this made my brain sort of throb in a good kind of way. ( )

Like "Pygmalion," much about accent, here an Irish one from a Glaswegian drunk. Rather, "Pygmalion" much like this play, which was a decade earlier. My delight to discover many personal links, like "praaps" for perhaps, and “bigor,” used by my Maine forbears from 18C Nova Scotia and the other side, probably Eire. The Glasgow Hafigan says “Begorra.” And Lawyer Broadbent plans his trip to Roscullen from Milford Haven, where we departed for Dublin.

Broadbent’s partner came from Ireland and does not want to return, with his brilliant reflections on Irish imagination and religion, “It’s all dreaming…the poor village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story of a saint, has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of the poor”(517).

Act II, great last line, after Broadbent has gone out to check on Nora Reilly by the “Roun Tower” as she waits for Larry, disappointed after his staying away 18 years, but his car’s broken down—didn’t take the Beeyankiny car (“bus”). Broadbent the engineer has had two jiggers of home brew “potsheen” and falls “sentimental” for Nora’s voice in the moonlight. Nora thinks he’s drunk, and he may be slightly, so she has him grasp her arm as she leads him down the knoll and he stumbles over a rock. He’s led in “the character of a convicted drunkard,” but he “has no suspicion of the fact, or of her ignorance of it, that when an Englishman is sentimental he behaves very much as an Irishman does when he is drunk.” (vol II, 546) An astute comparison by an author who knew both islanders.

Act III Breakfast table on a grass plot at Cornelius Doyle’s house, with Aunt Judy
and Nora Reilly, Larry having arrived. Butler Hodson, Potsheen home-brew is “horrid, sir. The people here call peat turf. Potsheen and strong porter is what they like…Give me the beer, I say.”(548)

Broadbent was sleeping on the sofa when a leg came off with a thud, middle of the night (reminds me of the three-legged chair I tipped on in Kent, 1968). Broadbent told he can have no porridge, later learns it’s called “stirabout” in Ireland. Matthew is aghast to be told by Broadbent he’s of the “yeomanry,” which is the Irish word for Orangemen. Larry Doyle, Broadbent’s affiliate, explains, “Matt they call a freehold farmer a yeoman”(569.
Shaw polishes his Cockney for Pygmalion a decade later, with the valet Hodson’s sliding out of his respectable English back into his Cockney birth, “You Awrish people are too well off: You talk of your rotten little fawm cause you mide it by chacken a few stowns dahn a ill!…maw grenfawther …built up a fust clawss dripery business in Landon..and was chacked aht of it on is ed at the end of is lease withaht a penny for his goodwill”(571).

Act IV. Parlor in C. Doyle’s house, half in uproarious laughter about Broadbent driving a “motor” through town, giving a new-bought pig a lift to Matt’s (?) farm, Matt afraid of motors. As the car roared and started, the pig kept from the back seat into the front, and climbed into the driver’s lap. “Dh only thing Broadbint could get at wi the pig in front of him was a fut brake; n the pig’s tail was under dhat; so that whin he thought he was put non the brake he was only squeezing the life out o the pig’s tail. The more he put the brake on the more the pig squared n the father he dhruv”(577).
Larry, indifferent to sylphlike Nora who’s waited 18 years for him, starts to whistle Offenbach’s “Whittington,” “Tell England I’ll forget her never…” Nora, “Are you wanting to go back to England?” “Not at all…No meaning, written by a German Jew , like most English patriotic sentiment”(591).

Keegan the trained priest who sees himself as mad calls Broadbent a devil for his Trumpian property plans, taking over all the farms for a hotel and golf course. Broadbent objects, so Keegan “softens it” to calling him an ass. Keegan clarifies, “The ass, sir, is the most efficient of beasts, matter-of-fact, hardy, friendly when you treat him as a fellow-creature, stubborn when you abuse him, ridiculous only in love, which sets him to braying…Can you deny any of these habits?”(606) Broadbent had been bragging of his Englishman’s efficiency and matter-of-fact directness.
Keegan adds, about the ass’s one fault… “He wastes all his virtues—his efficiency—in doing the will of his greedy masters …in the service of Mammon…”

Larry’s insights into an Established Church, since Father Dempsey is disestablished, “has nothing to hope or fear from the State…But the Conservative party alone is not priestridden, because its Church …can prevent a clergyman from becoming a bishop if he’s not a Statesman as well as a Churchman”(565)
An Established Church circumscribes,, whereas disestablishment leaves them free to empower whatever they please.
But on the penultimate page, Broadbent, “I claim the right to think for myself in religious matters; in fact, I am ready to avow myself a bit of a—of a —well, I don't care who knows it—a bit of a Unitarian”(610). Love the concessive tone, the admitting of a sin, to priests and clerics. I am a member of the New Bedford UU where RW Emerson was interim preacher in 1831, just before he quit the clergy because he opposed Communion (now long gone).

Read in Shaw, Complete Plays, vol II. Dodd, Mead: NY, 1963. (1st published, 1907) ( )

This pre-WW1 play about the Anglo-Irish relationship is less dated than some of Shaw's other plays, perhaps because the situation it portrays lasted for so long. While there were some funny scenes, overall it struck me as a bitter play. Perhaps I would like it more if I could see a performance. ( )

Mr. Shaw may well have been one of those Irishmen that doesn't like Ireland. But he was a Dublin protestant, and very popular in England. But comparing the play, and a lot of what has happened since, the play's still relevant. It was written in 1904, and that was before the whole thing became a Civil war for the fifth time. Good natured, and of course Clever. Lots of epigrams. I read it at least twice. ( )