Abstract
On the evening of November 1, 1913, a rally was held at the Royal Albert Hall in London to benefit the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. The workers had gone on strike in August and were subsequently lockedout by businesses all across Dublin. But the workers were not without their supporters, and the crowd assembled that November night—including Bernard Shaw—was eager to raise its voice in solidarity. Shaw’s opening remarks centred on his outrage over priests interfering with the Kiddies Scheme, an effort organized to provide temporary care for the children of the locked-out workers. Until this point, clerical figures in Shaw’s plays were sometimes comical, but they were certainly never flat. This chapter examines how 1913 represents a tipping point and how Shaw’s clerical characters cease being humorously and humanely flawed, and are instead not quite worth the bother.
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Notes
- 1.
Larkin was sentenced on October 27 and would be released (early) on November 13. The charges stemmed from a speech he delivered August 31 from an Imperial Hotel balcony on O’Connell Street. Police charged the crowd that was listening to Larkin, and hundreds were injured.
- 2.
Semantics pivot on the position taken: the business owners would refer to the event that lasted through December as a strike; but those supportive of the workers—and indeed the historical record—use the term Lockout, which was coined by Larkin from the first day.
- 3.
Peter Gahan, “Bernard Shaw: Dégringolade and Derision in Dublin City,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 32 (2012), 44.
- 4.
Qtd. in Pádraig Yeates, Lockout: Dublin 1913 (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 343.
- 5.
Dora B. Montefiore, From a Victorian to a Modern ([London]: E. Archer, 1927), 156.
- 6.
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation (Gainesville, FL: Univ. Press of Florida, 2011), 139–140.
- 7.
Mary Diskin, “Dora Montefiore: An Unwitting Victim of Propaganda,” in Lockout Centenary: Dun Laoghaire 1913–2013, ed. Padraig Mannion (Dublin: 1913 Commemorative Committee, 2013), 29.
- 8.
Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation, 148.
- 9.
Lucy McDiarmid, The Irish Art of Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005), 125.
- 10.
Dora Montefiore, “Our Fight…,” in https://www.marxists.org/archive/montefiore/1913/kiddies.htm
- 11.
George William Russell (AE), “An Open Letter to Employers,” in The Dublin Strike (Dublin: Irish Worker Press, [1913]), 4.
- 12.
Russell, “A Plea for the Workers,” in The Dublin Strike, 1.
- 13.
Russell, “An Appeal to Dublin Citizens,” in The Dublin Strike, 7.
- 14.
Yeates, Lockout: Dublin 1913, 343.
- 15.
Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation, 153.
- 16.
Nonconformist was an umbrella term for non-Anglican denominations that joined forces to counter their individual minority statuses when supporting or opposing select social and political issues.
- 17.
Robert Pope, “The Nonconformist Conscience,” in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century British Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 474.
- 18.
Shaw, “Shall Parnell Go? I,” in The Matter with Ireland (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), 25.
- 19.
Shaw, “Shall Parnell Go? I,” in The Matter with Ireland, 25.
- 20.
Shaw, Preface to Getting Married, in Collected Plays, Vol. III, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972), 452–453.
- 21.
Shaw, Preface to Getting Married, 462.
- 22.
The parenthetical dates within this essay refer to the year Shaw completed his MS; the dates in the Bibliography refer to year of first publication.
- 23.
There is a clergyman in Widowers’ Houses (1892), but he never appears on stage.
- 24.
Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, in George Bernard Shaw’s Plays, ed. Sandie Byrne (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2002), 24.
- 25.
Shaw, “Shall Parnell Go? II,” in The Matter with Ireland, 26–28.
- 26.
Shaw, “Shall Parnell Go? I,” in The Matter with Ireland, 25.
- 27.
Shaw, “Acting, By One Who Does Not Believe in It,” in Platform and Pulpit (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 20.
- 28.
John Richard Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism: The Mass, the Masses, and the Music Hall (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 119.
- 29.
Fabian references—including Sidney Webb (Getting Married) and H.G. Wells (Back to Methuselah)—are not uncommon in Shaw’s clerical plays and even more so in the prefaces.
- 30.
Their friendship, however, was tested in 1896 when they disagreed vehemently over the position that the Fabian Society should take against the Tories regarding the Boer War.
- 31.
Shaw, Preface to Candida (New York: Penguin, 2006), xxv.
- 32.
Peter Gahan, introduction to Candida (New York: Penguin, 2006), xii.
- 33.
Shaw, Candida, 60.
- 34.
Shaw, Candida,67.
- 35.
Shaw, Candida, 3.
- 36.
Shaw, Candida, 37.
- 37.
Shaw, “Why for Puritans?,” in Three Plays for Puritans (New York: Penguin, 1957), 25.
- 38.
Eric Bentley, Bernard Shaw (New York: Applause, 2002), 91.
- 39.
Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, 47.
- 40.
Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, in Three Plays for Puritans (New York: Penguin, 1957), 72.
- 41.
Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, 87.
- 42.
Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, 117.
- 43.
Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, 117.
- 44.
Shaw, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, in Three Plays for Puritans (New York: Penguin, 1957), 260.
- 45.
Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, in Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, 2nd ed., ed. John P. Harrington (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2009), 176.
- 46.
Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 138.
- 47.
Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 138.
- 48.
Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 141.
- 49.
He is not the sole Shavian protagonist in Getting Married, however; the position is shared with Hotchkiss, who shares the Shaw family nickname of Sonny and asserts that he does not “believe in anything but [his] own will, pride and honor.” See p. 658 ofCollected Plays, Vol. III for his most Shavian rant and its reflection of Shaw’s comments regarding his being the result of a specifically “Irish eighteenth centuryism” as discussed in the “My Own Part in the Matter” portion of the preface to Back to Methuselah.
- 50.
Shaw, Getting Married, in Collected Plays, Vol. III (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 573.
- 51.
Shaw, “Mr. Bernard Shaw on his New Play” in Collected Plays, Vol. III, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 665.
- 52.
Shaw, Getting Married, 640.
- 53.
Shaw, Getting Married, 574.
- 54.
Shaw, Getting Married, 609.
- 55.
Shaw, Getting Married, 609.
- 56.
Shaw, Getting Married, 621.
- 57.
Shaw, Getting Married, 601.
- 58.
Shaw, Preface to Getting Married, 501.
- 59.
Alfred Turco Jr., Shaw’s Moral Vision (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), 268.
- 60.
Anthony S. Abbott, Shaw and Christianity (New York: The Seabury Press, 1965), 183.
- 61.
Shaw, Back to Methuselah (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 102.
- 62.
Shaw, Back to Methuselah, 144.
- 63.
Bernard Shaw, “In Good King Charles’s Golden Days,” in Bernard Shaw Collected Plays, Vol. VII (New York, Dodd, Mead, 1974), 234.
- 64.
Shaw, “In Good King Charles’s Golden Days,” 234.
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Mannion, E. (2020). “An Incorrigible Propensity for Preaching”: Shaw and His Clergy. In: McNamara, A., O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, N. (eds) Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42113-7_5
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