Shaw and Irish Studies

Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland is a welcome voice in a chorus attempting to redress a glaring omission in Irish studies: its lack of a sustained interest in Bernard Shaw. This lapse is hardly unique, as writers who have resided or self-exiled outside the country—or whose work and aesthetic seem only indirectly related to Ireland's political or cultural agendas—have suffered, to varying degrees, from such disregard. When I was a student in the dark ages before laptops and iPhones, for example, and with a few notable exceptions, bibliographers classified Samuel Beckett as a French or English writer, and critics queried his relationship to the Irish comic tradition. Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland is book-ended by full-throated expressions of this concern. In their introduction, Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel underscore the "grievous error" of Shaw's narthecality (Paul Muldoon's useful term derived from the narthex of churches reserved for penitents and other marginalized worshippers) in the cloistered space of Irish studies (2); and in the book's final chapter, Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín repeats the charge: "Bernard Shaw has been widely neglected within the Irish literary tradition and within the Irish cultural heritage at large" (237). Surveying the extensive coverage of Shaw in such newspapers as La Vanguarda, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Washington Post, Rodríguez Martín adds that especially during the years of World War I critics around the world responded to Shavian drama from both "an artistic point of view and from a socio-political perspective," the latter informed by Shaw's "provocative" thoughts about socialism, nationalism, and anti-militarism (241). Accordingly, although the dozen essayists in Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland focus on Shaw's contributions to Irish culture and political discourse from the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 through the 1913 lockout of members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and the birth of the Irish Free State in 1922, several enlarge their scope to consider Shaw the international figure. After all, as Declan Kiberd notes in the book's foreword, Shaw, like W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce, belongs "in the end to the wider world" (viii).

Perhaps oddly, the project of this collection recalled for me Private Shaw and Public Shaw (1963), Stanley Weintraub's twin biography of Shaw and T. E. Lawrence. Not that any of the contributors to Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland either regard GBS as a "triumph of calculated self-advertisement" or portray him as a private figure like Lawrence, who only occasionally stepped "back into the limelight." Rather, the book's opening chapter, President Michael D. Higgins's 2012 "Speech at the First International Shaw Conference, Dublin," evokes this binary, one that functions subtly as a structuring device in what follows, when noting that although a recent production of Pygmalion confirmed the "enduring attraction" of Shaw's plays, his own interest gravitates toward Shaw the "public man" as essayist, Fabian lecturer, advocate, and ironist (12). "Public Shaw," as I have mentioned, engaged a range of issues affecting modern life: some—the blight of urban slums, the "philistinism of an uninformed commerce," and the roles of Junkerism and militarism in causing World War I—were cosmopolitan and European; others were more narrowly Irish (12). Several contributors share President Higgins's fascination with Shaw the public man, particularly Nelson Ritschel in "Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey: Remembering James Connolly" and Aisling Smith in "WWI, Common Sense, and O'Flaherty V.C.: Shaw Advocates a New Modernist Outlook for Ireland." To avoid misunderstanding, I should clarify that "Modernist" in Smith's title does not gesture toward a radical aesthetic or international avant-garde, but to Shaw's efforts to shake Ireland out of its provincial insularity.

My allusion to Private Shaw and Public Shaw is similarly inexact and might...