George Bernard Shaw: Commentary

[ top ]

G. K. Chesterton: ‘My principal experience from first to last, has been in argument with him. And it is worth remarking that I have [learned] to have a warmer admiration and affection out of all that argument than most people get out of agreement. Bernard Shaw, unlike some whom I have had to consider here, is seen at his best when he is antagonistic.’ (Quoted in Eavan Boland, review of Dan H. Laurence and Daniel J. O’Leary, ed., Bernard Shaw: Complete Prefaces Vol. 1, 1889-1913, Allen Lane/Penguin 1992, 630pp [first of three vols], in Irish Times 7 Sept. 1993.

H. G. Wells (writing to Shaw some time after the latter had written an unsympathetic letter when Mrs Wells died of cancer, in which Shaw described the disease as the failure of the Life Force): ‘[Y]ours is a flimpsy intellectual acquisitive sort of mind adrift and chattering brightly in a world you don’t understand. You don’t know, as I do, in blood & substance, lust, failure, shame, hate, love and creative passion’. Wells also accused him, somewhat more playfully, of being ruined by a huckster’s mentality: ‘you insisted on having a table; leaning over it with your knuckles; and addressing the contents of your contracted chest to the table-cloth. I will now, having tried to cure of that by fair means in vain, cure you of it by a blow beneath the belt. Where did you get that attitude? IN THE SHOP [...] I sweart that the next time you take that attitude in my presence I will ask you for a farthing paper of pins.’ (See Peter Kemp, review of J. Percy Smith, ed., Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, Toronto UP ?1995, 242pp., in Times Literary Supplement, 20 Oct. 1995, p.6).

[ top ]

W. B. Yeats (1) - after the failure of Todhunter’s Comedy of Sighs ( March 1893): ‘Shaw, whose turn came next, had foreseen all months before, and had planned an opening that would confound his enemies. For the first few minutes Arms and the Man is crude melodrama and then just when the audience are thinking how crude it is, it turns into excellent farce. [...] / On the first night the whole pit and gallery, except certain members of the Fabian Society, started to laugh at the author, and then, discovering that they themselves were being laughed at, sat there not converted - their hatred was too bitter for that - but dumbfounded, while the rest of the house cheered and laughed. In the silence that greeted the author after the cry for a speech one man did indeed get his courage and boo loudly: ‘I assure the gentleman in the gallery’, was Shaw’s answer, “that he and I are of exactly the same opinion, but what can we do against a whole house who are of the contrary opinion?” And from that moment Bernard Shaw became the most formidable man in modern letters, and even the most drunken of medical students knew it.’ (Autobiographies, 1955, Bk. IV: ‘The Tragic Generation’, q.p.)

W. B. Yeats (2): Yeats’s letter of refusal to St. John Ervine contains comments on Shaw: ‘Shaw has a unique mind, a mind that is part of a logical process going on all over Europe but which has found in him its efficient expression in English. He has no vision of life. He is a figure of international argument. There is an old saying, “No angel can carry two messages.” You have the greater gift of seeing life itself.’ (Quoted in John Boyd, ‘St. John Ervine: A Biographical Note’, in Threshold, Summer 1974, p.102.)]

W. B. Yeats (3): ‘Shaw, as I understand him, has no true quarrel with his time, its moon and his almost exactly coincide. He is quite content to exchange Narcissus and his Pool for a signal-box at a railway junction, where goods and travellers pass perpetually upon their logical glittering road.’ (In Autobiographies, p.294; quoted in T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, London: Methuen 1950, 1965, [Rev. edn.], p.209.)

W. B. Yeats (4): ‘I agree about Shaw, he is haunted by the mystery that he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.’ (Wade, ed., Letters, p.671; quoted in Henn, op. cit., 1965, idem.) See also Yeats’s account of a dream in which he compares Shaw to a sewing machine.

W. B. Yeats (5), letter to G. B. Shaw on reading John Bull’s Other Island, 1904): ‘You have said things in this play which are entirely true about Ireland, things which nobody has said before, and these are the very things that are most part of the action. It astonishes me that you should have been so long in London and yet have remembered so much.’ (Quoted in Aaron Kelly, Twentieth-Century Literature in Ireland: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2008, p.20, citing John B. Harrington, ed., Modern Irish Drama, London: W. W. Norton 1991, p.482 [see longer extract under Michael Holroyd, infra].)

W. B. Yeats (6) - “When I was Four-and-Twenty” (1919): ‘A few years ago Bernard Shaw explained, what he called “the vulgarity and the savagery” of his writing, by saying that he had sat once upon a time every Sunday morning in an Irish Protestant church. But mountain and lough have not grown raw and common; pillage and ravage could not abate their beauty; and the impulse that gathers these great companies in every year has outlasted armorial stone.’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library > Major Authors > Yeats - via index or as attached.)

[ top ]

Patrick Pearse: ‘We take no more interest in the literary fate of Mr George Bernard Shaw than an orthodox Hebrew of the house of Judah may be imagined to have taken in the fate of an erring member of one of the mislaid Tribes. So far as the Gael is concerned, Mr George Bernard Shaw belongs to “one of the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned”.’ (‘An English Censorship in Ireland’, in An Claidheamh Soluis, 28 Aug. 1909; cited in Gearσid O’Flaherty, ‘George Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Revival’, in P. J. Mathews, ed., New Voices in Irish Criticism, ed. P. J. Mathews Four Courts Press 2000, pp.33-42; p.40.)

James Stephens, in The Insurrection in Dublin (1916) [1st Edn. 1916], Foreward: ‘[...] Mr. Shaw has spoken of her as a “cabbage patch at the back of beyond”. On this kind of description Rome might be called a hen-run and Greece a back yard. The sober fact is that Ireland has a larger geographical area than many an independent and prosperous European kingdom, and for all human and social needs she is a fairly big country, and is beautiful and fertile to boot. She could be made worth knowing if goodwill and trust are available for the task.’ Further: [in concluding remarks of the Foreword]: ‘There is a reference in the earlier pages of this record to a letter which I addressed to Mr. George Bernard Shaw and published in the New Age. This was a thoughtless letter, and subsequent events have proved that it was unmeaning and ridiculous. I have since, through the same hospitable journal, apologised to Mr. Shaw, but have let my reference to the matter stand as an indication that electricity was already in the air. Every statement I made about him in [p.xiv] that letter and in this book was erroneous; for, afterwards, when it would have been politic to run for cover, he ran for the open, and he spoke there like the valiant thinker and great Irishman that he is.’

James Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin [1916), Chap. 1 - Monday: ‘On Saturday I got the Irish Times, and found in it a long article by Bernard Shaw (reprinted from the New York Times). One reads things written by Shaw. Why one does read them I do not know exactly, except that it is a habit we got into years ago, and we read an article by Shaw just as we put on our boots in the morning—that is, without thinking about it, and without any idea of reward. / His article angered me exceedingly. It [p.2] was called “Irish Nonsense talked in Ireland”. It was written (as is almost all of his journalistic work) with that bonhomie which he has cultivated - it is his mannerism - and which is essentially hypocritical and untrue. Bonhomie! It is that man-of-the-world attitude, that shop attitude, that between-you-and-me-for-are-we-not-equal-and-cultured attitude, which is the tone of a card-sharper or a trick-of-the-loop man. That was the tone of Shaw’s article. I wrote an open letter to him which I sent to the New Age, because I doubted that the Dublin papers would print it if I sent it to them, and I knew that the Irish people who read the other papers had never heard of Shaw, except as a trade-mark under which very good Limerick bacon is sold, and that they would not be interested in the opinions of a person named Shaw on any subject not relevant to bacon. I struck out of my letter a good many harsh things which I said of him, and hoped he would reply to it in order that I could furnish these acidities to him in a second letter.’ (pp.2-3.)

Daniel Corkery: ‘Mr Shaw has described himself as the faithful servant of the English people; is it not a strange thing that servitude to the stranger should eventuate in brilliancy? Yet is it not an old and a constant theme in literature? - the jester, just because he is not one of ourselves, is privileged to loosen his tongue - only that the jester in literature has a secret sorrow in the background, as if to preserve the natural roundness of life-heart as well as brain. All those writers were, as much as Mr. Shaw, servants of the English people: - one wonders if their desertion of the land that most required their services was not their secret woe? From Prout’s bitter gibing at O’Connell-that great if imperfect figure - one thinks it may have been so; that his secret sorrow should have expressed itself not in tears but in tauntings of one who did lay his gifts at his country’s feet, must not surprise us, since the jester must find an unusual way.’ (Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, 1931; Mercier Press Edn. 1966, p.19; allusion is to “Fr. Prout” [Sylvester Mahony].)

Ernest A. Boyd ‘An Irish Protestant: Bernard Shaw’, in Appreciations and Depreciations (1917): ‘It is, however, remarkable that, while English, American and continental European critics have studied his work, no Irishman has attempted to consider him from an Irish point of view. We have been concerned rather with those whose efforts have contributed to the building up of a national Anglo-Irish literature, rather than with those who addressed themselves primarily to the English public […]. English people have been disconcerted by Shaw’s ability to view them from outside, as it were. They should remember that he is merely exercising the privilege of the expatriate […]. Shaw is never more faithful to Irish Protestant tradition than when he exhibits scepticism towards the virtues of England, without, however, turning definitely against her. He is sufficiently aloof to be critical, but his instincts draw him so inevitably to the English people that he cannot really be inimical. In short, he is that perfect type of sans patrie which the anglicisation of Ireland has produced - men who cannot understand their own compatriots, and must necessarily take refuge among a people with whom they are condemned to be aliens. (n.p.; cited by Thomas Kilroy, ‘Anglo-Irish Playwrights and Comic Tradition’, in The Crane Bag, 3, 1979, pp.19-27; rep. in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, 1982, pp.439-47, p.446.)

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw’, Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (NY 1964), formerly collected in Otras Inquisiciones (1952): ‘The collective and civic problems of his early works will lose their interest, or have lost it already; the jokes in the Pleasant Plays [sic] run the risk of becoming, some day, no less uncomfortable than those of Shakespeare [...] the ideas declared in his prologues [prefaces] and his eloquent tirades will be found in Schopenhauer and Samuel Butler; but Lavinia, Blanco Posnet, Keegan, Shotover, Richard Dudgeon, and, above all, Julius Caesar, surpass any character imagined by the art of our time. If we thing of Monsieur Teste [in Valery] alongside them or Nietszche’s Zarathustra, we can only perceive with astonishment and even outrage the primacy of Shaw [...] The biography of Bernard Shaw by Frank Harris contains an admirable letter by the former [...]: “I understand everything and everyone and I am nothing a[n] no one”. From this nothingness (so comparable to that of God before creating the word, so comparable to that primordial divinity which another Irishman, Johannes Scottus Eriugena, called Nihil) Bernard Shaw educed almost innumberable persons or dramatis personae, the most ephemeral of these is, I suspect, that of G.B.S. who represented him in public and who lavished in the newspaper columns so many facile witticism [...] The work of Shaw [...] leaves one with a flavour of liberation, the flavour of the stoic doctrines and the flavour of the sagas.’ (Quoted in John Jordan, chapter-essay on Shaw, Wilde, Synge and Yeats, in Richard Kearney, ed., The Irish Mind, 1985, p.212f.; see further under Jordan, q.v.)

Samuel Beckett: ‘I wouldn’t suggest that GBS [Shaw] is not a great playwright, whatever that is when it’s at home. What I would do is give the whole unupsettable applecart for a sup of the Hawk’s Well, or the Saint’s, or a whiff of Juno, to go no further.’ (Frescoes of the Skull: The later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, ed. Pilling and Knowles, 1980; quoted in Harrington, The Irish Beckett, p.100.)

[ top ]

[ top ]

Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers: ‘The Irish of Bernard Shaw’s period enjoyed, in the field of literature, certain special advantages over the English, due to the fact that, Irish society, remaining largely in the pre-industrial stage, they were closer to the eighteenth-century standards. If we compare Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, to say, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells, we are at once struck by the extant to which these latter have suffered from their submergence in the commercial world. In their worst phases of sentimentality and philistinism, there is almost nothing to choose between them and the frankly trashy popular novelist; whereas the Irish have preserved form English Literature classical qualities of hardness and elegance.’

G. E. Brown, George Bernard Shaw (London: Evans Bros. 1970), ‘When we consider Shaw’s drama as a whole, we are reminded forcibly that he was above all a writer of plays of social protest. He was always aware of the theatre as an instrument for advocating the improvement of social conditions.’ (p.122.)

Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), Shaw tried to make a distinction between the stage Irishman, Tim Haffigan, and the real Irish in John Bull’s Other Island, but too many of the characters in that work are caricatures already. The problem was that dramatists and their personages came from different social classes.’ (p.100).

Venetia Newall, Foreword to Sean O’Sullivan, Legends from Ireland (London: Batsford 1977): ‘[…] Some sixty years ago, while writing about touring in Ireland, Shaw chided the car-men who took English visitors to see historical sites in the vicinity. A tradition existed among them, so he said, of entertaining the tourists with impersonations of Myles nag Copaleen and Micky Free, characters from early nineteenth-century novels set in Ireland. “All such performances”, he added, “are pure humbug and the anecdotes are learned and repeated without sense.” This is very true, but Shaw also used the word tradition, even though he may have chosen it coincidentally. He could therefore have recognised that a tradition is never totally worthless, since it illustrates the society which produces it. In the very changed society of modern Ireland, different traditions have survived or been recorded. This second selection within the present series from the Irish folklore archives, which Sean O’’Sullivan so long and ably tended, again shows how fortunate we are that this rich store of folklore has been preserved. How immeasurably poorer we would be if ‘traditional’ Ireland had been reduced to the caricature of Victorian fictional writers.’

Thomas Kilroy, ‘Anglo-Irish Playwrights and Comic Tradition’, in The Crane Bag, 3 (1979), pp.19-27, quotes: ‘[…] I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy two in England, but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one’ - and remarks, ‘The only problem with this statement of Shaw is that if the situation had been reversed in his life it is more than likely he would have lived and died a foreigner in Ireland. It is a truism of Shavian criticism that some kind of dialectic resides at the centre of all his work. More than any other of these Anglo-Irish playwrights he was acutely aware of being in suspension between two cultural identities. It is the subject of John Bull’s Other Island which Shaw wrote for an Irish audience as a corrective to relations between the two countries but also as a way of balancing, at times precariously, his own disjointed selves. The play, however, ends with the poles as far apart as ever, a typically ironical “patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre.” In the Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman Shaw describes the condition at the root of John Bull’s Other Island as a fact of knowledge but not of reconciliation. It is very doubtful if he would have wished it other.’ Further quotes: ‘From the day I first set foot … &c.’ [as infra], adding: ‘Shaw had an inexhaustible capacity to hold contraries of this kind in perpetual opposition and this is the basis of his comic technique. The bulk of the comedies are technically conservative to the point of forming an anthology of conventions out of the tradition. Shaw’s use of traditional comedy, however, is a brave attempt to urge it into the modern world by investing it with interesting ideas. The problem, in so many of Shaw’s plays, is that the tiredness of that tradition shows through despite the articulation, the mischief and the common sense.’ (END; rep. in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, 1982, pp.439-47, p.447.)

Declan Kiberd, Anglo-Irish Attitudes [Field Day Pamphlets, No. 6] (Derry: Field Day 1984): ‘George Bernard Shaw was another writer who treated England as a laboratory in which he could define what it meant to be an Irishman. […] John Bull’s Other Island is Shaw’s attempt to show how the peoples of the two islands spend most of their time acting an approved part before their neighbour’s eyes and these assigned parts are seen as impositions by the other side rather than opportunities for true self-expression.’ (p.10.) ‘Shaw’s play, like Wilde’s career, is a radical critique of the Anglo-Irish antithesis so beloved of the Victorians, and, it must be stressed, of that last Victorian W. B. Yeats. By the simple expedient of presenting a romantic Englishman and an empirical Irishman[,] John Bull’s Other Island mocks the ancient sterotype. Of course, that is not the end of the story, for, by his performance of absurd sentimentality, Broadbent effectively takes over the entire village on the terms most favourable to himself, while Larry Doyle loses his cynical self-composure in the face of the ruin of his people. […] in the end the Anglo-Irish antithesis is questioned, but only to be reasserted in a slightly modified form. It is left to the prophetic Peter Keegan to [12] explain Broadbent’s efficient victory: “let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth. I learnt at Oxford that this is the secret of the Englishman’s power of making the best of both worlds.” By mastering the stereotype, by pretending to be a stage fool, Broadbent has eaten up all the real fools, just as Larry predicted. Ireland has on this occasion been a useful laboratory for another English experiment.’ (pp.12-13). Note the extended analysis of play and characters, pp.10-13. Note that Kiberd ascribed androgynous creations to Shaw in Inventing Ireland (1995) calling St. Joan in particular ‘an ideal androgyne’ (p.438.)

[ top ]

Declan Kiberd, ‘The London Exiles: Wilde & Shaw’, in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry 1991), Vol. 2, pp.420-23. ‘Shaw’s play, like Wilde’s career, is a radical socialist critique of the Anglo-Irish antithesis so beloved of the Victorians and, it must be stressed, of that last Victorian, W. B. Yeats. By the simple expedient of presenting a romantic Englishman and [422] an empirical Irishman, John Bull’s Other Island mocks the ancient stereotype. Of course, that is not the end of the story, for, by his performance of absurd sentimentality, Broadbent effectively effectively takes over the entire village on the terms most favourable to himself, while Larry Doyle loses his cynical self-composure in the face of the ruin of his people. Larry’s discriminating intellect paralyzes him into inactivity, for he has grown too subtle and too cynical, too foolish in his very cleverness, whereas Broadbent’s blinkered vision is finally what allows him to be so efficient, so clever in his very foolishness. In the end, the Anglo-Irish antithesis is questioned, but only reasserted in a slightly modified form. (Ftn., A. Turco, Jnr., Shaw’s Moral Vision, Cornell UP 1976, p.178.) it is left to the prophetic Peter Keegan to explain Broadbent’s efficient victory: “Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth. I learnt at Oxford that this is the secret of the Englishman’s strange power of making the best of both worlds.” By mastering the stereotype, by pretending to be a stage-fool, Broadbent has eaten up all the real fools, just as Larry predicted. Ireland has on this occasion been a useful laboratory for another English experiment. / It is no accident that the British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour should have attended Shaw’s play with cabinet colleagues on four separate occasions, or that King Edward VII should have broken his chair while laughing at the production. [...] Yeats’s solution to this dilemma was to gather a native Irish audience and create a native Irish theatre in Dublin — to express Ireland to herself rather than run the risk of exploiting her for the foreigner. He accepted the Anglo-Irish antithesis, but only on condition that he was allowed to reinterpret it in a more flattering light. Whereas the English had called the Irish backward, super­ stitious and uncivilized, the Gaelic revivalists created an idealized counter-image, which saw her as pastoral, mystical, admirably primitive. Yet such a counter-image was not wholly effective, if only because it elevated a single aspect of Ireland into a type of the whole. ‘Connaught for me is Ireland ’, said Yeats; but Ireland is not Connaught — rather she is a patchwork quilt of cultures, as she was before the Normans invaded. George Watson has devoted a valuable section of Irish Identity and the Literary Revival to an elaboration of this point, showing how Yeats’s folklorism confirmed the traditional image of the Irish as subservient and menial — only now they were deemed menial in colourful and interesting new ways. ‘The cracked looking-glass of a servant’ was how Joyce’s hero Stephen described such an art. It is an apt image, not just of Yeats’s hopeless rehabilitation of the modes of deference but also of Joyce’s own escape into modernism, for what a cracked looking-glass really shows is not a single but a multiple self.’

Paul O’Mahony, ‘The Irish psyche imprisoned’, in A. Halliday & K. Coyle, eds., The Irish Journal of Psychology, ‘The Irish Psyche’ [Special Issue], Vol. 15, Nos. 2 & 3 ((Psychol. Soc. of Ireland 1994), pp.456-68: ‘Shaw brilliantly uncovers the contradictions in our approach to imprisonment and goes so far as to suggest that “imprisonment [...] is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims, for no single criminal can be as powerful for evil or as unrestrained in its exercise, as an organised nation”.’ (Shaw, Pref. to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government Prisons, Longman 1922; O’Mahony, p.463).

Lucy McDiarmid, review of Dan H. Lawrence and Nicholas Grene, eds., Shaw, Lady Gregory, and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1993) [Irish Liteary Supplement, Spring 1994, pp.4-6, includes an account of the defiance of Dublin Castle over Blanco Posnet; an account of the part played by McGarritty in the arrest of the Playboy Abbey cast in Philadephia; and the attempt to play Shaw’s O’Flaherty VC in Dublin; of the last-named Shaw wrote to Yeats, ‘it is written to appeal very strongly to that love of adventure and desire to see the wider world and escape from the cramping parochialism of Irish life which is more helpful to recruiting than all the silly placards about Belgium and the life’; Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory, ‘it was out of the question fighting the issue’; Shaw conveys St John Ervine’s complaints about Abbey’s failure to pay his play fees [5]; Shaw’s summary of O’Flaherty VC in a letter to Lady Gregory, ‘The idea is that O’Flaherty’ experience in the trenches has induced in him a terrible realism and an unbearable candour. He sees Ireland as it is, his mother as she is, his sweetheart as she is; and he goes back to the trenches joyfully for the sake of peace and quietness. Sinclair [the Abbey actor] must be prepared for brickbats’; on an appeal for support for the Abbey, Shaw wrote to her, ‘I feel provoked to say that if the child needs so much nursing it had better die [...] Let it go smash. Then you will have to turn it into a Cinema house and make it comfortable’; McDiarmid quote Lady Gregory’s memoir of Shaw’s talking of his mother’s encountering a seance-spirit called Matthew Haffigan, who was a terrible liar; Shaw’s reference to the ‘disgraceful old literary rags’ of the [British] national anthem’s second verse’, which he then rewrote; in 1948 the Republic of Ireland Act caused him to write to the Irish Statesman, ‘I am by birth a British subject, I have always so described myself when applying for passports, though I never stood up nor took off my hat off while the English national anthem was being played until Ireland became the so-called Free State. I am also a registered citizen of my native Ireland.’ Further, quotes Larry Doyle: ‘The Irishman can’t be intelligently political; he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in ninety-eight [... &c.’, as in “Quotations”, infra.]

Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1996), for accounts of Shaw’s ‘feud’ with Henry Irving, whom he regarded as a reactionary actor-manager; Shaw refused to attend his funeral at Westminster on the grounds that ‘literature had no place at Irving’s graveside.’ (p.306.)

J. H. Martin, letter to the Times Literary Supplement (24 May 1996: Mrs Patrick Campbell is reputed to have said, when Shaw was monitoring a rehearsal of Pygmalion: ‘Some day you’ll eat a pork chop, Joey, and then God help all women!’ The story usually attributed to Ellen Terry, and retaled, ‘if GBS ever lapsed and ate a beefsteak, no woman in London would be safe.’ (Times Literary Supplement, p.19, Letters.)

Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The One Volume Definitive Edition (Chatto & Windus 1997), pp.834. John Bull’s Other Island is a section title in Chap. [IX], pp.302-06, with the epigraph: ‘the object of the play is to reach Irish people the value of an Englishman as well as to shew the Englishman his own absurdities’ (viz., ‘Author’s Instructions to the Producer’, John Bull’s Other Island). Holroyd calls Edward Martyn ‘an owl-blinking misogynist’ (p.302.) John Bull’s Other Island was begun as “Rule Britannia”. Holroyd writes: ‘In John Bull’s Other Island Shaw contrasted the twenty years of his upbringing in Dublin with the twenty years of his career in London. At one level, which he later developed in his Preface, the play is about the opposing political histories and natioanl characteristics of the two countries. But Ireland and England are also metaphors for differing philosophies: and Shaw’s experiment at reconciling them is the theme of this self-revealing work.’ (p.303). Holroyd quotes Yeats’s letter to Shaw: ‘I thought in reading the first act that you had forgotten Ireland, but I found in the other acts that it is the only subject on which you are entirely serious. You have said things in this play which are entirely true about Ireland, things which nobody has said before [, and these are the very things that are most part of the action.] It astonishes me that you should have been so long in London and yet have remembered so much. To some extent this play is unlike anything you have done before. Hitherto you have taken your situations from melodrama, and called up logic to make them ridiculous. Your process here seems to be quite different, you are taking your situations from life, you are for the first time trying to get the atmosphere of the place … a geographical conscience […]. You have laughed at the things that are ripe for laughter, and not where the ear is still green … we can play it, and survive to play something else.’ In the Preface to the 1906 edition, Shaw wrote that it was ‘uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland.’ Holroyd concludes, ‘Yeats could recognise the wonderful power of Shaw’s pen – its logic, justice, audacity, conviction. But Shaw represented “the spirit of the press, of hurry, of immediate interests”, over what Yeats felt was the slow-burning spirit of literature. He was consuming his own talent with superficial theatricality, the unnerving tic of his wit, rambling vulgarity – anything that seemed to stiffen the purpose of the moment.’ (p.307).

[ top ]

A. R. Jones (Shaw, q.d.): ‘The interest of the plays resides chiefly in the animation of the dispute, the conflict is between ideas which are given a general validity, carried by characters and situations which are entirely credible [...] It is the characters who are moved about by the ideas and not the ideas which arise out of the dramatic conflict between the characters [...] In spite of their assumed naturalism, these plays are artificial and contrived quality which his not wholly compensated for by the sharp, witty exchanges between characters.’ (q.p..) ‘He successfly transforms drawingroom comedy into a vehicle for ideas. He is related to Goldsmith, Sheridan, and Wilde as a dramatist who revived and extended the comedy of manners.’ (p.15.) ‘Shaw’s social and artistic attitudes are closer to Dickens than to Ibsen, and his Bergsonian Protestantism recalls Dickens’ optimitistic faith in the principle of Universal Benevolence’ (p.66.) ‘Dramatically, Shaw was only really comfortable among the cultivated, leisured middle-classes [...] Henry Straker, Snobby Price, Mr Doolittle, etc., are little more than sage Cockneys.’ (p.73.) ‘His dramtic range is narrow; charctes have little or no private life. His plays through a penetrating light on the folly, vanity, and greed of man, but the area of illuminated is not large’. (p.73). [The title cited is not listed in the British Library Catalogue.]

Nicholas Grene, ‘Shaw’, W. J. McCormack, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Oxford: Blackwell 1999; reiss. 2001): ‘Shaw’s distinction involved a pecular combination of clarity and singularity in thought and style. Through the period of his intellectual evolution in the 1880s and the 1890s, he absorbed ideas from Hegel, Marex, Nietzsche (Shaw as the writer who gave the word “superman” to the English language), William Morris, Ibsen and Wagner, but he transformed them into an amalgam which was all his own. His central creed of cretive evolution, the idea that a life force was working through the human species towards ever greater powers of self-realisation, was a means of marrying his individualism to a comprehensive and determining world view. The brilliant discursiveness of so much of his writing, and its didacticism in both plays and prefaces, helped to make Shaw disciples, but have also resulted in his anomalous standing as a figure in world literature. The standard charge against Shaw, in his own time and since, has been that he is not a playwright but a precher, a preacher whose views have become increasingly outmoded. / On the face of it the charge is ridiculous […] By its crackle and thrust, turn and counter-turn, Shaw’s dramatic rhetoric continues to live, though his ideas may be dated as the dodo. Yet the hostility towards Shaw’s plays persists […].’ Grene also speaks of ‘the unquantifable influence of his ideas diffused by quotation through the language.’ (p.530-31.)

Nicholas Allen, ‘Free Statement: Censorship and the Irish Statesman’, in Last Before America - Irish and American Writing, ed. Fran Brearton & Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 2001), quotes Shaw on the effect of Irish censorship (, as supra and remarks: ‘[...] The image of Ireland slipping back into the Atlantic, lost beneath a wave of religious dogma, is a powerful one [b]ut it is also the product of a political sleight of hand, as Shaw takes onto himself the voice of arbiter between the [94] Irish nation and the outside world.’ [Here notes the omnipresence of Texaco oil advertisements in the Irish Statesman itself, with corresponding implications for globalism and anti-isolationism.] ‘The Irish Statesman’s readership was well aware that Ireland was in no danger of economic isolationism under the administration of Cumman na nGaedheal, not least because of the favourable and regular reports that the Ford factory in Cork received in the journal’s pages.’ What Shaw proposes [...] is a myth of the Irish Free State’s regression. It is a myth created to empower Shaw, and writers like him, with a prophetic voice by which to influence the politics of a state within which writers had as yet no formal place. [...] Shaw’s article is a masterpiece of polemical writing but it fails on one critical point. It reads, in the context of the adverts for Texaco petrol and Ford tractors, as out of date, an echo without substance. / The proof of Shaw’s irrelevance is that Russell, after the publication of Shaw’s article, committed his energy to lobbying for change in the Censorship Bill rather than Shaw’s demand for its complete dismissal. [...; &c.]’ (pp.94-95.)

[ top ]