CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

The play's staging is old-style theater, from Victorian melodrama. The crowd scenes, the Roman army hailing Caesar, the elaborate and exotic scenery all derive from the methods of conventional theatre. But, as Martine Meisel writes, whereas conventionally, the heroes matched their histrionic style to the stage grandeur, in Shaw’s play Caesar is played off against this grandeur. This makes the stage unsettling. Caesar is first deflated during his apostrophe to the Sphinx; he next stages his own anti-climactic "reception by the Queen of Egypt.” That is, Shaw is fooling the audience into thinking it is getting conventional drama, then inserting unsettling incongruities.

The Part of Caesar was written for Johnston Forbes-Robertson, a classical actor of old-style 'musical' vocal delivery. “Without him Caesar and Cleopatra would not have been written”. It is obvious that Caesar is more important than Cleopatra - again against audience expectations - though, in the (good) movie versiom, the camera, you’ll notice, cannot keep its eyes off Vivien Leigh.

There is nothing in the actual acting of the part of Caesar that would have troubled the conventional actor. Much of the joke of the staging is that the characters in the play do not need to know there is anything subversive going on: they can play the parts ‘straight’ - as, indeed, they did in the movie made 50 years later!

Caesar is a probably conscious refutation of Bolingbroke’s philosophy in Eugene Scribe's THE GLASS OF WATER that little things, not heroes, are the cause of major historical events. Shaw’s ‘great men and women of history” are always conscious of being superior to the ‘little’ view of life, and aware of taking hold of events to great purposes. All through the play Shaw also is setting up Caesar as a superior alternative to Shakespeare’s Antony: as someone with a sense what is important and what is petty in the world. Shaw’s Caesar is probably too all-knowing: but this at least allows Shaw to show up the ridiculous limitations of the others surrounding Caesar - which makes for good comedy.

5. THE THEME OF CHANGE IN THE PLAY AND IN SOCIETY
CAESAR is aware the old (republican) Rome is passing away and imperial Rome with its destiny is about to be born. In other words, that something major is at work in history and that he, Caesar is a part of this: as Shaw, the Marxist, felt himself to be part of the huge social changes happening in his time. Also aware of historical evolution, is the god Ra, in the Prologue, who is Shaw in thin disguise.

For Caesar’s vision to get across to the audience, he needs to be surrounded by people of more limited vision against whom his own progressive identity stands out. These are characters who belong not just to the older, conventional idea of the world, but to the older, conventional theatre. This will become Shaw’s constant comedic method: of creating all the elements of the old kind of theatre, filled with conventional situations and character types, and then infiltrating into the play subversive ‘new’ characters and situations (and ideas) with which they are hilariously unequipped to deal.

In this way, the stage comes to resemble Shaw’s idea of the world outside the theatre, where the majority of human beings do not ‘see ’ the world they are living in, and blunder into disasters, violence and war instead of controlling the forces of life and creating utopia on earth. Only a few lonely individual (usually 'great' men and women) carry the vision of the future. They are like the promising mutants of genetic change.

Shaw’s is the comedic version of Ibsen’s tragic vision that sees the huge discrepancy between what people think is reality, and what reality actually is.

(a) Victorian melodrama: Prologue and Alternative Prologue:
(I) Prologue
The exotic locale: Statue of Ra and the god’s voice.
Alternative Prologue
(ii) The group of soldiers picturesquely costumed., swearing by strange gods “by Apis..” etc.

All this was familiar Victorian theatre fare, as with Hollywood costume drama. Victorian theatre staged biblical epics and Roman history and the tableaux in Shaw’s play, of crowds and armies greeting Caesar, are taken directly from conventional Victorian staging, which loved these ‘big’ effects. Melodramas especially loved to deal with picturesque crowd effects, tableaux.

Melodramatic actions:
(iii) The sinister character of Pftatateeta, lurking in the background until she
murders and is murdered, is straight from melodrama. Shaw’s innovation is to
give her a comic touch - the jokes around her name - which, in a way, tells us we
are childish to take her seriously in the old melodramatic style. Shaw, you see,
has his cake then critically eats it. He supplies the melodrama for thrills, and then makes fun of it, as if he’s a bit ashamed of it.

(iv) The swordfights, the action leading to imminent dangers, the sudden escapes
especially around the swashbuckling figure of Apollodorus .

(v) The hairbreadth ‘escape from the lighthouse’ is good old melodrama
in its situation: but it is then subverted in two ways.
(a) Caesar is ashamed of “wasting time” with Cleopatra and so sacrificing his
soldiers who are more important than her.
The plunge into the harbor becomes a comic competition: young Apollodorus, old Caeser, while poor Cleopatra is unceremoniously chucked into the sea

(vi) The crowds or mobs howling at the doors, the ‘confrontations’
between Caesar and his opponents, are all ‘staged’ for melodramatic effect. But notice how, in Act IV., Shaw lifted the confrontation to a new level in Caesar’s reproach to those who justified Cleopatra’s revenge in having Pothinus murdered. The murder is the old-style Theatrical 'justice' which the audience would have approved of, as do all the characters on stage. Caesar's reproof is a reproach to the theatre audience, too, which holds to Cleopatra’s idea of justice as vengeance.

(vii) The ceremony to the god Ra, who needs a blood sacrifice, interrupted by the death-cry of a murdered man.

(viii) Then, the discovery of the body of Pfatateeta, dead at the altar, oozing blood, to make the ‘curtain’ of Act IV

(b) Scribean well-made-play elements
(I) The careful exposition on the Alternative Prologue: of the war between Ptolemy and Cleopatra of the wars between Pompey and Julius Caesar, Pompey’s arrival and death, Julius Caesar’s arrival, of Cleopatra’s disappearance - all swiftly dealt with before the major action begins.

(ii) In the rest of the play we will find plotting and counter-plotting in the Scribean manner; Especially n Act IV, with the palace intrigues of Pothinus, Pftatateeta, Cleopatra, Rufio. This is the Scribean seesaw of one side up, then down
(iii) Pothinus murder by Pfatateeta is carefully ‘set up’ when Pothinus fatefully says about Cleopatra, “whilst I live she shall never rule...” a sure signal he will be killed.
(iv) Even the first act ‘surprise’ when Cleopatra discovers who Caesar is, standing beside her as the Roman army enters is a carefully plotted ‘well-made’ situation on which the curtain falls. It is similar to the Scribean expected surprise entrances.

In other words, Shaw is cleverly exploiting already existing and effective theatrical conventions, not inventing new ones. But Shaw also was a disciple of Ibsen and the new drama. He had already written The Quintessence of Ibsenism in which he announces the 'new drama’. He read, and wrote about, EMPEROR AND GALILEAN. So he brings to the melodramatic and ‘well-made’ dramatic structure a philosophic and dialectical dimension, and an awareness of the limitations of the old-fashioned methods he is using.

6. Shaw’s ‘other’ ‘perspectives’ which he brings to the melodramatic and well-made-play structure” is that of seeing a larger action behind the immediate human one. For Shaw, the Marxian socialist, all of human life is transitional, evolutionary: none of its structures are permanent. The Egyptians believed their world-view was the ultimate one. So did the Victorian British. Each believed its own moral system was the moral system of the universe.
The present day state of Kansas seems to believe it can undo the course of Evolution: which is as absurd as believing the god of the Nile can defeat the Roman military machine.

In both cultures, ancient and modern, is the paradox that the refusal to recognize the impermanence of things is a permanent human disposition. Shaw’s plays have certain ‘bringers of light’ aware of the need and inevitability of change- like Schiller’s Marquis of Pose in DON CARLOS These figures try to counter the forces that threaten to destroy our species and take the planet with them.

Julius Caesar is obviously such a character., as are his Napoleon and St. Joan - or John Tanner. These individuals seem to detach themselves form their historical context and to live in a realm of thought where they join with the other great figures of history. They speak to Shaw’s contemporary Victorian audience, but also from ‘above’. The choice of Caesar and Napoleon show that Shaw believed progress required ruthlessness.

THE MEDIUM NOT THE MESSAGE
Shaw is an example of someone whose ‘message’ might be revolutionary, but whose ‘form’ is conventional. One of the pleasures of his plays is in detecting how he is ‘rewriting’ the old stock plays for his radical new message. He sets up audience expectations, based on the old models, and then knocks them down. For the bright ones in Shaw’s audience the pleasure comes from the comic inadequacy of the old stock responses to the new situations - or when faced with new thinking. So all around Caesar Shaw carefully composes characters to be shocked or surprised by him. It as if Scribe’s Bolingbroke were to show evidence of original thinking!

Shaw’s ‘double vision’ then, is of presenting a petty assemblage of characters and their preoccupations, and then judging them from his ‘higher’ perspective through his ‘spokesman’ Caesar. It is as if Caesar finds himself in the wrong play - that he belongs to EMPEROR AND GALILEAN but finds himself in the world of Scribe and Victorian melodrama. (This is somewhat like HAMLET whose hero similarly often seems to be in the wrong play: a sensitive, subjective thinker expected to behave like a mindless avenger. Shaw pulls off this trick again and again in his plays, St. Joan being a notable example.

. The ‘great individuals’ in Shaw: (Caesar., Napoleon, Catherine, St. Joan) is an agent of the historical dialectic. The author’s perspective intrudes above the folly of the action. Shaw, criticizing a conventional historical melodrama, wrote of playwright who,“would have a stage Julius Caesar; but ...at the end of the play the personage so dressed up has felt nothing and seen nothing and done nothing that might not as appropriately have been felt, seen and done by his valet” so that the fact that the hero is called Caesar is no significance at all. To create a stage Julius Caesar you must be a Julius Caesar in your imaginative creation.

2. This fits into Shaw’s quite undemocratic ‘great man/woman belief. His great men
are Napoleon and Caesar. His great women, Catherine of Russia and St. Joan.
They are ‘above’ he crowd in sensibility; are not understood

3. The paradox of the play:
(a) Humanity has always been the same
(b) Humanity is always evolving.

4. Taking on Shakespeare: Caesar vs. Antony: For Shaw, Shakespeare is no ‘thinker’ but a great poet/musician. Shaw's Caesar, by contrast is a thinker, a man of destiny, and also one of those whose mind exists ‘above’ the folly and cruelty of history: one of the ‘bearers of light’. The play deliberately disappoints the audience’s expectations of a love story - of Caesar transfigured by love for Cleopatra. The god Ra. squelches that interest in the Prologue. Shaw, in fact, seems to have followed the error of a historical who denied Cleopatra was the mother of children by Caesar.
The play, instead is the Education of Cleopatra (and the British audience) into political realities.

Where Shakespeare allowed the love-value that Antony and Cleopatra affirm (against the odds and the evidence) to have full poetic voice, SHAW is determined to firmly put this ‘value’ in its place, as a foolish infatuation in a world where there are more serious issues and needs to be met. Antony and Cleopatra’s irresponsibility is the unstated counter-text to Shaw’s play. Caesar puts Cleopatra aside for the serious business of winning battles and organizing events - the opposite of Antony who gave kingdoms to Cleopatra and threw away the battle of Actium for Cleopatra. Shaw ignores the historical fact that Caesar DID become Cleopatra’s lover and had children by her. He needed to create a childish Cleo to snub modern audience’s expectations.

Caesar must do the world’s hard work, as Shaw, a socialist, must do it (he was an active political force, founder of the Fabian Society and Labor Party, platform speaker, town councilor, etc. etc.) Shaw’s idea of the function of drama (of all art) is similar to both Schiller’s, Ibsen’s and Brecht’s. The play brings Schiller’s idealist drama back down to a kind of ‘theatrical’ reality.

5. Didactic history. Historical drama as object lesson to contemporary culture. The anachronisms in the play continually remind the audience that their own world is involved, and that its big issues have existed before. The New Woman; Egypt for the Egyptians, the Jewish Question
Shaw is continually ‘nudging’ his modern audience with topical allusions.

THE PROLOGUE.
The God Ra and Anachronism
Shaw s directly addressing the theatre audience from the perspective of History, making it aware of its own smaller perspective: its mode of dress, compulsory education, acceptance of the British Empire and its absurd idea of its superiority over other ages and cultures. So, continually, the god talks of Rome as if it were Britain.
“And when they squeezed their own poor dry, they robbed the poor of other
lands, and added those lands to Rome until there came a new Rome, rich and
huge. And I, Ra, laughed; for the minds of the Romans remained the same size
whilst their dominion spread over the earth.”

This is a direct reproach to the British audience, proud of its empire “on which the sun never set” yet hopelessly small-minded and unenlightened: each man borrowing his idea of his own ‘greatness’ from the unearned sense of his country’s power. Today, the American is in the same danger: “the greatest country in the world...proud to be an American” devouring the planet’s resources, when he or she may have done nothing individually great nor anything to be proud of. It is “armchair greatness” ready to be whipped into patriotic fervor and madness, simply because patriotism is a quick escape from one’s own mediocrity and insignificance: a weakness to which the British in their imperial days were very prone. And to which their politicians, and songwriters, and dramatists pandered, showing even the humblest ‘Tommy’ (British soldier) more than a match for any insolent or evil foreigner. Merely to be British (now American) was to be able to strut a bit in the world. Which made the British ripe for enlightened COMEDY.

The God, Ra. has seen it all before and is looking at it again, with impatient amusement. “What fools these mortals be”.
Caesar, ‘every man’s woman and every woman’s man’ would scandalize the puritanical British who had imprisoned Oscar Wilde not long before. That seems what Shaw is obliquely referring to on p. 5.

And the gods smiled on Caesar; for he lived the life they had given him
boldly, and was not forever rebuking us [the gods] for our indecent ways of
creation, and hiding our handiwork as a shameful thing. Ye know well what
I mean, for this is one of your own sins.”

Shaw admired his fellow Irishman, Wilde, and was appalled at the vindictive manner in which Victorian society turned upon and destroyed him. It was to Shaw, another example of how he lived among a tiny-visioned people, like Gulliver among Lilliputians. One of the oddities of Shaw’s ‘socialism’ is that socialism was desirable because it would allow the ‘masses’ or the ‘rabble’ to become cultivated middle-class types like Shaw himself. He had little sympathy for the victims of capitalism.

His point was that poverty created filth and violence and ignorance: and that filthy, violent, ignorant people were intolerable. So were their opinions and prejudices, which did so much harm to people better than themselves. Hence the fate of Wilde who, perhaps, appears in this play as Apollodorus - who mentions Art for Art’s sake - a slogan of Wilde’s.

The alternative to the Prologue is a little scene showing ‘ordinary humanity’ (the guards and servants) about to be overwhelmed by History, which in one sense will change their world. But the fact they are exactly like contemporary English men and women means that, in another way, History has not changed our humanity that much.

10 Act One
Sphinx, Caesar, Cleopatra: three ages of humanity
CAESAR addresses the Sphinx and the repository of old, eternal wisdom that exists above any particular historical culture, as Caesar tries to. Caesar is aware all things pass away, that “this too shall pass”: that his little individual intellect ad voice is swallowed up in the eternal identity of the Sphinx and of history. But then he is interrupted by a childish voice: the girl, Cleopatra, her head filled with the superstitions of her own passing culture - which are no more absurd than our superstitions today.

THE REST OF THE PLAY COULD BE CALLED ‘EDUCATING CLEOPATRA’
a somewhat futile attempt to raise her to the level of Caesar, if not of the Sphinx. Instead, she will be unable to rise above the level of Shakespeare’s ANTONY! And the rest of the play will be a set of comedic contrasts between Caesar’s vision of the world, and the world he finds he must live in. Which is how Shaw sees his own situation.

“The new man must either rule the world or be crucified by it.” This clear reference to Jesus places Caesar, with the world’s artists, thinkers, saints, leaders, one of the torchbearers of progress who appear throughout history to advance the species.

Dialectic, history and drama. What is dialectic?
The method whereby a proposition or situation (thesis a) is contradicted and ‘negated’ (demolished/refuted) by its opposite (antithesis b). This, however, does not mean the annihilation of (a) but its incorporation, with (b) to a more adequate ‘truth’ (synthesis c).
(c) in turn becomes a new thesis begetting its antithesis and synthesis ad infinitum.

A better idea of dialectic in life is that a given situation, under pressure, is forced to reveal its inherent contradictions and, from this new insight, is forced to arrive at a 'higher' or more adequate condition which, in turn, will reveal contradictions of its own,etc... Things and situations, therefore, exist in a condition of ‘contradiction and these contradictions emerge from analysis, and, from the ‘pressure’ of an opposing force, are made to recognize and give up their inadequate condition for a more adequate one. Often this inadequate condition is no more than inadequate thought or understanding about the condition (its Concept).


JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND
1. The Irish National Theater asked Shaw to write a play to be performed at the soon-to-be-Abbey Theater. When Shaw sent them his 'Irish play', John Bull's Other Island in 1904, W..B. Yeats turned it down. One excuse was that the Irish National theatre did not have the resources to mount the play: but a major reason was the intense dislike W.B. Yeats always felt for Shaw's idea of drama as a modern drama of ideas. Shaw then went on to give it a very successful commercial production in London to appreciative English audiences.

2. One can see why Yeats disliked the play. As a man and a writer, Shaw was the total opposite of Yeats and his idea of the purpose of drama went right against the idea of the theater of Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge. They wanted a theater that would be mystical, poetic, drawing on folktale and rooted in the Irish character. Shaw was rational, logical, political, international: he wanted the Irish theater and the Irish nation to join the international community, and in drama this meant it had to accept Ibsen's revolution in the theater. But Yeats and Synge intensely disliked Ibsen and the new drama. Another disciple of Ibsen, James Joyce, was to leave Ireland for ever and to laugh at Yeats's idea of reviving a "Celtic twilight" - what Joyce called a 'Celtic twalette' Like Shaw, Joyce was an internationalist in outlook. Instead of looking back to its old heroic myths, legends and folktales, Ireland should seek to take its place among the leaders of modern thought.

3. Shaw was a revolutionary in politics and in ideas, but, unlike Ibsen, and unlke Yeats and Synge, he was not an originator in dramatic form. The paradox` about Shaw 's dramatic writings is that they are brimful of the latest ideas in the world BUT these are coupled with many of the most hackneyed elements of the old melodramatic theater on which he had been brought up as a child in Dublin. John Bull's Other Island is the exact opposite of Playboy. Where Synge is picturesque, even if brutal, Shaw's play is determinedly matter-of-fact.

Synge's play was an archetypal fable of the evolution of the main character's identity, from outcast, to hero, then pharmakos and finally willing outcast. Christy Mahon really had two identities: the one that evolves in his mirror relationship to the crowd, the other in the discovery of his own authentic voice of solitude. Christy, we saw, also was a mirror himself in which the crowd saw the reflection of its own anarchic desires. For this fable, Synge went to one of the primal forms of folktale, the quest-myth or hero's journey to a foreign country which is a form of wasteland and which contains the enchanted 'princess' pining for the hero who will rescue and wed her : Synge also revived some of Comedy's function of 'permitted anarchy' or overthrow of order. That is, Synge's play goes back to a traditional comic form and function even though it contains a very untraditional and unconventional subtext.

But the traditional form it gets back to is an archetypal one, not a hackneyed one. Synge rediscovers, by pursuing his own path, major traditional functions of Comedy ever since Aristophanes: its release of anarchic energies, it temporary overthrow of authority (perhaps permanent in Playboy as in Aristophanes The Birds). Synge's return to these comic roots makes his work genuinely his own: he had had to rediscover them in his own terms. But the future was with Shaw, and Playboy is the last, as it is the best, of the old order. For Yeats' later poetic dramas were not written for the Abbey Theater audiences.

John Bull's Other Island, by contrast, gets its form from nineteenth century British melodrama and sentimental comedy, and then infuses into this conventional form very unconventional themes taken from modern, that is post-Ibsen, theater. This form and function are the antithesis of the myth-filled and poetic theater Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge wanted to revive. Shaw's trick is to give his theater new life by using the hackneyed conventions of nineteenth century sentimental melodrama for the opposite purposes for which they were devised: to arouse audience expectations with his plots and characters, but then to outrage those expectations. This is his dialectical procedure.

An obvious example is at the beginning of the play when the fake stage Irishman, Tim, having fooled Broadbent, would also have fooled British audiences into thinking he is meant to be genuine: his fake brogue, his fake Irishisms; "Top o' the morning', 'broth of a boy' and so on. The audience has seen this type before, in many previous melodramas, and believes it is the genuine article, and usually can rely upon him to supply a harmless fund of folksy wisdom, together with a marked weakness for alcohol and a great deal of sentimentality. The English audience's attitude would be one of tolerant cultural superiority. This is one of the pleasures conventional theater provides: of giving us a world we comfortably know - or thinnk we do - and then confirm all our habitual prejudices and sentiments about this world.

But almost immediately, in that opening scene, another Irishman, Doyle, appears, shows his evident disgust with Tim, exposes him as a fraud and exposes Broadbent as, in ths instance, a fool who has no idea about Ireland except from stale theatrical cliches and equally as stale political cliches. The result is that the British audience, having been thrown off guard, will now have to examine all the other theatrical and political conventions Shaw will be serving up as the play continues. (This is his technique in his other plays, too. It is a form of "alienation effect" - not as radical as Bertolt Brecht's but used for the same reason: to show us that we do not know what we think we do.

"The known, just because it is the known, is the unknown" said Hegel. In this Hegelian tradition of thinking, known as Dialectic, we must learn to look upon the world as utterly strange, unknown, alien, to be discovered right from the most fundamental and basic level. (Socrates was the first to introduce this kind of dialectic into thinking). What the world presents to us is false because we have always perceived it falsely: we have been educated to see it falsely and must now unlearn what we have learned, to "negate the negation" if we are to arrive at truth and freedom. And, for Shaw, this truth and freedom could not reside in nationalism, patriotism, in turning away from the modern world to a Celtic twilight. So his quarrel with the Irish National Theater and its quarrel with him is the most fundamental of the controversies involving that theater.

As a Marxist and Socialist, Shaw could not see Ireland's troubles as peculiar and special to the Irish. "Class oppression was common to all nations" so that he could not sympathize with the ardent Irish nationalists. There is a scene in Act Three where Broadbent's British working-class servant, Hodson, turns on Matthew Haffigan, a tenant farmer who continually complains about the miseries and injustices suffered by the Irish at the hands of the British. Hodson's brutal diatribe accuses Haffigan of being a professional Irish whiner whose sufferings are nothing compared to those suffered by the British poor under capitalism. Furthermore, Hodson fiercely resents the Irish who are driven to seek work in England at starvation wages, thereby either putting the English out of work or depressing their wages - something the United States is learning about now. The common enemy of both is capitalism and, for Shaw, the nationalist resentments of Haffigan and his kind is preventing the workers of both nations - indeed of all nations - from uniting and changing the real causes of their condition..

Shaw, then, as an internationalist in John Bull's Other Island gives his audience a lesson on the nature of capitalism. Broadbent and Doyle are seen buying up a stretch of Ireland, Ruscollen, and bringing it prosperity: with such prosaic, unpoetic things as a hotel, industry, improved agriculture. This is something that Shaw would approve of even though Broadbent's unscrupulous capitalism later will have to be converted to socialism - its inevitable evolution. There is a brutal form of evolution, of survival of the fittest when the mystical 'saint' Keegan, reveals he knows how Broadbent and Doyle will get ultimate possession of the business they will start - by deliberately ruining it and its shareholders, and buying it up cheap: a typical scam like the Savings And Loans scams in recent U.S. history. The weak and honest folk will go under, and the ruthless crooks will triumph. Keegan, who is too saintly to be accepted by the Church, dreams of a New Trinity in which "the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one...."(203)

As he speaks we see another trinity onstage: Broadbent, the man of practical power;' Doyle, the man of intellect; Keegan, the mystic. If these three could be one, Shaw seems to be saying, a Socialist Utopia might come into being. We have a very similar Trinity in another play, Major Barbara, with Undershaft, the weapons industrialist, Cusins, the intellectual Greek scholar, and Barbara, the mystical heroine who has lost her old Faith and is discovering a new one.

7. The conflict in the play is between Ireland's backwardess, its habit of dreaming instead of facing reality. One speech must have hurt Yeats's feelings very much: The speaker ins Larry Doyle who, like Shaw himself, turned his back on Ireland and founded his career in England. In this speech Doyle seems to be attacking the very purposes for which, we saw, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge created the Irish Theater

Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming!.........
...........that you cant bear it without whisky.

For Shaw, Ireland didn't need folktales, heroic legends and fairy stories, it needed industry, organized labour, socialism, in league with the International Socialist Movement in Europe at large. It needed to know how Capitalism was likely to take charge of its economy and put its land in the hands of foreign investors, who, like Broadbent, could buy it up. The speech sets out two classes of men and women: on the one side the dreamers, who are doomed to disappointment, whisky and sardonic laughter

This must have fallen like a very cold shower on poor Yeats and the reference to Kathleen Ni Houlihan and Shan Van Vocht must have seemed like a frontal assault on the National Theater's policy. So these two plays, Playboy (1907) and John Bull (1904) are completely opposite ideas of comedy and of theater. They differ in the perennial dramatic metaphors of Scene, Character, Action, Dialogue, Props.

Scenically we have the contrast of the London office of the industrial engineers, Broadbent and Doyle, then the Irish setting of the Celtic Round Tower and the cottage of Cornelius Doyle. It is the London Office that will buy up and transform both the Irish landscape and its cottages driving characters like Haffigan to America, making Cornelius into a ruthless manager of the British hotel, and turning younger men like Patsy Farrell into capitalist fodder.. Scenically, then the contrast is ruthless practicality versus twilight dreaming (tower) and progress versus undeveloped poverty (the cottage). Broadbent and Doyle arrive on the Irish scene by automobile - which, in 1904, and in Ireland especially, is a sign of things to come. Shaw, as a Marxist, wishes to give the Irish audience a lesson in the real state of things in a capitalist world which will gobble up patriotic nationalism and cultural nationalism together.

The Characters are decidedly deglamorized versions of Synge's and Lady Gregory'ds peasants, exhibiting those traits of character that, in Shaw's view, makes the Ireland that he, like Larry Doyle, left behind for London, such a backward and hopeless case: a place of ineffectual dreaming and equally ineffectual squabbling, complaining, resentment.

The language which Shaw skilfully uses lacks all the charm of Synge's characters, for these characters are political-economic types, modern Marxist portraits drawn almost totally without affection, although with a great deal of exasperated amusement and with much skill. Shaw is very well aware of the Irish manner of escaping reality through anarchic humour: the Irish tradition of the hilarious mishap. The Playboy of the Western World in one sense, is just such an outrageous joke (though it is much more than this). Eugene O'Neill recreates very similar Irish jokes at an practical man's expense in his plays The Long Day's Journey into Night and at an Englishman's expense in The Moon for the Misbegotten. In John Bull's Other Island we see the origins of the joke in the incident of Broadbent, the automobile and the Pig, and then Barney Doran's no doubt wildly exaggerated retelling of the incident as a good Irish joke, convulsing his listeners, much to Keegan's disgust. (178).

Then Broadbent describes the incident, totally without humour but with rather touching feeling and even concern for the innocent pig. It is typical that Shaw should trick his audience into laughing along with Barny Doran's story and then make them ashamed of doing so, as an example of their ineffectuality. As Larry Doyle comments when aunt Judy thinks Broadbent made a fool of himself admitting the incident: "Suppose you had a vote! which would you rather give it to? the man that told the story of Haffigan's pig Barney Doyle's way or Broadbent's way?" In other words, 'Barney Doyle's way" is the way of the ineffectual loser, laughing at the practical man. Broadbent's way is the way of the man who gets things done: it is Shaw's version of the relation of Ireland to England.

Even the love triangle of Larry, Nora and Broadbent is presented without any romance in the language: with the debunking of romance, in fact, as Broadbent wins Nora more from his economic than his personal attractions: and the slim Nora is slim only because her diet is unhealthily poor: her beauty is bulimia. Keegan, alone, has a language of genuine deep feeling as he expresses Shaw's ultimately mystic vision of human redemption beyond the absurd quarrels and confusions and ambitions of the world. But Shaw insists we can't rise to the Keegan vision before we economically transform the material world
.
Shaw's plays were accused of being all talk and no action, though, in fact, quite an immense action does take place in the play behind all the talk as Broadbent, like Julius Caesar, came and saw and conquered, getting the girl, Nora, the parliamentary seat, and the beautiful landscape for his golfers hotel. People complained about the talk in Shaw's plays really because, for all its great skill and humour, it is DIDACTIC: it won't let us alone until we have learned the lesson Shaw inists on teaching, and this interferes with our wish to escape the lesson, escape reality and enter an escapis fiction.

The Plot of the Play
Stage Directions are for the reader for the most part. Shaw at first could not get performed and so published his plays to be read.)
The play seems to offer familiar stage conventions. It opens, we saw, with a stage Irishman, a trap for the audience. It contains the melodramatic plot of the villain driving folk off their land. It has the sweetheart and 'heiress' waiting back in Ireland for her beloved (Doyle); it has the 'friend's betrayal' as Broadbent woos Nora, and it ends with the hero's success and forthcoming marriage. But all these stale theater elements are paradoxically transformed!

The stage Irishman is quickly shown up and driven offstage;' the villain who drives folk off their land ultimately is doing them good; the sweetheart waiting at home is not wanted by her 'lover'; she is an heiress only by Irish standards; Broadbent's wooing of Nora will be to her benefit which Doyle is happy to go along with; Broadbent's success reveals that he is really clever beneath his buffoonery (something Doyle found out early on) and it seems likely that the Englishman, Broadbent will represent the Irish constituency in Parliament, as well as buying up much of the surrounding land.

Broadbent and Doyle represent the brute reality of modern finance and modern engineering. Says Doyle, in unpoetic language that must have pained the ears of Yeats: "I'm a metallurgical chemist turned civil engineer. Now whatever else metallurgical chemistry may be, it's not national. It's international. And my business and yours as civil engineers is to join countries, not to separate them. The one real political conviction that our businesss has rubbed into us is that frontiers are hindrances and flags confounded nuisances."

This is the brute reality of international finance, of the huge transcontinental conglomerates now running our lives and, in Hollywood, dictating what we are allowed to see as entertainment.
Shaw was convinced modern literature, especially modern drama, had to be at least as international, practical, even brutal if we were ever to take control of our culture and our lives. The Irish theater, in Shaw's eyes, was in danger of escaping into a dream world to avoid the world of brutal fact.

Just before the end of Act I, Doyle exclaims that Irish charm is the charm of a dream, only:

Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their
charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of
their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where
the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal."

In the next Act we come upon the Irish dreamer, 'Father' Keegan whose vision of Ireland is the opposite of Broadbent's and Doyle's economic-industrial development. He is holding conversation with a rather loquacious grasshopper. The distance betweeen the sunset and the grasshopper is the distance between Ireland's poverty stricken reality (which the grasshopper confirms is Hell) and a possible heaven on earth. (For Shaw, the answer is Socialism, the fusion of Keegan's vision and Broadbent's facts: that is, material facts that have been redeemed by vision.

To create this sort of Hegelian Morality Play Shaw throws in a good many familiar ingredients. Nora Reilly waits for her 'lover' by the picturesque Round Tower but its the unromantic Broadbent who appears (and who will win her). The two meet by the tower and go off together arm in arm, but not from love but because Broadbent thinks he's drunk. The conventional stage exit of lovers arm in arm is here a sight gag. In these and many other ways Shaw is always giving new sardonic twists to stock theatrical situations.

The heart of the play is the long discussion on the political and economic future of Ireland and its Church. where Shaw combines the entertainment function of theater, by having the debatees lose their temper, quarrel with one another, and the didactic function, in which Larry Doyle expounds his solutions to his listeners. When Shaw feels the audience has received as much of this as it is likely to tolerate, he veers the play around to the farce, of Broadbent's comic expedition in his car with the unfortunate pig: itself a quite conventional piece of stage farce: the Irish joke.

Act Four opens with the pig episode now being the subject of the kind of humour Larry Doyle despaired over in Act One. As Keegan says, grimly, when Nora protests at the laughter, 9177)

"Why not? There's danger, destruction, torment! What
more do we need to make us merry? Go on Barney: the
last drops of joy are not squeezed from the story yet. Tell us
again how our brother [the pig] was torn asunder.

Against this negative and destructive spirit Shaw sets the vision of Keegan, the mystic, from the Irish visionary tradition, who believes in the transformation of earth as Hell, which it is at present, to earth as Heaven, in a transformed form of Catholicism. And, as we noted, there is another possibility in the 'trinity of Broadbent, Doyle and Keegan

This is the combination of "Irish" vision and British pragmatism which the inellectual,, Doyle was unable to bring to his partnership with Broadbent because he had forsaken his Irish identity, just as he had forsaken Nora Reilly. Shaw's play is the hint of a synthesis between Keegan, Doyle and Broadbent, the wildly impractical, the sharply intelligent and the MATERIALIST 'visionary.' Keegan dreams of a new Heaven on earth and Broadbent dreams of a profitable golfers' hotel. Broadbent, like Undershaft, is a problem because his practical success is conquering the world (at least of the world of the play) without any vision as to where all this industry will lead.

Keegan has the vision but no means to bring about except dreaming. The combination of Broadbent's pragmatism and Keegan's vision will be, Shaw is suggesting, a new Socialist utopia instead of the golfing hotel and tourists and industry Broadbent is bringing. There's no wonder Yeats and his companions disliked Shaw's play. But the play was defended by Sean O'Casey who felt the theater had made a mistake in rejecting it. And O'Casey will continue Shaw's method in even more unconventional terms, of using comedy and farce to convey a serious vision.