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John Bull's Other Island: Taking the Bull to Ireland

In the midst of composing John Bull’s Other Island, Bernard Shaw remarked enthusiastically in a letter to Ada Rehan about his nonpartisan play: “This is the first time I have tried my hand on Ireland; and of course, being an Irishman, I get a quality into the play that is quite unlike anything in any other plays. It is not particularly complimentary to either the English or the Irish; but it is fascinating.”1 Written in 1904 under the working title “Rule Britannia,” John Bull’s Other Island is Shaw’s only full-length play to be set largely in Ireland, despite the fact that Shaw was born in Dublin and lived there for the first twenty years of his life. Indeed, G. K. Chesterton declared that all Shaw’s blood and origin may be found in this play.2 There is continued debate as to the history surrounding Shaw’s uncompromising play. Michael Holroyd, for example, adheres to Shaw’s own claim in the preface that it was W. B. Yeats who invited him to write the play as “a patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre.”3 But as A. M. Gibbs points out, even though Shaw wrote to Yeats on 23 June 1904 that “I have it quite seriously in my head to write an Irish play,” an earlier letter from Yeats to Lady Gregory, dated 12 March 1900, reveals that the idea of “a play on the contrast between Irish and English character” had been forming in Shaw’s mind well before 1904.4 Michael J. Sidnell further contends that Yeats did indeed invite Shaw to write a play, but that it was in 1901 and that it was Yeats’s intention that Shaw “stir things up still further” at a time when the Irish Revival was in full swing.5 Whichever the case, the fate of Ireland and of the Irish remained paramount in Shaw’s mind even as he distanced himself from the belated aesthetic and cultural aspirations of the Celtic Renaissance. In fact, the revitalized sense of Irish “reality” that Shaw ultimately presented in John Bull’s Other Island