Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (76 page)

MAN AND SUPERMAN

1
(p. 306)
“Oui, ma foi
...
songerons a nous”:
“Yes, to be sure! I must reform. Another twenty or thirty years of this kind of life, and then we'll give it some thought.” Molière's Don Juan (in act 4, scene 7 of
Don Juan,
1665) here retains the crude postponement of repentance that Tirso de Molina made part of Don Juan's youthful bravado in the face of mortality. Don Juan's desire to live an eternal life of sexual conquests betrays the anxiety he feels over his individual mortality, for his sexual seeding of so many women suggests a frantic counterattack on death with an abundance of aggressive vitality. In
Man and Superman
, Shaw will rework this confrontation with mortality into Don Juan's rejection of the Devil's invitation to a death-in-life pursuit of pleasure and beauty; Shaw will also transform it into Tanner's embrace of fatherhood as a way of defeating death.

2
(p. 308) “marchesane,
principesse, cameriere, cittadine”:
”Mar chionesses, princesses, maids, townswomen“—in Mozart's
Don Giovanni
(1787), Leporello catalogues all the types and nationalities of women the Don has seduced, making the point that Don Giovanni's erotic appetite and vitality are, like the male sexual drive itself, of comic-epic proportions in recognizing neither class barriers nor national ones. In Shaw this becomes Tanner's political and social rebellion against artificial class distinctions and his flight from Ann across a foreign border into Spain.

3
(p. 313)
a process over which I assure you I have no more real control than I have over my wife:
Like all men who have been married only a few years—Shaw had married an Irish millionairess, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, in 1898—Shaw here notes his own bewilderment at how he came to be in the married state. His own account of the wedding, which he wrote as a publicity release for a newspaper, the
Star
(June 2), confirms the idea: “As a lady and gentleman were out driving in Henrietta-st., Covent Garden yesterday, a heavy shower drove them to take shelter in the office of the Superintendant Registrar there, and in the confusion of the moment he married them.“

4
(P. 322)
Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions.... it has been pointed out that Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense
: Here Shaw states a cardinal principle of playwriting: that the dramatist must not propagandize for a partisan point of view. The playwright must allow each character his or her say and from their point of view: “their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also.” Stacking the deck against characters with whose ideas the playwright disagrees does not produce drama; it produces partisan politics. For this reason, Shaw's plays rarely lend themselves to exploitation for partisan ends—as do, say, some of Brecht's plays and indeed so much of what passes for drama now.

5
(p. 326)
the play of Coriolanus is the
greatest of Shakespear's comedies:
This is one of Shaw's most puzzling pronouncements. I believe he means that Coriolanus, with his obsessive fear of still being a boy tied to his mother and not a man, resembles the great humorous characters created by Molière or Ben Jonson, characters who are so defined by a single trait—avarice, lust, and so on— that they become comical through their seemingly mechanical behavior.

6
(p. 363) “
Yes, my dear Lady Mephistopheles, tempted”:
At this stage of the drama, Jack unconsciously thinks of marrying Ann as an obstacle to fulfilling his destiny as a revolutionary thinker and social reformer, one who will contribute to the human race's progress through writing and politics; consequently, he associates her with the Devil, who, according to Tanner's dream self, Don Juan, diverts man from his true purpose to find the heaven of the real. Only when Jack realizes that Ann is the way to the real, through marriage and fatherhood, can he agree to marry her.

7
(p. 379)
He now gets into the car.... stowing away his hammer:
Shaw revised this paragraph for a later edition to read: ”
He now gets into the car to stow away his tools and divest himself of his overalls. Tanner takes off his leathern overcoat and pitches it into the car with a sigh of relief, glad to be rid of it
.
The chauffeur, noting this, tosses his head contemptuously, and surveys his employer sardonically.”
The changes reflect Shaw's practical experience with the actual staging of the play.

8
(p. 390)
“I suppose you will go in
seriously for politics some day, Jack”:
In a letter to Harley Granville-Barker (May 24, 1907) about staging this scene between Ann and Tanner, Shaw explained how the suggestion of Robert Lorraine (the actor playing Tanner)—that he deliver his ”great speech about the tyranny of mothers enthroned in the motor car, with Lillah (McCarthy, the actress playing Ann) somewhere under the wheels with her back to the audience“—made Shaw realize that he must put Ann in the car instead, but in the driver's seat “in a fascinating attitude with her breast on the driving wheel.” In that way Shaw could use the staging to help express the meaning of the scene: Tanner, in the fashion of courting males, displays his oratorical powers to impress the female, while the female audience of one, Ann, completely controls the situation.

9
(p. 429) But this time Mozart's music gets grotesquely adulterated with Gounod's: Shaw means the music Charles Gounod wrote for Mephistopheles in Faust (1859), an opera Shaw in his role as music critic was compelled to hear so many times that he declared himself tired of it and done with it.

10
(p. 429) “
Its sympathies are all with misery, with poverty, with starvation.... I call on it to sympathize with joy, with love, with happiness, with beauty”:
The Devil's sentiments here strongly resemble those expressed by Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891): “I cannot sympathize with [suffering]. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life” (chapter 5). Shaw has made the Devil echo Wilde's Dandy, Sir Henry, in order to identify the Devil as an exponent of Aestheticism, one who views art as separate from moral teaching and as existing for its own sake.

11
(p. 439)
an Italian and an Englishman:
The allusion to two epic poets is not idle humor. Shaw means
Man and Superman
to stand alongside Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (c. 1320) and John Milton's
Paradise Lost
(1667)—and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808, 1832), likewise alluded to in humorous fashion—as accounts of humankind's purpose and destiny within a cosmic framework. Like the pilgrim Dante, Shaw's Don Juan makes a literal and psychological journey from Hell to Heaven. And Tanner and Ann, like Adam and Eve in
Paradise Lost
, though they are individual characters, are also projections of maleness and fe maleness uniting in marriage in order to procreate and renew the world. In this same speech the Devil goes on to criticize
Paradise Lost
for being so long that no one has ever finished it; he also constantly criticizes Don Juan's speeches for their excessive length. Thus does Shaw parallel his own writing with Milton's—both are found boring by the Devil!

12
(p. 504)
“Is there a father's heart as well
as a
mother's?”:
Here the originality of Shaw's conception becomes apparent as he imagines a paternal instinct that matches the intensity of the maternal instinct, and then makes its discovery and recognition the turning point in Tanner's resistance to his destiny.

13
(p. 504) [
panting
...]
“Jack: let me go.... I can't
bear
it”:
Shaw makes Ann mime simultaneously having an orgasm and giving birth (she had a few moments before pointed out to Jack that marriage brings for the woman the risk of death in childbirth). In designing the climax of Ann and Jack's courtship in this way, Shaw has in mind Arthur Schopenhauer's essay “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” (1844), in which the philosopher argues that sexual attraction between a man and a woman embodies the will to live of the future child the couple can produce.

INSPIRED BY THE PLAYS OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The theatre may survive as a place where people are taught to act, but apart from that there will be nothing but ”talkies“ soon.

—George Bernard Shaw

 

Shaw's dramatic canon continues to be produced, entire theater festivals are dedicated to his work, and the classical theatrical repertoire now includes Shaw's plays alongside those of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen. Nevertheless, it would seem that Shaw was right in pointing out the burgeoning dominance of film in human culture. Luckily for the playwright, movie-makers have been more than happy to embrace him.

In 1959 Guy Hamilton directed an all-star production of
The Devil's Disciple,
featuring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier. The film retains much of Shaw's dialogue and wit. Hamilton, who went on to direct four James Bond films, brings a distinctly British sensibility to Shaw's satire of the American Revolution. The British soldiers are represented not as caricatures of evil, like the “Redcoats” in many American films, but as dedicated men who simply commit the folly of forgetting to tell Lord North to join forces with General “Gentleman” Johnny Burgoyne (Olivier), who, it seems, could have taken care of all the rebels himself. Lancaster and Douglas—that legendary duo of American action-adventure—are the rebels. Lancaster plays the Reverend Anthony Anderson, a pacifist who makes a startling conversion in becoming the quintessential American firebrand. Douglas plays a revolutionary rogue, the Devil's Disciple, who takes the reverse tack and becomes a minister. Together they whip patriotic fervor to a fever pitch. Yet Olivier steals the show with his underplayed performance of the cynical Burgoyne. Although Olivier never felt he had done Shaw's masterpiece justice, several critics have lamented that there is not more of him in the picture.

American playwright Robert Anderson is best known for his 1953 Broadway play
Tea and Sympathy,
which is in effect a retelling of Shaw's
Condida.
Anderson's play revolves around a persecuted homosexual schoolboy who becomes attached to a protective older woman. In 1956 Vincente Minnelli directed a film of
Tea and Sy
mpathy,
featuring Deborah Kerr and John Kerr (no relation), who both appeared in the original stage production. The film, bowdlerized by the Hays Office (Hollywood's self-censor), takes pains not to reference homosexuality explicitly—“Sissy Boy” (John Kerr) is merely an effeminate but decidedly heterosexual college student. Deborah Kerr, who also appeared in
The King and I
that same year, plays the part of Laura Reynolds, a teacher's wife who eventually offers her body to the young boy. Kerr closes the action of the film with the devastating line: “When you speak of this in future years—and you will—be kind.” Interestingly, Deborah Kerr had made one of her first film appearances in Shaw's
Major Barbara
(1941) and went on to play the role of Candida on the stage.

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works' history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter George Bernard Shaw's
Man and Superman and Three Other Plays
through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

George Bernard Shaw

The fairness of criticism is one thing, its adequacy quite another.

—
The Star
(December 19, 1892)

 

H. L. Mencken

 

Mrs. Warren, despite her ingenious reasoning, is a vulgar, ignorant woman, little capable of analyzing her own motives. Vivie, on the other hand, is a girl of quick intelligence and extraordinary education—a Cambridge scholar, a mathematician and a student of the philosophies. As the play opens Mrs. Warren seems to have all the best of it. She is the rebel and Vivie is the slave. But in the course of the strangely searching action, there is a readjustment. Convention overcomes the mother and crushes her; her daughter, on the other hand, strikes off her shackles and is free....

“Candida” is a latter-day essay in feminine psychology after the fashion of “A Doll's House,” “Monna Vanna,” and “Hedda Gabler.” Candida Morell, the heroine, is a clergyman's wife, who, lacking an acquaintance with the philosophies and face to face with the problem of earning her daily bread, might have gone the muddy way of Mrs. Warren. As it is, she exercises her fascinations upon a moony poet, arouses him to the mad-dog stage of passion, drives her husband to the verge of suicide-and then, with bland complacency and unanswerable logic, reads both an excellent lecture, turns the poet out of doors, and falls into her husband's arms, still chemically pure. It is an edifying example of the influence of mind over matter....

Measured with rule, plumb-line or hayscales, “Man and Superman” is easily Shaw's
magnum opus.
In bulk it is brobdignagian; in scope it is stupendous; in purpose it is one with the
Odyssey.
Like a full-rigged ship before a spanking breeze, it cleaves deep into the waves, sending ripples far to port and starboard, and its giant canvases rise half way to the clouds, with resplendent jibs, skysails, staysails and studdingsails standing out like quills upon the fretful porcupine. It has a preface as long as a campaign speech; an interlude in three scenes, with music and red fire; and a complete digest of the German philosophers as an appendix. With all its rings and satellites it fills a tome of 28 I closely-printed pages. Its epigrams, quips, jests, and quirks are multitudinous; it preaches treason to all the schools; its hero has one speech of 350 words. No one but a circus press agent could rise to an adequate description of its innumerable marvels. It is a three-ring circus, with Ibsen doing running jumps; Schopenhauer playing the calliope and Nietzsche selling peanuts in the reserved seats. And all the while it is the most entertaining play of its generation.