Man and Superman and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

believes Ann Whitefield has designs on his best friend, Octavius, but not on himself. Yet he also does everything a male can do to impress Ann Whitefield with his qualifications for fatherhood. And in the course of the play, though he runs away from her, he comes to understand when she catches him that there is such a thing as a father’s heart as well as a mother‘s, and that he has one and therefore must marry Ann—for, as Benedick says when he capitulates to love, “The world must be peopled.”
    In the detachable third act of the play, known, when it is performed separately, as “Don Juan in Hell,” John Tanner, having fled to the Sierra Mountains in Spain to escape Ann’s pursuit and capture of him, dreams of himself as Don Juan debating with the Devil whether he (Juan) should stay in Hell or move to Heaven. Doña Ana and the Statue of her father are the audience and sometime participants in the debate. Hell, it turns out, is not unlike the world we all know—a place where people love beauty and romance, seek pleasure, and pursue happiness, and deceive themselves about reality when it interferes with such goals. The Devil is the promoter of Hell as a paradise where the aesthetic reigns supreme. Heaven, by contrast, is the place where the Real reigns, where people work to make life more intensely self-conscious. After a seventy-five-minute discussion that is by turns witty, profound, hilarious, and dizzying about the purpose of life and the operation of the Life Force, about whether Man is primarily a creator or destroyer, about the roles of romance and sex in marriage, Don Juan finally argues himself into leaving Hell and heading for Heaven. The Statue looks upon this decision with regret since from his perspective Heaven is “the most angelically dull place in all creation.” But Doña Ana does not; she is inspired by Don Juan’s decision and goes off in pursuit of “a father for the Superman.” Through his dream Tanner tells himself that by marrying Ann he will make his contribution to “helping life in its struggle upward.” Once he understands that he can marry, Shaw’s new Don Juan seeks not a personal genetic immortality through the seduction of many women but the evolutionary improvement and immortality of the species by marrying one woman and becoming a father.
    Shaw’s plays are full of ideas, ideas of every color on the spectrum from dangerous to preposterous, from wonderful to thrilling, and, as Jacques Barzun says, it is never a question with Shaw of agreeing with all his ideas but of being moved by the vision. It is a vision that is always a play of contrary ideas, and therefore a mirror of life itself—ideas dramatized always with graceful wit, genial humor, and fearlessness, but also with the great feeling and emotional fervor that comes with thinking that life, and how it goes, and where it is headed, matter. Not for Shaw the despairing gaze into the abyss—laughter, rather, and the imagining of hope.
    JOHN A. BERTOLINI was educated at Manhattan College and Columbia University. He teaches English and dramatic literature, Shakespeare, and film at Middlebury College, where he is Ellis Professor of the Liberal Arts. He is the author of The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw and editor of Shaw and Other Playwrights; he has also published articles on Hitchcock, Renaissance drama, and British and American dramatists. He is writing a book on Terence Rattigan’s plays.



MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION

PREFACE
    MAINLY ABOUT MYSELF
    THERE IS AN OLD SAYING THAT IF A man has not fallen in love before forty, he had better not fall in love after. I long ago perceived that this rule applied to many other matters as well: for example, to the writing of plays; and I made a rough memorandum for my own guidance that unless I could produce at least half a dozen plays before I was forty, I had better let playwriting alone. It was not so