George Bernard Shaw by Christopher Wixson

Author:Christopher Wixson [Wixson, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192590350
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

John Bull’s Other Island (1904)

At the turn of the 20th century, the literary side of the Celtic Renaissance encouraged native writers and artists to infuse Gaelic language, contemporary politics, and elements of Irish folklore into their creative work. Shaw was ambivalent about the movement’s nationalism and self-romanticizing, especially concerned that they could feed intra-society prejudice and political violence. But he finally got around to realizing his intention to write a play about Ireland in 1904, what he called his ‘political farce’ John Bull’s Other Island. It was greatly admired by William Butler Yeats, who then was collaborating with Lady Gregory on what would eventually become the Abbey Theatre, but its casting and design challenges proved insurmountable for their novice company. John Bull’s received its original production as Shaw’s initial new contribution to Granville-Barker’s tenure at the Royal Court and proved very successful through five separate stagings between 1904 and 1906. Prime Minister Arthur J. Balfour attended five performances, and King Edward VII famously is alleged to have laughed so hard one night that he broke his chair. It would be the actor who originated the role of Tom Broadbent who would eventually get the play performed in Dublin in 1907 (albeit by an English company) where it also enjoyed acclaim.

Infused with what Yeats called Shaw’s ‘geographical conscience’, John Bull’s is the study of a joint business venture undertaken by Broadbent and Larry Doyle, two civil engineers who seek to seize mortgaged farmland on which the owners have defaulted to develop the rural town of Roscullen into a tourist destination for foreign travellers. Broadbent is an Englishman whose perception of Ireland borrows from music hall stereotypes while Doyle is an expatriate Irishman who rejects romance in favour of realism, bitterly pushing back against his upbringing in Roscullen. At the centre of their colonial encounter is Peter Keegan, a priest defrocked for granting absolution to a Hindu and now a visionary wanderer who strives to harness spiritual and political power towards the advancement of peace and human progress. Keegan’s utopian sensibility is at odds with Broadbent’s materialist faith in the salvation of entrepreneurial investment, in this case a vacation resort draped in manufactured ‘authentic’ Irishness. With John Bull’s, Shaw is able to critique Anglo-Irish relations, especially the exploitation exerted by the bigger island upon the smaller that was legitimized by a framework of dehumanizing tropes of Irishness and John Bull stereotypes within English imperial discourse, sentimental fiction, and the 19th-century stage.

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