Lessons from the Land: Shaw's John Bull's Other Island

John Bull's Other Island is George Bernard Shaw's only full-length play that devotes sustained attention to Ireland and Irish issues.¹ The play has often been dismissed by critics as being too much about Ireland to appeal to a wide audience. With the increased interest in recent years toward the role of place in literature, though, John Bull's Other Island deserves closer examination. Ideas of place, landscape, the built or natural environment, home, and emplacedness have all played important parts in Irish literature.² Beyond the aesthetic role that the environment plays, ecocriticism seeks to find ecological messages in literature. These include an "ecocentric perspective that recognizes the interdependent nature of the world," "an imperative toward humility in relationships with both human and non human [sic] nature," and "an intense skepticism concerning hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an indictment of an over-technologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe."³ An ecocritical reading of Shaw's Irish play not only allows the role of place and the human connection to it to come to the fore, but also reveals Shaw's concern for ecological issues long before the popular green movements of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

John Bull's Other Island takes up the issues of land ownership and land use. The name of the play itself highlights the reality that ownership of the entire island of Ireland rested in England, and not in Ireland itself. The play was written and first performed in 1904, the same year that the Abbey Theatre was established. Shaw wrote John Bull's Other Island "at the request of Mr William Butler Yeats," one of the co-founders of the Abbey, "as a patriotic contribution to the Irish Literary Theatre," but the play did not premiere there. Yeats and Lady Gregory rejected the play after some consideration, perhaps because it was too long, too controversial or outright political, or too difficult to produce. As a result, although the play was originally intended as Shaw's official contribution to the Irish Literary Renaissance, it was performed for the first time in London, and to great acclaim. During a performance attended by Edward VII, the king was said to have "laughed so hard he broke his chair" (CP 26).⁴

The vast difference between expectations of the Abbey's audience and an English play-going audience is evident in the case of John Bull's Other Island. On one hand, the English audiences seemed to delight in the fun being poked at them. Shaw writes in his "Preface for Politicians," that "English audiences very naturally swallowed it eagerly and smacked their lips over it, laughing all the more heartily because they felt they were taking a caricature of themselves with the most tolerant and large-minded goodhumor [sic]" (CP 444). But Shaw wrote the play "for an Irish audience," with hopes of showing them "very clearly that the loudest laugh they could raise at the expense of the absurdest Englishman was not really a laugh on their side; that he would succeed where they would fail" (CP 443-44). On top of that, the Irish audience that the Abbey hoped to establish was not interested in laughing at "caricatures of themselves," as the English seemed to enjoy doing. No doubt, Yeats and Lady Gregory worried that the comedic play cast the Irish characters in the same light as the problematic Stage Irishman. Through the drama produced on the Abbey stage, Yeats hoped to ignite a spirit of nationalism and pride in Irish heritage. Lady Gregory explained that the work of the Abbey "will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism."⁵ Shaw's preface conceded that John Bull's Other Island was "uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old...