Bird Imagery and Bird Lore Motifs in The Shadow of a Gunman

Abstract

As scholarly inquiry into O’Casey’s technique increases, literary critics are becoming more and more aware of a curiously anachronistic quality about his work. Although he was a modern playwright producing “problem” plays in the shadow of Shaw and Ibsen, there have always been elements in his plays which belie the labels attached to O’Casey and, indeed, set him apart from the mainstream of twentieth century drama. The more astute of the critics have, in fact, stopped identifying O’Casey’s early work as the epitome of social realism it was once thought to be and now place it in a more impressive dramatic tradition. John Gassner, analyzing the problem which O’Casey encountered getting his plays before a contemporary public, explains that O’Casey is “as baroque, as lavish and prodigal, as were Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and John Webster. He belongs to the spacious days of the theatre.”¹