Abstract
Bernard Shaw was one of the most prominent writers of his age on the world stage. His political commitment and his sharp, witty tongue made him an authoritative figure on practically every burning question of his time. However, he modulated his outspoken activism when it came to the ‘Irish Question’. In fact, despite being born in Dublin and having a lifelong link with all things Irish, his views on topics such as Irish nationalism and the process by which Ireland gained its independence did not inform his plays and prefaces as a general rule. Unsurprisingly, one can find little material on the aforementioned questions in his dramatic writings outside his only ‘Irish play’, John Bull’s Other Island. All this has resulted in a widespread critical neglect of his plays as part of the Irish literary tradition.
Despite Shaw’s seemingly uninterested stance, there exist a number of subtextual references in two of his major plays (Caesar and Cleopatra and Saint Joan), in which the detached historical setting and the nature of the characters allow him to weave an intricate network of symbolic and allegorical elements (both lexical and phraseological) that can plausibly be linked to the political situation of Ireland. These include anachronistic comparisons with the status of Ireland within the British Empire, the subverted use of contemporary political discourse or religious parallelisms with Ireland, among several others. All of them portray an indirect picture of Shaw’s opinions on the ‘Irish Question’, thus shedding light on and complementing his public political position. Most importantly, these stylistic phenomena reinforce the view that Shaw was genuinely Irish—perhaps in spite of himself.
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Notes
- 1.
Martin Meisel, ‘“Dear Harp of My Country”; or, Shaw and Boucicault’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 30 (2010): 43.
- 2.
George Bernard Shaw, The Matter with Ireland, eds Dan H. Laurence and David Herbert Greene (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), 72.
- 3.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish Nationalism and Labour Internationalism (London: Garden City Press, 1920), 5.
- 4.
George Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw Collected Plays with Prefaces, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1971), 841–42. In this chapter, all quotations from the plays and prefaces are from this seven-volume edition.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
‘A Preface for Politicians’ is the prefatory essay to John Bull’s Other Island.
- 7.
The fact that Shaw favoured internationalism has sometimes resulted in a widespread neglect of his work within the Irish cultural tradition at large. This incomprehensible prejudice has only recently begun to be replaced by a holistic account of his ‘Irishness’. See, for example, the themed issue on ‘Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition’ (Peter Gahan, ed. SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 30 [2010]) or, more recently, David Clare’s Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook (New York: Palgrave, 2015).
- 8.
As Brad Kent rightly points out, Shaw ‘was deploying and responding to archetypes that were well known and that would likely evoke specific reactions’ (‘The Politics of Shaw’s Irish Women in John Bull’s Other Island’, in Shaw and Feminisms: On Stage and Off, eds Dorothy A. Hadfield and Jean R. Reynolds [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013], 74).
- 9.
Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18.
- 10.
This Act, ‘framed around the idea of voluntary land purchase’, meant for many ‘the beginning of a new consensual approach to reform and indeed the dawning of a new, admittedly slowly evolving, inclusivist national spirit’ (Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998: War, Peace, and Beyond [Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010], 150).
- 11.
The ‘Preface for Politicians’ sums up the feeling of stagnation that Wyndham’s Land Purchase Act may foster among the new landed class, just as it had fostered ‘unnatural’ loyal Irishmen, for ‘no doubt English rule is vigorously exploited in the interests of the property, power, and promotion of the Irish classes as against the Irish masses’ (Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume II, 812).
- 12.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Random House, 2002), 51.
- 13.
See Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, 48 ff.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Archer, Peter. ‘Shaw and the Irish Question’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 11 (1991): 120.
- 16.
Ibid., 128.
- 17.
Shaw wrote Caesar and Cleopatra in 1898 (premiered in 1901), but it was to undergo revision in 1930. Saint Joan was written and premiered in 1923, although it is likely that a trip to Orleans in 1913 (Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition [New York: Random House, 1997], 520) and Joan’s canonisation in 1920 successively sparked the idea of the play.
- 18.
Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume II, 168.
- 19.
Ibid., 162.
- 20.
Ibid., 295. For a more comprehensive discussion of the concept of whether historical progress is real and attainable, with specific references to Caesar and Cleopatra, see Jonathan L. Wisenthal, Shaw’s Sense of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 101 ff.
- 21.
Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume II, 200.
- 22.
Darrell Figgis, The Economic Case for Irish Independence (Dublin: Maunsel, 1920), 13.
- 23.
US Government, ‘The Irish Question: Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Sixty-fifth Congress, Third Session, on H. J. res. 357, Requesting the Commissioners Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the International Peace Conference to Present to the Said Conference the Right of Ireland to Freedom, Independence, and Self-determination’ (Washington: Government Printing Office, 12 December 1918), 28.
- 24.
Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume II, 204–5, 214, 217.
- 25.
William J. Bryan and Francis W. Halsey. The World’s Famous Orations. Volume VI: Ireland (London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906), 204. ‘Ireland for the Irish’ became the slogan of O’Connell’s Repeal Association, and was reproduced in posters and all sorts of souvenir prints (cf. Eileen Reilly, ‘Modern Ireland: An Introductory Survey’, in Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, eds Joseph J. Lee and Marion R. Casey [New York: New York University Press, 2006], 87).
- 26.
A search on the British Newspaper Archive (http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/) retrieves hundreds of occurrences of the exact phrase in the right context just for the span between 1850 and 1900. The phrase was even translated literally outside the English-speaking world to illustrate the ideas of Irish nationalists. For example, the National Digital Newspaper Archive of Spain (Hemeroteca Digital, available at http://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/) contains abundant examples of ‘Irlanda para los irlandeses’ in articles dating as far back as the 1840s.
- 27.
‘Ireland for the Irish’, Northern Daily Mail, 24 September 1890, 4; ‘Ireland for the Irish,’ The Yorkshire Herald, 10 July 1894, 6; and ‘Ireland for the Irish’, Edinburgh Evening News, 5 June 1899, 2.
- 28.
Henry O’Neill, Ireland for the Irish: A Practical, Peaceable, and Just Solution of the Irish Land Question (London: Trübner and Co, 1868); and Robert Dennis, Industrial Ireland: A Practical and Non-Political View of ‘Ireland for the Irish’ (London: John Murray, 1887).
- 29.
Jonathan L. Wisenthal, Shaw’s Sense of History, 102.
- 30.
See Judith Evans, The Politics and Plays of Bernard Shaw (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 43–44, for a general discussion on this topic.
- 31.
Samuel A. Weiss, ed., Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 20. Siegfried Trebitsch was Shaw’s German translator.
- 32.
Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume II, 204, 206–7, 216, 240.
- 33.
Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Textures of Irish America (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 130.
- 34.
‘The English Army of Occupation in Ireland’, The Northern Echo, 26 March 1890, 3; and ‘The English Army of Occupation in Ireland’, The Sunderland Daily Echo, 1 July 1892, 2.
- 35.
‘The Army of Occupation’, The Freeman’s Journal, 17 March 1896, 4.
- 36.
Rona M. Fields, Northern Ireland: Society under Siege (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1980), 173. My emphasis.
- 37.
Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters (1898–1910) (London: Max Reinhardt, 1972), 394.
- 38.
Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume II, 203.
- 39.
Ibid., 198–200, 204.
- 40.
Ibid., 226–27.
- 41.
Stanley Weintraub, ‘The Hibernian School: Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 13 (1993): 29. Elsie B. Adams (Bernard Shaw and the Aesthetes [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971]) provides a deep discussion on the personal and artistic relationship between Shaw and the so-called ‘aesthetes’.
- 42.
John T. Koch, ed., Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 709 ff. In Shaw’s time, Horace Plunkett (Horace Plunkett, Ellice Pilkington, and George Russell, The United Irishwomen: Their Place, Work, and Ideals [Dublin: Maunsel, 1911], 1) begins his argument by stating that ‘Ireland, more than any other country, is spoken of as a woman.’
- 43.
Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume II, 175, 184.
- 44.
Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, ‘Reminiscences of an Irish Suffragette’, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. V: Irish Women’s Writing and Tradition, ed. Angela Bourke (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 92.
- 45.
Jonathan L. Wisental, Shaw’s Sense of History, 101.
- 46.
Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume VI, 125.
- 47.
Ibid., 126.
- 48.
George Bernard Shaw, ‘G. B. S. on Ireland’, Weekly Irish Times, 22 August 1922, 8.
- 49.
George Bernard Shaw, ‘The Irish Crisis by Bernard Shaw in “Manchester Guardian”’, The Maoriland Worker, 8 March 1922, 1.
- 50.
Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume VI, 60.
- 51.
Nicholas Allen, ‘Reflections on Twentieth-Century Irish Literature’, An Exhibition of Irish Literary Materials in Wilson Library. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://www2.lib.unc.edu/rbc/n4/reflections.html. Accessed 1 September 2014.
- 52.
Shaw explains: ‘Now for the facts as to “St. Joan”. I wrote it in 1923. During that year I was at Glengarriff from the 18th July to the 15th August, and at Parknasilla from the 15th August to the 18th September working at the play all the time’ (Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, volume VI, 242).
- 53.
Ibid., 241–43.
- 54.
Ibid., 128.
- 55.
Ibid., 136. Compare Caesar’s words regarding the Britons’ belief that ‘the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature’.
- 56.
Ibid., 162.
- 57.
Ibid., 140.
- 58.
Ibid., 93, 113, 122.
- 59.
Ibid., 129.
- 60.
Ibid., 131.
- 61.
Ibid., 139.
- 62.
Ibid., 139–40. My emphasis.
- 63.
Ibid., 14.
- 64.
Ibid., 67.
- 65.
Ibid., 139.
- 66.
We may remind readers of the scene in the first part of Back to Methuselah (‘In the Beginning’) in which the Serpent invents new words such as ‘dead’, ‘born’, or ‘miracle’ so that the only humans in Eden can properly refer to the new realities they discover in their daily toil.
- 67.
Ibid.
- 68.
Ibid., 28.
- 69.
Ibid., 85.
- 70.
It is interesting to note how the phrase ‘New Woman’ was mentioned explicitly in Caesar and Cleopatra and is omitted twenty-odd years later in Saint Joan. The new ground broken by feminists around the world and especially in England had finally made an impact.
- 71.
Ibid., 20.
- 72.
For a discussion of Shaw’s sources and their use thereof, see Michel Pharand, Bernard Shaw and the French (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 154–55.
- 73.
See Peter Archer, ‘Shaw and the Irish Question’; and Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 51–63, among others.
- 74.
Michel Pharand, Bernard Shaw and the French, 151.
- 75.
Letter to Mrs Patrick Campbell (8 September 1913). In Dan H. Laurence, Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters (1911–1925) (London: Max Reinhardt, 1985), 201–2.
- 76.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 6.
- 77.
I would like to clarify what I mean by ‘sugar-coating’. This is a critical term that has often been used to devaluate Shaw’s drama on the grounds that (a) it is not weighty enough, and (b) it is merely a soap box for the author’s ideology. It is my contention that neither of the above applies to Shaw, for—contrary to the popularly held belief that ‘if a work is comic it cannot, by that very fact, be of any genuine weight’ (John A. Mills, Language and Laughter: Comic Diction in the Plays of Bernard Shaw [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1969], x)—the ability to make an otherwise unpleasant topic palatable by virtue of humour is one of Shaw’s greatest assets.
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Rodríguez Martín, G.A. (2018). Bernard Shaw and the Subtextual Irish Question. In: Villanueva Romero, D., Amador-Moreno, C., Sánchez García, M. (eds) Voice and Discourse in the Irish Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66029-5_8
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