Shaw & Militant Irish Socialism

Playwriting and Politics combine in this book in a series of fascinating, often unexpected rapprochements between Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge and James Connolly, dubbed by Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel "an ideological trinity." What united these Irishmen was, broadly speaking, a common wish for freedom of expression, and in the case of working-class socialist agitator Connolly, political and national freedom. The confluence of Synge and Shaw in the dramatic arena and of Shaw and Connolly in the political one are the twin subjects of this work, the fourth book by Ritschel, author of studies on Synge and Irish nationalism, women on the Irish stage, and productions of the Irish Theatre Movement.

The purpose of this book, Ritschel writes, "is to bring to the surface Shaw's direct and indirect presence and provocation in what became militant Irish socialism." That presence was felt as early as 29 October 1902, when the Irish National Theatre Society (founded that year) premiered The Laying of the Foundations by Frederick Ryan (the INTS's first secretary), a play which, as Ritschel demonstrates, owes much to Shaw's Widowers' Houses (1892).

Enter Synge. Shortly after seeing the INTS touring production of Synge's first staged work, In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), in London on 26 March 1904, Shaw on 17 June began his own major Irish play, John Bull's Other Island (premiered 1 November 1904), his attempt to undermine what he perceived as a feverish Irish nationalism. Ritschel points out numerous parallels—for example, between Synge's Nora Burke and Shaw's Nora Reilly—and considers John Bull "a reconfiguration and expansion" of In the Shadow of the Glen and "a wider socialistic take" on it.

Although John Bull's Other Island was performed in Dublin only in November 1907, Synge had read the play in 1904 and reconfigured it into The Playboy of the Western World (published 1907), which he had begun drafting within days of reading Shaw's play and whose 26 January 1907 premiere was famously marked by violent rioting among the Abbey Theatre audience. There are similarities between the plays, but The Playboy of the Western World, aimed at conservative, capitalist middle-class moral obsession with respectability, has more in common with The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (which premiered at the Abbey Theatre on 25 August 1909 and also protested), in which Shaw too attacks Christian middle-class morality. Having seen The Playboy of the Western World in London in June 1907, Shaw would write in 1911 that the play was about "a universal weakness of mankind: the habit of admiring bold scoundrels." Like Playboy's Christy, Blanco turns out not to be the scoundrel everyone at first believed him to be.

Next came Shaw's O'Flaherty V.C., completed in September 1915 and first performed on the Western Front at Treizennes, Belgium, in February 1917. This "Syngean-structured un-Syngean ideological play," according to Ritschel, borrows "Syngean devices and conventions to enwrap [Shaw's] Irish war message," as well as the name O'Flaherty, an even more Irish take on Playboy's Pegeen Flaherty. In addition, Mrs. O'Flaherty's language and bullying character recall Playboy's abusive Old Mahon, both parents having driven their offspring from their homes prior to the plays' action. And Shaw, as Ritschel shows, borrows even more significant Syngean elements from In the Shadow of the Glen.

James Connolly, founder in 1896 of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, had left Ireland in 1903 (when the ISRP was dissolved) to spend seven years in the United States as a union organizer. Upon his return to Ireland in 1910, he wrote a pamphlet, Labour, Nationality, and Religion (published in August), that would establish him as a leading theorist of Irish socialism. Ritschel finds similarities between that work and Shaw's Dublin lecture, delivered two months later, on 3 October 1910, entitled "The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland." This important speech established Shaw as "a visible bridge or...