Introduction: Women, Nation, Enablement, and the Irish Question

Abstract

A prolific playwright with an oeuvre of almost sixty plays, Bernard Shaw has, as Nicholas Grene contends, “so long remained the invisible man of Irish theater”. There has been a slight shift in that attitude in recent years with four of his plays, which had never previously been staged by the Abbey Theatre, making their National Theatre debut: Pygmalion, 2011, Major Barbara, 2013, Heartbreak House, 2014, and You Never Can Tell, 2015. Since 1989 there have been fifteen professional Shaw productions: three in The Gate Theatre, four in the Abbey Theatre, one in the Peacock Theatre, with the remainder performed in regional theatre spaces around Ireland. Most Shavian drama has been produced in England, the United States, and Canada, where the annual Shaw Festival takes place in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Likewise, much of the academic investigation into and critique of Shaw’s work is also attributed to international scholars. However, there is an emergent interest on the part of Irish scholars in the playwright especially in relation to his Irish heritage, as most recently framed by Peter Gahan’s Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition, 2010, David Clare’s Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 2015, and Audrey McNamara and Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland, 2020. The premise of this book is to engage with that scholarly discourse and emphasise Shaw’s centrality to the Irish theatrical tradition where, arguably, he sits uncomfortably at present. In my reading of a representative selection of plays during the period 1892 to 1914, I will seek to connect Shaw’s drama to an era that was a momentous time for both the emergence of female suffrage and Irish national independence, where Shaw reacted to the two movements within his dramatic canon.