Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw (world of reading TXT) đź“•
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Following the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the ward of Jack Tanner and Roebuck Ramsden; Jack is a childhood friend, author of The Revolutionist’s Handbook, and descendant of Don Juan, while Roebuck Ramsden is a respectable friend of her father’s entirely opposed to Jack’s philosophy. Also in mourning are Octavius Robinson, who is openly in love with Ann, and his sister Violet, who is secretly pregnant. So begins a journey that will take them across London, Europe, and to Hell.
George Bernard Shaw wrote Man and Superman between 1901 and 1903. It was first performed in 1905 with the third act excised; a part of that third act, Don Juan in Hell, was performed in 1907. The full play was not performed in its entirety until 1915.
Shaw explains that he wrote Man and Superman after being challenged to write on the theme of Don Juan. Once described as Shaw’s most allusive play, Man and Superman refers to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. It combines Nietzsche’s argument that humanity is evolving towards a “superman” with the philosophy of Don Juan as a way to present his conception of society: namely, that it is women who are the driving force behind natural selection and the propagation of the species. To this end, Shaw includes as an appendix The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion as written by the character Jack Tanner.
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- Author: George Bernard Shaw
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Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers. You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Put your Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside Mr. Valiant and Mr. Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan’s coward stirs your blood more than Shakespeare’s hero, who actually leaves you cold and secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespeare, with all his flashes and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan’s hero, look back from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his pilgrimage, and say “yet do I not repent me”; or, with the panache of a millionaire, bequeath “my sword to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.” This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man’s work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.
It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the difference between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan’s perception that righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr. Legality in the village of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion, his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr. Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a
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