Sean O'Casey Boeken

317 pages The Silver Tassie; Purple Dust; Red Roses for Me with and introduction be JC Trewin

A murderer becomes the toast of the village as his charm negates his crime. A young countess saves her tenants from starvation, but only by selling her soul to the Devil. The sleepy parish of Nyadnanave sees a vision of a cockerel that dares the inhabitants to break the shackles of Church and State. All these plays were met with moral outrage and rioting in their native Ireland.Yeats's 'The Countess Cathleen' (1892), J. M. Synge's 'The Playboy of the Western World' (1907) and O'Casey's 'Cock-a-doodle Dandy' (1949) emerged from a period of traumatic change for Ireland. While the plays bear witness to the immmense social upheavals of the turn of the twentieth century, they also represent a new age of Irish drama that rose from the turmoil, and their lessons ring true to this day.

A play set in the tenements of Dublin in 1922, just after the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, revolving around the misfortunes of the dysfunctional Boyle family ("Juno and the paycock"). A tragicomedy set during the Irish War of Independence centering on the mistaken identity of a building tenant who is thought to be an IRA assassin ("The shadow of a gunman"). A play set in Dublin addressing the 1916 Easter Rising ("The plough and the stars")

This educational edition, with the full play text and an introduction to the playwright, features a detailed analysis of the language, structure and characters of the play, and textual notes explaining difficult words and references. It contains: - The full playtext - An introduction to the playwright, his background and his work - A detailed analysis of language, structure and characters in the play - Features of performance - Textual notes explaining difficult words and references Professor Murray's notes, to be read alongside the full playtext provided here, will enable students to better understand, appreciate, enjoy and write about O'Casey's greatest play.