John bull's other island - Essay Example

al observer of ‘Irishness’ and his love-hate relationship with the English middle-class are played out by his two principal characters, Broadbent, a middle-class Englishman with a ‘colonial’ mind-set and the expatriate Irishman Doyle, who has no illusions about the Ireland of the early 20th century. A foil for the protagonists is added with the one-time priest Keagan, who is appalled by the impending land re-possessions. Regardless, Shaw has him acknowledge that maybe British efficiency may be better than ‘patriotic fools’.

Shaw was somewhat dismayed by his critics failure to understand the character of Keegan, when he said “I shown the Irish saint shuddering at the humor of the Irish blackguard--only to find … the average critic thought the blackguard very funny and the saint very impractical” (Shorter qtd. in Henderson 619). When the play was first performed, praise was copious - Edward VI was said to have laughed so much, his chair broke – but so was criticism, with Chesterton accusing Shaw of ‘being liable to fits of admiration for the British’, although condemning them elsewhere (Auden in Kronenberger 619) There had been other criticism and in response, Shaw allowed himself to be interviewed by The Tatler, stating that far from being frivolous, he had been deadly serious, showing …the Englishman to the Irishman and the Irishman to the Englishman, the Protestant to the Catholic and the Catholic to the Protestant… taken that panacea for all the misery and unrest of Ireland (the Land Purchase Bill) … and … shown at one stroke its idiocy, its shallowness, its cowardice, its utter and foredoomed futility.

(Shorter in Henderson 619). The reception of the treatment of the latter was even more mixed, which can only makes sense in the light of British ignorance of the Ireland of the early 20th century, with its large families, ‘progressively pauperized by primogeniture’, and its absentee landlords