Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Plays of (ever) changing Ireland
- 2 Late nineteenth-century Irish theatre: before the Abbey – and beyond
- 3 The ideology of the Abbey Theatre
- 4 The theatre of William Butler Yeats
- 5 Lady Gregory’s Abbey Theatre drama: Ireland real and ideal
- 6 J. M. Synge, ‘national’ drama and the post-Protestant imagination
- 7 On the siting of doors and windows: aesthetics, ideology and Irish stage design
- 8 Oscar Wilde and the politics of style
- 9 George Bernard Shaw and Ireland
- 10 Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: disillusionment to delusion
- 11 Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr
- 12 Samuel Beckett and the countertradition
- 13 Brian Friel’s sense of place
- 14 The Field Day Theatre Company
- 15 Tom Murphy and the children of loss
- 16 Reconstructing history in the Irish history play
- 17 The Abbey Theatre and the Irish state
- 18 Staging contemporary Ireland
- 19 The Revival revised
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
9 - George Bernard Shaw and Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Plays of (ever) changing Ireland
- 2 Late nineteenth-century Irish theatre: before the Abbey – and beyond
- 3 The ideology of the Abbey Theatre
- 4 The theatre of William Butler Yeats
- 5 Lady Gregory’s Abbey Theatre drama: Ireland real and ideal
- 6 J. M. Synge, ‘national’ drama and the post-Protestant imagination
- 7 On the siting of doors and windows: aesthetics, ideology and Irish stage design
- 8 Oscar Wilde and the politics of style
- 9 George Bernard Shaw and Ireland
- 10 Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: disillusionment to delusion
- 11 Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr
- 12 Samuel Beckett and the countertradition
- 13 Brian Friel’s sense of place
- 14 The Field Day Theatre Company
- 15 Tom Murphy and the children of loss
- 16 Reconstructing history in the Irish history play
- 17 The Abbey Theatre and the Irish state
- 18 Staging contemporary Ireland
- 19 The Revival revised
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
At the age of ninety, George Bernard Shaw was asked by an Irish newspaper reporter to what extent he thought his mentality had been tempered by the fact that he had been born in Ireland. He responded:
To the extent of making me a foreigner in every other country. But the position of a foreigner with complete command of the same language has great advantages. I can take an objective view of England, which no Englishman can. I could not take an objective view of Ireland.
David Greene and Dan Laurence have refuted the writer’s claim that he suffered from a lack of objectivity when confronted with the subject of Ireland:
During the period of more than sixty years in which these selections were written, and which Ireland arrived at her final appointment with destiny through bitter political agitation, bloodshed, and civil war, not many Irishmen, whether participants in those events or merely commentators on them, showed as much objectivity as Shaw did . . . It is all the more remarkable therefore that Shaw, who believed he could not be objective on the subject of his native country, could be not only objective but temperate and wise in an atmosphere of rabid partisanship. The reader, knowing that very few of the books which made Shaw famous deal with Ireland, will also be surprised to learn how concerned he was about the problems of his native country and how much of his time and energies was devoted to studying and writing about them (The Matter With Ireland, ix).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama , pp. 122 - 135Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004