John bull's other island Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

John bulls other island - Essay Exampleal commentator 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 deport Irishman Doyle, who has no illusions about the Ireland of the early twentieth 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 strength may be better than patriotic fools. Shaw was somewhat dismayed by his critics failure to understand the character of Keegan, when he saidI shown the Irish revere 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 conceivable 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 diabolically serious, showingthe 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 bezant 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