George Bernard Shaw"Philosophical Comedies"

The dramatic form of to each one(prenominal) play has puzzled critics:

What Shaw does is to mix together in each play a MoliFresque comedy and a Socratic dialogue. all(prenominal) play begins by presenting us with a high-minded idealist, who takes himself with longing seriousness and looks upon himself as an enlightened reformer. He is then do the subject of a comedy in the style of MoliFre, non with the idea of unmasking his hypocrisy, simply of exposing the comic contradictions within his ideals and personality (Crompton 89).

Tom Broadbent is the idealistic liberal who is the target of the humor in John Bull's Other Island. The play is seen as a tenacious comedy that is enlivened by broad caricature:

It depicts with a pungent blend of disgust and compassion the continuing advantage of Ireland by the British invader, specifically the conquest of an Irish crossroads by an side land developer who plans to convert a rupture estate into a tourist resort (Valency 238-239).

Shaw does not name a simplistic vision in which the Irish argon the good and downtrodden while the British are the overlords exploiting them for everything possible. For Shaw, both the English and the Irish emerge as scoundrels. What Shaw does in this play is criticize the sort of man he himself had been, for there is much of the gullible Shaw in Tom Broadbent. Shaw did not create a guinea pig who was simply a caricature of the right wing in politics in order to make his liberal side seem more

Shaw, George Bernard. blazonry and the Man and John Bull's Other Island. New York: Bantam, 1993.

Hill, Eldon C. George Bernard Shaw. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Marx says that worldly-minded society has simplified the antagonisms that existed before so that now there are only two great hostile camps stand as two classes directly facing one another--the middle class and the proletariat. Marx describes these antagonisms in his writings, shows how they developed, how they operate in society, and what the consequences will be for the historic development of society.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.

It has solely established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones (Tucker 474).

Valency, Maurice. The Cart and the Trumpet. New York: Schocken, 1983.

As Shaw depicts them the Irish villagers are small men, mean-spirited, stingy, and self-centered, and quite incapable of extricating themselves from the economic mortification into which they have fallen, or of comprehending their national problem in any(prenominal) but its most trivial aspects (Valency 239).

The envy the proletariate feels for the bourgeoisie is something Marx does not feature as does Shaw. For Marx, it is inevitable that the proletariate will rise up and throw off its shackles, but for Shaw it is just as liable(predicate) that the proletariate will emulate the bourgeoisie and try to make a profit.

Broadbent and Doyle, partners in a civil engineering firm, decide to induce for their syndicate a resort hotel and golf course to commute the farms whose mortgages they have foreclosed in Roscullen. Father Keegan, a forerunner of today's environmentalists, raises objections; but he is powerless in preventing the desecration (Hill 87).

The world, sir, is very distinctly a place of torment and penance, a place where the scud flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a
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