G. B.

Shaw: Thesis drama and Technique in Man and Superman

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agent's office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widower's Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Man and The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, Don Juan in Hell, the third act of the dramatization of woman's love chase of man, Man and Superman (1903). In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the drama, in Back to Methuselah (1921), although in the same period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan(1923), in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to the present. Other important plays by Shaw are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and Androcles and the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. In Major Barbara (1905), one of Shaw's most successful plays, the audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the medical profession. Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw's greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour. Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death. Man and Superman is a four-act drama, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to calls for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. Man and Superman opened at The Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but with the omission of the 3rd Act. A part of the act, Don Juan in Hell (Act 3, Scene 2), was performed when the drama was staged on 4 June 1907 at the Royal Court. The play was not performed in its entirety until 1915, when the Travelling Repertory Company played it at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. The long third act of the play is often cut. Don Juan in Hell consists of a philosophical debate between Don Juan (played by the same actor who plays Jack Tanner), and the Devil, with Doa Ana (Ann) and the Statue of Don Gonzalo, Ana's father (Roebuck Ramsden, an aged acquaintance of Tanner's and Ann's Guardian) looking on. Subtitled A Comedy and a Philosophy, George Bernard Shaws Man and Superman is a comedy of ideas: its characters discuss ideas such as capitalism, social reform, male and female roles in courtship, and other existential topics in long speeches that resemble arias in an opera. The plays verbosity makes it unwieldy to produce full scale, so the Epistle in the beginning and the Revolutionists Handbook at the end are usually not performed, and the scene in Hell, although containing the bulk of the plays philosophical musings, is often dropped. Of Man and Superman, Shaw himself said that he had written "a trumpery story of modern London life, a life in which . . . the ordinary man's main business is to get means to keep up the position and habit of a gentleman and the ordinary woman's business is to get
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married." This suggests that the play is a comedy of manners replete with farcical elements, a play which represents no real break in the tradition of the Victorian theatre. In the play are to be found such familiar romantic and melodramatic elements as a will, a love triangle, the apparently fallen woman, and an episode involving capture by brigands. Among the longlived comic types are the mother bent on marrying off her daughter; the brash, impertinent servant who knows more than his master; and such caricatures as that of Malone, the American millionaire. In character portrayal, he almost always depends upon overstatement, and such exaggeration is strictly in the tradition of the comic writer and satirist. Like many earlier dramatists, including Shakespeare, to say nothing of Shaw's Victorian predecessors and contemporaries, the dramatist develops situations by means of a series of misunderstandings, which may be called "mistaken awarenesses." Thus he is able to build up in each successive act a series of amusing, often exciting climaxes. Bernard Shaw described Man and Superman as a comedy and a philosophy. It is Shaws full-length exposition of his theory of Life Force, which was to help mankind in his evolution toward a better existence in life. For this purpose, both man and woman are required to act in cooperation with each other. Woman is indicated as Natures contrivance for perpetuating natures achievement and man as womans contrivance for fulfilling Natures behest. The superman is born to replace the existing feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances that human beings today are. Thus, Shaw is a full-fledged philosopher in this play and his philosophy is a piece of teaching, quite different from the mixture of clowning and satire found in many of his other plays. The Superman from Shaws play possesses a set of characteristics that cant be found in any man, qualities like superior intellect, cunning and intuition, ability to defy obsolete moral codes and self-defined virtues. He selects a few figures from history that display some of the Supermans traits, figures like Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte or Oliver Cromwell. Each of them was an influential leader, each with his amazing capabilities, but they all had their failings. Because most people in society are unexceptional, the few Supermen who happen to appear on the planet now and then face a nearly impossible challenge. They must try to either subdue the mediocrity or to raise the mediocrity up to the level of Supermen. Therefore, Shaw does not simply want to see a few more Julius Caesars crop up in society. He wants mankind to evolve into an entire race of healthy, morally-independent geniuses. Shaw states that the idea of the Superman has been around for millennia, ever since the myth of Prometheus. He was the titan who defied Zeus and the other Olympian gods by bringing fire to mankind, thereby empowering man with a gift meant only for deities. Any character or historical figure that, like Prometheus, endeavours to create his own destiny and strive towards greatness (and perhaps leading others toward those same godlike attributes) can be considered a superman of sorts. However, when the Superman is discussed in philosophy classes, the concept is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1883 book Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche provides a vague description of an Ubermensch loosely translated into Overman or Superman. He states, man is something which ought to be overcome, and by this he seems to mean that mankind will evolve into something far superior to contemporary humans Because the definition is rather unspecified, some have interpreted a superman to be someone who is simply superior in strength and mental ability. But what really makes the Ubermensch out of the ordinary is his unique moral code. In contrast to some of Nietzsches ideas, Shaws Superman exhibits socialist leanings which the playwright believed would benefit civilization. Jack Tanner is an unconventional character in a conventional world. He is a wealthy politically minded intellectual, middle-aged and unattached. The issue is that Ramsden cannot stand Tanners morals and Tanner hates being Annes guardian. He is a confirmed bachelor and he condemns the institution of marriage and he is the author of The Revolutionists Handbook that details opinions on many controversial topics like overthrowing governments or the role of women in the society. In the eyes of Roebuck Ramsden, Jack Tanner is initially viewed in a negative light. He calls Ramsden an old fuddy-duddy to Ramsden's face and to advise him to cultivate a little
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impudence and to welcome heterodox opinions. Tanner himself does both witness his tirades against the tyranny of greybeards and of mothers, his redefining of morality in terms shocking to the conventional. Shaw uses Tanner to purify the intellectual air. It is he who seeks to clarify the relationship between the sexes, to debunk what Shaw considered Victorian smugness and hypocrisy, to ridicule the romanticism of the Tavies and (more important) to expound his latest theory relating to the advance of the race through eugenics. Thus Tanner is intended to represent what Shaw believed to be the true moral sense. This is clearly revealed in the first long dialogue between Jack and Ann in Act I. Jack had acknowledged the fact that he had been destructive as a boy but insisted that he is now ten times as destructive, for his destructiveness is directed toward moral ends. Shaw describes Anne as "perfectly ladylike, graceful, and comely, with ensnaring eyes and hair. She is a charming, dutiful girl, scheming hypocritical young woman who wants Tanner as a husband. She is full of sweet sentiments; she is daintily coy and appealingly helpless; she even swoons in the presence of young men as is expected of the feminine, wellbred young Victorian Womanly Woman. Bernard Shaw, an Irishman and a Socialist, in his play Man and Superman takes up this theme and addresses the evolution of man as a whole as a means to the ideal man of legend; his egalitarian sentiments find mankinds saviour not in an individual, but in the individual. Not even a superman can refrain from the Life Force which gets its way in the end. Ann Whitefield woos her newly appointed guardian, John Tanner, and he, in spite of his antiromantic persona, falls for her. He does not love her in the conventional sense, but falls prey to the "Life Force" that she exudes. It is more a matter of sexual attraction than it is of romantic love. Shaw's idea of this Life Force derives from French philosopher Henri Bergson's Olan vital, or spirit of life. Also Shaw plays upon the theme of the Don Juan. In the preface of Man and Superman, he discusses the way Don Juan has been portrayed in other works, such as Mozarts opera or Lord Byrons poetry. Traditionally, Don Juan is a pursuer of women, an adulterer, and an unrepentant scoundrel. At the end of Mozarts Don Giovanni, Don Juan is dragged to Hell, leaving Shaw to wonder: What happened to Don Juans soul? Man and Superman provides an answer to that question. The spirit of Don Juan lives on in the form of Juans distant descendant John Tanner. Instead of a pursuer of women, Tanner is a pursuer of truth. Instead of an adulterer, Tanner is a revolutionary. Instead of a scoundrel, Tanner defies social-norms and old fashioned traditions in hopes of leading the way to a better world.

Bibliography Richard Burton, Bernard Shaw: The Man And The Mask Gabrielle H. Cody, The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, Volume 2 http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/man-and-superman http://law-projects.blogspot.ro/2012/04/chapter1-introduction-george-bernard.html http://plays.about.com/od/manandsuperman/a/supermanthemes_2.htm