Lessons from the Land: Shaw's John Bull's Other Island

Abstract

John Bull’s Other Island is George Bernard Shaw’s only full-length play that devotes sustained attention to Ireland and Irish issues. The play has often been dismissed by critics as being too much about Ireland to appeal to a wide audience. With the increased interest in recent years toward the role of place in literature, though, John Bull’s Other Island deserves closer examination. Ideas of place, landscape, the built or natural environment, home, and emplacedness have all played important parts in Irish literature. Beyond the aesthetic role that the environment plays, ecocriticism seeks to find ecological messages in literature. These include an “ecocentric perspective that recognizes the interdependent nature of the world,” “an imperative toward humility in relationships with both human and non human [sic] nature,” and “an intense skepticism concerning hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an indictment of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe.” An ecocritical reading of Shaw’s Irish play not only allows the role of place and the human connection to it to come to the fore, but also reveals Shaw’s concern for ecological issues long before the popular green movements of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. John Bull’s Other Island takes up the issues of land ownership and land use. The name of the play itself highlights the reality that ownership of the entire island of Ireland rested in England, and not in Ireland itself. The play was written and first performed in 1904, the same year that the Abbey Theatre was es-