arguments that would proliferate through the emergent years of the new Free State dominated O’Casey’s plays, as well as in late warnings by Connolly who forewarned his comrades to “hold onto your rifles” as they may yet be needed (110).With the onset of the 1920s, later chapters draw interesting perspectives on the unproduced O’Casey play Harvest Festival, written in 1919, depicting a workers revolution in Dublin. Shaw’s sprawling multiverse of Back to Methuselah was written in response to not just the preceding decade of international warfare and socialist unrest from Ireland to Russia, but also the perilous position of hope in society. The question posited by Shaw here, namely what was to become of nationalism and of social progress, is interestingly explored in this chapter. O’Ceallaigh Ritschel draws fascinating examination of The Tragedy of the Elderly Gentleman to help answer these questions as Ireland faced into a War of Independence and later a brutal civil war, still “Ireland needed hope, particularly its working and non-working classes” (120).A chapter on Saint Joan delves into the Irish writing of the play by Shaw in terms of time spent in County Kerry writing the play but also the resonances of Connolly’s own actions and their reverberations against the experiences of Joan: “In essence, Connolly’s execution represented for Maxwell in 1916, ‘a political necessity,’ just as Joan represented the same for Warwick. In actuality, both Joan and Connolly represented similar threats” (175). These threats included their respective martyrdom and the growth of nationalist-driven rhetoric within contemporary historiography in the immediate wake of their deaths. There are numerous important points on the processes of history and historicization throughout the book, among them this example: “Connolly is present in Shaw’s exploration of the process of history to know the present, and to advance modern civilization following colossal wars and universal suffering” (178).In relation to the aftermath of the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 7 January 1922, a striking line is quoted that brings neat symmetry to the book’s message regarding the intertwined lives and legacies of the protagonists Shaw, O’Casey, and the dead James Connolly. It is a quote from James Larkin, another voice strongly present in the book. On the news of the passing of the treaty, Larkin cables a message from Sing Sing prison in New York that is published in the ITGWU’s The Voice of Labour on the following day: “We stand for the dead. We entered into a compact with them when living” (130). Larkin intones the fallen leaders of the 1916 Rising, including Connolly, directly in the message. It also echoes an earlier lament for the dead generations heard at the end of Gregory and Yeats’s Kathleen Ní Houlihan: They shall be speaking for everThe people shall hear them for ever.2 (This allusion to Kathleen is also referenced in a later chapter on Shaw’s Saint Joan where Joan speaks to Baudricourt: “Your name will be remembered for ever as my first helper” [148].) O’Ceallaigh Ritschel also traces the links on the eve of the Civil War to a meeting between Shaw and Michael Collins in July 1922, less than a month before Collins was killed, to Shaw’s article “The Eve of Civil War,” which was published in the Irish Times and outlined Shaw’s views, which ranged from ineffectiveness in the anti-Treaty stance and frustration for the socialist cause to workers’ conditions should civil conflict continue, which, as is argued clearly in the book, also channeled themes of James Connolly’s play, Under Which Flag?As the class (and family) politics of a new Irish Free State, and in particular in the grim wake of the post-Treaty years of Civil War, were so dissected onstage by O’Casey in his The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, and the later The Plough and the Stars, so too were the threads of influence of Connolly present in works by O’Casey and also to be seen in Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island. As O’Ceallaigh Ritschel astutely observes, “The two Irish socialist dramatists in the 1920s were poised to contribute significant work, indeed great work, and Connolly was a presence for both.” The book concludes as it approaches the 1930s and with an informative and engaging discussion of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie and Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, both finished in 1928. The synergies between the writings of these three again all become clear through the close textual readings that pick up on James Connolly’s Reconquest of Ireland, in which he likens the status of women with capitalist societies as being reduced to “the slave of the slave.” Shaw makes a similar point in his Intelligent Woman’s Guide, where he too echoes Connolly’s warnings of capitalism’s double framing of women’s forced servitude.In a letter to F. E. Lowenstein, and in response to an invitation from David Marcus for Shaw to contribute an essay on contemporary Irish writing for a book being edited by Lowenstein and Marcus, Shaw refused on the grounds that he “left Ireland 70 years ago” but more so as he was not up to date on such Irish writing, with Sean O’Casey being the only living figure whose work he was known to him.3This may have been the case, but as the book makes clear, Connolly was a figure of major import for Shaw as well as O’Casey. “Connolly maintained a presence for both Shaw and O’Casey, all socialists in their different ways—whether they wanted to or not” (270).The book will be of great interest and value to those outside of Shavian interests. It is a fascinating and richly detailed account of the socialist and cultural history, of labor movements and the overlaps between Ireland and international contemporary events and political class movements across Europe, Russia, and the United States of the time, offering rigorously researched and detailed transnational studies of socialist cultural history and class politics, identifying the far reach and influence of the book’s protagonists. The author has made exhaustive use of numerous primary sources, from the published letters of Shaw, O’Casey, Yeats, and others, to a wide range of socialist and political pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and other similar materials, again reminding all scholars of the value of such ephemeral records. The book is also a continuation and important addition to earlier monograph studies by the author, such as “Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation” (2011). This volume continues a vein of dialogue between many voices, contrasting political contexts and the at-times competing egos as the long, fraught, and often violent journey for Ireland’s freedom took shape from the late nineteenth century. Importantly, the book reminds us of the need for any study and full understanding of the period to consider class and labor politics at the heart of the political, social, and cultural events of the time.