Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (78 page)

Misprint; should be “insistence.”

Should be
The War of the Worlds
(1898); corrected by Shaw in later editions.

Edward Bellamy, author
of Looking Backward
(1888).

Shaw borrows Oscar Wilde's paradoxical aesthetic pronouncement that nature imitates art.

A near-quotation from Sonnet 55, lines i and 2.

An allusion to Sonnet 110, whose first four lines are: “Alas, ‘tis true I have gone here and there / And made myself a motley to the view, / Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, / Made old offences of affections new.”

Not the Romantic poet, but the popular Victorian playwright Henry James Byron (1834-1884).

One who is aggressively loyal to a religious sect, after the Scots who signed the Covenant in 1638 to remain loyal Protestants.

The earliest English translation of the term “Übermensch,” coined by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Shaw would later use “Superman.”

In the Bible, Mark 1:7, John the Baptist says of himself in relation to Christ: “There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose” (KJV).

Plain-style country cake.

In cricket, the guard who stops balls from passing the wicket.

Worn (from covering the corners of the table).

Coarse rug.

Highly polished, colorful shells.

English architect (1831-1915 ) who worked with the socialist William Morris (1834-1896).

[Christ‘s] blood and wounds; an indecorous oath for a minister.

That is, the jail; a generic term derived from the name of a notorious London prison.

Devil-may-care.

Georgius Rex (Latin for “George the King”).

One of Shaw's best epigrams.

That is, from the Church of England; here used metaphorically to mean a rebel.

Solemn music from the oratorio
Saul
(1739), by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759).

Head.

Shaw fondly portrayed his fellow critic as Mr. Trotter in
Fanny's First Play
(1911).

He who acts through an agent acts for himself (Latin).

One thousand and three (Italian); in Mozart's
Don Giovanni
(1787), the Don's servant Leporello claims for his master this number of amorous conquests in Spain.

Fray Gabriel Téllez (Tirso de Molina), a dramatist who lived in the early seventeenth (not sixteenth) century.

The Trickster (Deceiver, Gamester) of Seville.

Don
Juan (1824), a comic-epic poem.

Don Juan's servant in works by Molière (Don
Juan,
1665) and Mozart (Don Giovanni, 1787), respectively.

Of eighteenth-century Russia; reputedly most amorous, she was the subject of Shaw's Great Catherine (1913).

François Guizot was a nineteenth-century Protestant historian.

The Stony Dinner-Party (French).

Let a just heaven protect (Italian); sung by Anna and Ottavio in Mozart's
Don Giovanni.

EdwardAlexander Westermarck (1862—1939), Finnish anthropologist of marriage.

Hypocritical character in Charles Dickens's
Martin Chuzzlewit
(1844).

The libertine punished (Italian); subtitle of Mozart's
Don Giovanni
(1787).

In Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
(1848), a type of the faithful, devoted suitor.

Bunsby and Mrs. MacStinger are characters in Dickens's
Dombey and Son
(1848).

Amandine Dupin, Baronne Dudevant (1804-1876) published novels under this name.

In
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(c. 1790).

Saucepan.

Bread and games (Latin); from one of Juvenal's
Satires.

Shaw appended Tanner's Revolutionist's Handbook to
Man and Superman.

Shaw's Mendoza derives from Doyle's El Cuchillo in
The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard
(1896).

Shaw is referring to J. M. Barrie's
The Admirable Crichton
(1902). ‡On her peace (Italian).

Simon Tappertit, in Dickens's
Barnaby Rudge
(1841), schemes to marry above his station.

Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr. Tite Barnicle are characters in Dickens's
Bleak House
(1853) and
Little Dorrit
(1857), respectively.

French theatrical term for the young male lead.

In
The Jungle Book
(1894)
,
Rudyard Kipling's brave mongoose, which kills a cobra to save a baby.

A chorus from Handel's
Messiah
(1742).

Lighthearted youngsters.

Analogous to a U.S. public school.

Religious (but not Church of England) universities.

The Life of the Bee
(1901).

In this reference to the Bible, Tanner adapts Proverbs 6:6: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise” (KJV).

That is, undermine my reputation as a chaste woman.

A book (1858) of essays by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

In a later edition, Shaw changed this to “mawdest,” to indicate Hector's American accent.

Unpleasant-sounding laughter.

Pierre de Beaumarchais was an eighteenth-century playwright whose
Marriage of Figaro
(1784) criticized aristocratic privilege.

I demand to speak. It is completely false. It's false! false!! false!!! Mur-r-r-r-derer! (French).

Phony (French).

Pigs! ... We have to shoot, right? (French).

Fall on them, for God's sake (French).

Calm down (French).

My brother (French).

Never in my life! Rotten liar (French).

Atheist.

Cold feet.

Quotation from
Hamlet
(act 5, scene I), with “Louisa” substituted for “Ophelia.”

White Sunday (Pentecost) week, a solemn period in the Christian calendar.

A paraphrase of Percy Bysshe Shelley's
Peter Bell the Third
(1819; part 3, stanza I), which has “London” in place of “Seville.”

Long live the females! / Long live good wine! (Italian); from Mozart's
Don Giovanni.

Sustenance and glory / Of humankind (Italian); from Mozart's Don Giovanni.

The quote is from Goethe's
Faust, Part Two,
the final chorus; the lines describe Heaven.

Shakespeare is the poet,
Hamlet
the speaker (act 2, scene 2).

Short-term savings account.

Shaw updated this to “the electric chair” in a later edition.

Shaw changed this to “animalism” in a later edition.

Greek comic dramatist (c.448-380 B.C.), in his play The Birds.

Apolitical person; political fence-sitter.

In Shakespeare's
Cymbeline,
the latter falsely claims to have seduced the former.

In these lines, Shaw lays out his sense of the Devil as the destroyer of will and purpose.

Adapted from the first stanza of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's
In Memoriam
(1850): “I held it truth, with him who sings / To one clear harp in divers tones, / That men may rise on stepping-stones / Of their dead selves to higher things.”

“Koheleth” is the Hebrew word, translated into Greek as Ecclesiastes (the Preacher), which names the Old Testament book from which the saying comes (Ecclesiastes 1:9): “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (KJV).

Vanity of vanities (Latin), a key phrase in the biblical book Ecclesiastes (chapters 1 and 12).

Said by Edgar in
King Lear
(act 3, scene 4).

John Tyndall delivered a heterodox speech on religion and evolution in 1874.

Cavalry regiment charged with guarding the British monarch's life.

From Mozart's
Don Giovanni,
when the Statue commands the Don to repent three times and is thrice refused.

Shaw later revised this to Coventry Patmore's “Angel in the House,” a poem that idealized woman.

Not only the characters but the audience and the cosmos as well are laughing at Tanner's destiny.