Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland ed. by Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland ed. by Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel Susan Harris (bio) Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland, edited by Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel; pp. xxvi + 274. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $119.99, $89.00 ebook. One of the consequences of what Declan Kiberd has famously called the worlding of Irish Studies has been a shift in the field's conception of who the major Irish modernists are. Widening the scope from nationalism to internationalism has created more room in the Irish canon for modern writers whose relationship to the Irish revival and/or Irish nationalism was antagonistic, tangential, or ambivalent. Figures like Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett—Irish-born, Irish-educated writers whose careers unfolded outside of Ireland and whose work does not overtly engage Ireland—have moved in from the margins. Somewhat belatedly, George Bernard Shaw is making that journey. In the twenty-first century, Shaw's work is getting renewed critical attention. The past decade has produced new single-author studies like Matthew Yde's Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia (2013) and Steven Watt's Bernard Shaw's Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (2018). Shaw has also figured in a number of new investigations of the origins of modern drama in English, including David Kornhaber's The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama (2016), Patrick Bixby's Nietzsche and Irish Modernism (2022), and my own Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892–1964 (2017). With Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland, Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel seek to establish Shaw as a major Irish modernist. Lamenting that Shaw "remained outside the realms of Irish studies until … 2010" (2), McNamara and Ritschel have assembled a group of essays that seek to "demonstrat[e] how influential a figure he was in the ongoing debate and movement toward Irish independence" and [End Page 342] "highligh[t] the international vision Shaw had for a modernizing Ireland" (5). The collection appears to have been inspired by the International Shaw Society's 2012 meeting in Dublin and includes the address given at that conference by Irish President Michael D. Higgins. The collection is part of Palgrave's series "Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries," which was launched in 2016 with David Clare's Bernard Shaw's Irish Outlook, and which now boasts over twenty titles. Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland is shaped by a tension between two different impulses legible in its introduction. Connecting Shaw to the Irish revival, on the one hand, is for some of these authors part of a larger attempt to reconceive that revival as international and cosmopolitan rather than nationalist and insular. On the other hand, there also seems to be a concern to insert Shaw into a conception of Irish modernism which is more strictly defined by Irish nationalism and its preoccupations. Collectively, these chapters expand our understanding of Shaw's biographical, historical, and political context in welcome and generative ways. Several chapters zoom in on an important and under-discussed period of Abbey Theater history: the years between the beginning of the Irish revolutionary period (the great Dublin Lockout of 1913) and the emergence of Lennox Robinson as the next long-term Abbey director in the early 1920s. It was during this decade of turbulence—when directors cycled through the Abbey almost on a yearly basis, often departing under a cloud—that Shaw's plays finally took over the Dublin stage, as they had long dominated serious drama in London. Anthony Roche's investigation of this period makes a persuasive case for considering Joseph Augustus Keough's 1916–17 Shavian season at the Abbey an important catalyst for the development of Irish modernism. This period of Abbey history also includes the saga of Shaw's little-known play O'Flaherty, V.C. (1915). Having been asked in 1915 by the Under-Secretary of Ireland to write a play to help recruit Irish soldiers for the British army, Shaw produced a one-act jeremiad against romantic...