“Dear Harp of My Country”; or, Shaw and Boucicault

Abstract

Shaw’s ambitions never included celebrity as an Irish playwright. Like Larry Doyle of Broadbent and Doyle, he had his eye on the wider scene— the contemporary world where international capitalism and aspiring international socialism eclipsed any sentimental backyard parochialism. As a London critic he campaigned for a theater that embraced the new Continental repertory; and his own rise to theatrical eminence began effectively in places like Germany and America. His Nobel Prize money went to promoting Strindberg and Anglo-Swedish literary exchange. Accordingly, when acknowledging predecessors, he was more likely to invoke Mozart and Verdi, Goethe and Ibsen, than Sheridan and Boucicault. Nevertheless, he had no compunctions about proclaiming his Irishness when it suited him—usually to underline his outsider’s credentials as a critic of English institutions and habits of mind. And he had no compunctions about coopting and exploiting elements characteristic of such predecessors as Boucicault, dramaturgical, representational, and attitudinal, especially when their very familiarity eased the way to challenging an audience to think about things it took for granted. Shaw, as I have argued elsewhere, made extensive use of the materials and conventions of the nineteenth-century theater in his dual assault on the conventional theater and the established pieties and institutional arrangements of his day—each, as he saw it, supporting the other.1 His habit was implicitly and sometimes overtly dialectical. But since it was convention and conventionalities that furnished (in several senses) his quarry, his depredations generally had a generic cast, rather than a self-evident specific source. So it was in his relations with Boucicault. Boucicault, in his long career, was quite as eclectic as Shaw, in the range and variety of his genre experiments; but his great midcentury success—at a moment when he might even be said to have been the leading playwright in the English-speaking world—was as a sensational melodramatist