James K Lowers - CliffsNotes on Shaws Man & Superman

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In the stimulating and amusing Epistle Dedicatory, a letter addressed to Arthur Bingham Walkley, dramatic critic of The Times, Shaw provides, among other things, the details relating to the genesis of Man and Superman and an exegesis of his current philosophy and of certain dominant ideas in the play. Although Walkley had praised Shaw as a man who can give us a refined intellectual pleasure, he did not rate his friend very highly as a dramatist. Since Shaw had been conducting a running battle against current romantic drama, Walkley playfully suggested that Shaw show how the love theme should be developed by writing a Don Juan play. And the dramatist complied. Aware that Walkley believed that he wrote dialectic, not drama, which (in the words of Aristotle) should be an imitation of an action, Shaw wittily concedes that he has the temperament of a schoolmaster and identifies himself as a reformer expressing his annoyance at the fact that people remain comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable. The implication is clear: When one is comfortable, he has no desire for change, and thus progress is impossible. If you dont like my preaching you must lump it, Shaw concludes. All these give some insight into Shaws comic theory. In his Praise of Comedy, Mr. James Feibleman defines comedy as the satiric criticism of the present limited historical order and a campaign for the unlimited logical order. This involves a departure from an older view which called for approval of the conventional. Shaw would have endorsed Feiblemans view. To be sure, brilliant comedies had been based on the older theory. Henri Bergson, developing his ideas of the comic chiefly with reference to the plays of Molire, insisted that such ridiculous figures as Harpagon and Tartuffe placed themselves outside the pale of the conventional because they suffered from an inelasticitythey had become automations and thus invited derisive laughter. Shaw went further. He believed that it was not just the occasional individual who made himself ridiculous; it was the larger society, and it was the conventional itself which often was absurd. So long as it was so afflicted, society had no right to be comfortable.

Shaw dismisses current romantic plays as childish and insists that they are quite devoid of interest and have been forced to deal almost exclusively with cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. So he accepted Walkleys challenge; he has indeed written a Don Juan play, but it is one in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one another is the mainspring of the action. The adjective natural is the significant word here. Shaw distinguishes between eroticism and sex. For him, most dramas had been concerned with the former, not the latter, which is instinctual and procreative.

Of course Shaw cannot merely rewrite the Don Juan story as it has come down in versions and variants through the centuries. The original story written by a sixteenth-century Spanish priest told how Don Juan, scion of the illustrious Tenorio family, lived a life of unbridled licentiousness and ultimately killed the governor of Seville, whose daughter he had been attempting to abduct. His sensuality having destroyed all faith in the spirit world, he then visited the tomb of the murdered man and challenged his statue to follow him to supper. The challenge was accepted; the animated statue appeared at table among the guests and carried the blaspheming skeptic to Hell. The moral, as Shaw remarks, is a monkish one: No one can escape Gods inexorable justice; repent before it is too late. That will not be the text of Shaws preaching.

It remained for Molire to give a new aspect to the character in Don Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre (1655). The hero, though as heartlessly depraved as in the Spanish original, loses some of the sterner elements of character and becomes more seductive and more amusing. Mozarts opera Don Giovanni, the libretto of which was furnished by Da Ponte, has done more to popularize the story in Molire as distinct from the severer early Spanish form than any other setting, literary or musical, has ever received.

Shaw argues that what had attracted readers and audiences to Don Juan from the very first is not the moral lesson but Don Juans heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own Devils Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Here we have one of the keys to Shaws interest in the story: He too could depict a hero who was a rebel on the grand scale, but one who was an enemy of the false gods of society.

And surely Walkley knows that Shaw cannot depict Don Juan in an aristocratic society dominated by men. Not only has the middle class come into its own, but woman has become completely emancipated: Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of sex... the enormous superiority of Womans natural position in this matter is telling with greater and greater force. Here writes the man who had hailed the advent of the New Woman in his praise of Ibsen and in his own Candida. A modern Don Juan, Shaw continues, does not even pretend to read Ovid (The Art of Love, Roman classic of eroticism); he has read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, studied Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts.

The identification of these authors is quite significant, pointing as it does to Shaws new approach to the sex theme in English drama. Edward Alexander Westermarck, the distinguished Finnish anthropologist who accepted the appointment as Professor of Sociology at the University of London in 1907, is best known for his scholarly The History of Human Marriage and as an authority on morals. Obviously, it is the human race, not the individual, which is his prime concern. Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860), the famous German philosopher whose best-known work is