On 26 November 1926, a letter was composed in Paris and mailed to George Bernard Shaw on the occasion of Shaw’s recent Nobel Prize. The brief letter, merely one sentence, offered “felicitations to you on the honour you have received and to express my satisfaction that the award of the Nobel prize for literature has gone once more to a distinguished fellow townsman” (Joyce, Joyce Letters, III, 146). The letter was from James Joyce, which Shaw scholar Dan Laurence maintained was the only congratulatory Nobel Prize letter Shaw kept (Ellman, “Notes”, Joyce Letters, III, 146).1 It was a significant acknowledgement from arguably Ireland’s most important modernist fiction writer to a contemporary, if older, modernizing Irish dramatist who had done much to pave the road to modernism. It is a matter for debate as to the extent that Joyce recognized Shaw as an Irish or Dublin author from their perspective internationalisms but the recognition was posited. Arguably, Joyce had maintained an occasional eye on Shaw for some time, from turning to Grant Richards with his Dubliners manuscript so soon after the publisher had released a separate volume of Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession in 1902.2 As the play was blocked by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office from professional performance in England, which persisted from the 1890s into the 1920s, on the grounds of immorality, Joyce most likely saw Richards as a possible publisher for Dubliners, which too challenged the sham guise of social morality—and, of course, Richards eventually published the book in 1914 after Joyce’s fallout with the Dublin publisher Maunsel. And as Joyce thematically undermined militarism within his literature, Shaw too had done the same, from his 1894 play Arms and the Man through to his 1914 master journalistic response to the early months of the Great War, Common Sense About the War—a work that Shaw made clear in its early pages that in writing it, “I shall retain my Irish capacity for criticizing England with something of the detachment of a foreigner” (16–17). But while Joyce and Shaw hailed from Dublin and wrote mostly in exile, only one would consistently be viewed as an Irish writer and always be included within the arena of Irish Studies. Yet, this grievous error with regard to Shaw has been challenged repeatedly, and now with more and more critical voices.
In his superb study The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 (2015), Anthony Roche begins his Shaw chapter, titled “Shaw and the Revival: The Absent Presence”, by writing that in his “two magisterial literary studies, Inventing Ireland (1995) and Irish Classics (2000), Declan Kiberd has persuasively made clear the case for George Bernard Shaw to be considered an Irish writer” (79). Roche followed this by lamenting that studies of the Irish Dramatic Revival failed to seriously consider Shaw as part of that revival or to consider Shaw’s lasting imprint on Ireland. Indeed, as inspirational as the above two Kiberd books have proven to be for scholars who have considered Irish drama and literature since, Shaw has for most remained an outsider, perhaps flippantly brushed aside due to his long residence in England—despite the fact that, as Nicholas Grene noted in his 1992 essay “Shaw in the Irish Theatre: An Unacknowledged Presence”, such a fate did not greet other Irish writers who chose to live in self-exile, such as Sean O’Casey and Joyce. Nonetheless, despite the fact that the three major critics of Irish drama since the early 1990s, Grene, Kiberd, and Roche, have not ignored him, Shaw remained outside the realms of Irish Studies until, arguably, 2010.
Victor Merriman considered Shaw’s presence or lack of presence, not in Dublin during the Irish Dramatic Revival, but within Irish Studies itself in his 2010 essay “Bernard Shaw in Contemporary Irish Studies: ‘Passé and Contemptible’?” After considering Shaw within, or without Irish Studies at the time, Merriman concludes:
There is much in these words, from Merriman and O’Toole, regarding the necessity of including, forcibly even, Shaw within Irish Studies. Interestingly, and arguably, Merriman’s essay appeared in a volume that launched a new initiative to reconnect Shaw to Irish Studies.The whole point about modernity, which Shaw asserts time and again, and recent events dramatize [international downturns in world economies], is that, while it is the impetus for national movements and national consciousness, it is a transnational economic and cultural system. It knows no boundaries, and recentering Shaw’s work, and his sharp, utopian, critical stance in Irish Studies, may enable its practitioners precisely to go beyond the kind of inherited disciplinary boundaries summarized by Fintan O’Toole: “From the 1890s, until recently, the principal subject of Irish writing had been ‘Ireland.’ … Thus … John Bull’s Other Island is an Irish play because it deals with the matter of Ireland. But Pygmalion, because its settings and characters are English, isn’t. Never mind that what it deals with—class, language, sexuality—things which are central to the experience of Irish people as they are to anyone else.” [“Review of I Know My Own Heart, by Emma Donoghue,” in Critical Moments, ed. O’Hanlon and Furay, 118]. Applied to current debates around Irish Studies, Shaw’s strategy of establishing and then disrupting dialectical consciousness using all available forms—from drama to policy analysis and journalism—may enable a rethinking of problems and possibilities arising within that field. If it does, it may well enable insights struggled for in Irish Studies, in their turn, to inspire critique—and human progress—not only in Ireland but in other parts of a troubled, shrinking world. p. 231
Merriman’s essay was included in a special-themed volume of SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies titled Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition, edited by Dublin-born Shaw scholar Peter Gahan, author six years earlier of the imminently insightful Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw.3 The ambitious volume included stalwarts of Shaw Studies, such as Stanley Weintraub, Martin Meisel, and Christopher Innes, mixed with important Irish Studies scholars such as Eibhear Walshe, James Moran, Brad Kent, Heinz Kosok, Victor Merriman, Terry Phillips, scholars of international focuses such as Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja, and one of the co-editors of this anthology, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel. The volume represented important steps for both Shaw Studies and Irish Studies, recentering, to use Merriman’s term, Shaw into the Irish equation and that equation into Shaw Studies, commencing a new exploration of Kiberd’s argument that Shaw is of the Irish literary tradition.
In the year following Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition, O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation (2011) was published, revealing, as Richard Dietrich noted in his Foreword to the book, “how often things Shaw said, wrote, and did really mattered to the Irish in Ireland who had revolution on their minds and were responded to in ways that directly affected the outcome of events, most particularly in the works and deeds of two of Ireland’s major cultural leaders of the twentieth century, John Millington Synge and James Connolly” (xii). The book used as a springboard Kiberd’s statement in Irish Classics that Shaw’s influence in Ireland was significant: “His plays were much admired not just by intellectuals but by trade unionists” (345). Following this book, in 2012, was the International Shaw Society’s conference at University College Dublin, organized by the co-editor of this anthology, Audrey McNamara. The conference, which was opened by Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland (whose opening speech from the conference is included in this anthology), featured a keynote address by Grene, as well as plenary lectures by Gahan, Roche, and O’Ceallaigh Ritschel. A major convergence of purpose was underway, as the conference facilitated platforms that assisted the next noted contribution to the agenda of “recentering” Shaw within the Irish literary tradition and Irish Studies: David Clare’s 2016 Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook. Clare’s book drew on both Kiberd and O’Toole, along with Dietrich’s call in the above-mentioned Foreword, a work that establishes Shaw, “like Joyce and Yeats, … wrote always as an Irishman” (xi). Clare’s book demonstrates just that; that even in plays set outside of Ireland, Shaw’s thoughts and consciousness are never far from Ireland: it is a seminal work indeed. This not only echoed Merriman’s quoted excerpt from O’Toole, but also through Kiberd’s balanced argument in Irish Classics that a play such as Arms and the Man (1894) set in 1880s Bulgaria reflects an Irish sense through its character Bluntschli, the Swiss mercenary, who, as the outsider on many levels, is “set down” within a culture not his natural own, much like Shaw himself being an Irishman “set down” in London, beginning in 1876 (345). Yet the impact of McNamara’s conference did not end with Clare’s book. These exciting directions in research related to “Shaw and Ireland” include O’Toole’s 2017 Judging Shaw, that seemingly prompted the Irish television documentary My Astonishing Self in the same year—collectively elevating Shaw’s presence in Ireland.
The 2012 Dublin Shaw conference also led, directly or indirectly, to the next books by Gahan and O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914 and Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism: Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and the Great War, respectively. While focusing on Shaw’s international concerns beyond, and outside of Ireland, the two books, in their own ways, echo Merriman’s view that the Irish Shaw can still change the dynamics of Irish Studies by focusing on the international and Irish implications of Shaw’s work, particularly as these monographs focus on Shaw’s crusading political work outside his plays. In a similar vein, Roche’s plenary lecture in the 2012 conference fed what would become his Shaw chapter in The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939. In addition, one might also say that the formation of Palgrave Macmillan’s Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries series grew from conversations between Gahan and O’Ceallaigh Ritschel concerning the 2012 conference in the three years following it. Given such stimulation generated by considering Shaw within his native city, it seems that the conference itself should be the starting point to present representations of new and emerging scholarship on Shaw and Ireland, specifically setting President Higgins’s seminal speech that opened the conference as the starting point. The President’s speech represents a significant recognition of Shaw’s contributions to the making of modern Ireland and the international stage. Concentrating on Shaw’s public persona, President Higgins traces Shaw’s social and political engagement, as an Irishman, within an international community and opens the debate for Shaw’s ongoing influence on and relevance in modern Ireland. It heralds the platform from which new “Shaw and Ireland” directions are taking off, as seen in the work of long-established, recently established, and important emerging voices within “Shaw and Ireland” scholarship.
This unique collection explores the many facets of Shaw’s work in the opening decades of the twentieth century and demonstrates how influential a figure he was in the ongoing debate and movement towards Irish independence. This collection also highlights the international vision Shaw had for a modernizing Ireland. The first essay following President Higgins’s speech, “The Rush of Air, The Windows Opened on Extravagance and Storm of Ideas: Kate O’Brien’s The Last Summer and Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman”, by Anthony Roche, demonstrates how Kate O’Brien’s work is strongly influenced by the work of Bernard Shaw. He argues that “a revolution of consciousness [was] initiated within Kate O’Brien by what she saw and heard on stage” when she attended Shaw’s Man and Superman performed in the Abbey in 1917. In the essay, Roche also convincingly turns the notion of a fractious relationship between Shaw and the Abbey on its head. David Clare’s “Shavian Echoes in the Work of Elizabeth Bowen” argues that Bowen endorsed Shavian ideals with regard to notions of Irish and English identity. He discusses how these notions are represented within a literary context that spills over from the stage and are overtly present in both Bowen’s literary journalism and her novels. Through an exploration of a selection of Shaw plays and writings by Bowen he creates an indelible thread of influence. He concludes by noting that this Shavian influence can be detected and connected to the work of many other Irish writers.
Elizabeth Mannion examines how the rally to support the workers of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), held in the Albert Hall in 1913, was instrumental in the change in the way Shaw created his religious characters. She argues that he turned them from a source of amusement to a source of disdain. She claims that “when it came to the Kiddies Scheme and religious officials standing in the way of tenement children receiving relief, the stakes were rather too high to keep the jokes flowing, and the Church behavior beyond the range of humor”. Also looking at the role of the ITGWU, in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel explores events, stemming from what can be described as an Irish socialist revolution in his essay, “Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey: Remembering James Connolly”. Using the trio as a triangulation of personalities, he explores the different perspectives at play during th...