History and Religious Imagination: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Revival—an Overview

Abstract

ABSTRACT An overview of Bernard Shaw’s involvement in early twentieth-century Irish history, both political and cultural. Pressure building since the death of Parnell in 1891 would lead to Ireland’s independence from Britain and the establishment of the Irish free State in 1922, with Shaw’s Irish friends Horace Plunkett, Augusta Gregory, George Russell (“Æ”), and especially W. B. Yeats all prime movers in major new national cultural institutions that sprang up around the turn of the century. Through these four as well as his Irish wife, Charlotte Shaw, Shaw became involved in both the affairs of the nation as well as in Irish drama, especially Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats and his work were particularly important for Shaw’s contributions to the Irish literary revival, in which, whether in satirical, comic, or tragic modes, his Irish plays comprehend Irish mythology, history, imagination, and religious salvation.