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Politics, Comedy, Character, and Dialectic: The Shavian World of John Bull's Other Island

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frederick P. W. McDowell
Frederick P. W. McDowell*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, Iowa City
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Extract

John bull's other island, Shaw once said, is one of “a group of three plays of exceptional weight and magnitude on which the reputation of the author as a serious dramatist was first established, and still mainly rests.” The other two plays are Major Barbara and Man and Superman. John Bull's Other Island was popular at the Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 and established Shaw as a great and popular dramatist. Since then, however, this play has not been esteemed as much as Man and Superman and Major Barbara, although I would argue that in humor and insight it is their equal. It has been revived only twice in London in the last forty years—in 1938 and 1947; and it is far less known to the public or to scholarship than are the other two plays. Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, Shaw's estimate of his play should, I think, be taken seriously. Some critics have seen the play as original in method, as still pertinent to the Irish situation, and as universal in its significance. “Shaw made out of this topical subject a masterpiece,” Reuben Brower has written, “one of his purest and most sustained comedies.” I believe this view can be upheld.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 7 , December 1967 , pp. 542 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 “To Audiences at Major Barbara,” Prefatory Note to American revival of 1915 and 1916, Shaw on Theatre, ed. E. J. West (New York, 1958), p. 118.

2 For instance, Lawrence Langner (G. B. S. and the Lunatic, New York, 1963, pp. 4, 16) describes the play as “now obsolete”; and Louis Kronenberger (The Thread of Laughter, New York, 1952, p. 250) feels that it is not “very high spirited,” has little story value, and contains too much discussion. John Gassner (The Theatre in Our Time, New York, 1954, p. 338) finds that the humor is “esoteric” for those who do not know Ireland; and he is skeptical of Shaw's tendency to debate on both sides of the question.

3 Among such commentators, St. John Ervine (Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends, New York, 1956, p. 372) holds that the play is as “true to the fact of Eire” as it was when it was first produced, and Maurice Colbourne (The Real Bernard Shaw, New York, 1949, p. 158) and A. C. Ward (Bernard Shaw, New York, 1951, pp. 102–103) stress its psychological acuteness and freshness. Arland Ussher (Three Great Irishmen, New York: New American Library, 1957 [first publ. 1952], p. 25) even regards the “very topicality” of the play as a main strength. In their books Eric Bentley (Bernard Shaw, New York, 1947 and 1957), William Irvine (The Universe of G. B. S., New York, 1949), and Martin Meisel (Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater, Princeton, 1963) deal with the play perceptively but not exhaustively. See also these brief studies: Warren S. Smith, “John Bull's Other Island Revisited,” Educational Theatre Journal, iii (1951), 237–241, and Jere S. Veilleux, “Shavian Drama: A Dialectical Convention for the Modern Theater,” Twentieth Century Literature, iii (1958), 170–176.

4 Major British Writers, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York, 1959), ii, 691.

5 Our Theatres in the Nineties (London: Constable Standard Ed., 1948), ii, 29, 31. See also Meisel, p. 279. The chief virtues of the real Irishman are his melancholy, surliness, restiveness, and independence; his vices are his resort to expediency, his obsequiousness in personal relationships, his mendacity, and his superstition.

6 John Bull's Other Island with How He Lied to Her Husband and Major Barbara (London: Constable Standard Ed., 1960), p. 13. Further references to “Preface for Politicians” and to the play will be cited in the text.

7 “The Irish Players,” New York Evening Sun (9 Dec. 1911). Reprinted in The Matter with Ireland, ed. Dan H. Laurence and David H. Greene (New York, 1962), p. 65.

8 Everybody's Political What's What (London: Constable Standard Ed., 1950), p. 197.

9 Bernard Shaw's Letters to Granville Barker, ed. C. B. Purdom (New York, 1957), p. 26. See “George Bernard Shaw: A Conversation,” Tatler, clxxvii (16 Nov. 1904), 242, for Shaw's statement concerning rejection of plot in this play: “Because the play did not begin with two and a half acts of explanations by stage servants, stage solicitors, 'character parts,' and 'comic relief,' all leading up to Larry catching his bosom friend, Broadbent, in the act of making love to his adored Nora—this is what is called a strong and original situation—with a blow, a struggle, a duel arranged for the last act between friends whose hearts bleed for their broken friendship, but who must kill each other because the free list would consider any other course unnatural, and—but I need not go on with it; you know the sort of thing. What is to be done with men whose heads are full of such stuff? It is all very well in its place and in its way; but what do they take me for that they ask me to mix their romantic pap for them?”

10 A. B. Walkley, Drama and Life (London, 1907), p. 223.

11 See Tatler reference, n. 9.

12 See Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York, 1953), p. 356.

13 This farcical episode develops when Broadbent offers to drive Matthew Haffigan and a newly purchased pig home in his motor car. Haffigan is afraid of machines and runs off, Patsy Farrell is drafted to watch the pig in the back seat, the pig eludes Farrell and lands in Broadbent's lap, Broadbent presses its tail in accelerating the car, and the car goes out of control, causing at once much destruction in the town and the death of the pig when it is finally thrown from the car.

14 Letters to Granville Barker, p. 28.

15 R. F. Rattray, Bernard Shaw: A Chronicle (London, 1951), p. 159.

16 See Irvine, p. 254, wherein Broadbent is seen as confusing “politics with civilization, melodrama with life, personal advantage with moral idealism.”

17 Letters to Granville Barker, p. 66.

18 “In the Days of My Youth,” Mainly About People (17 Sept. 1898), reprinted in Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable Standard Ed., 1949), pp. 43–44.

19 Although Keegan does not specifically say so, he would agree with Shaw that the curse of a nationalist movement, such as agitation for Home Rule, is the inability of the nation to think of anything except its wrongs suffered in the past and its desire for independence in the present. The result is that “the great movements of the human spirit which sweep in waves over Europe are stopped on the Irish coast by the English guns of the Pigeon House Fort” (p. 40). Keegan does explicitly voice the Ruskinian sentiments expressed by Shaw elsewhere on the subject of Irish civilization: “Ireland is now called a Free State, but the problem of how to make Ireland a country fit for civilized men to be in has not yet been solved” (“How to Restore Order in Ireland,” New Leader, 16 March 1923; reprinted in The Matter with Ireland, p. 259).

20 The Thread of Laughter, pp. 248–249.

21 “War Issues for Irishmen,” 1918, reprinted in The Matter with Ireland, p. 174.

22 Other similarities between the two men exist. Like Keegan, Larry is deemed mad by his more timid and conventional countrymen, by his father when he proposes a minimum wage for Irish laborers, and by Father Dempsey when he proposes to reestablish the Catholic Church in Ireland. His views on the ideal function of the Church echo Keegan's in the “Trinity” speech already quoted: “in Ireland the people is the Church and the Church the people” (pp. 128–130).

23 George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century (New York, 1956), p. 621; The Universe of G. B. S., p. 258.

24 Mirror in My House: The Autobiographies of Sean O'Casey (New York, 1956), i, Drums Under the Windows, p. 256.

25 Letters to Granville Barker, p. 39.