Abstract
The new century brought a breakthrough in dramatic form and philosophical understanding for Shaw. His marriage to the Irish Heiress Charlotte Payne-Townsend in 1898 and his first economically successful play, The Devil’s Disciple (1897, produced by Richard Mansfield in America), freed Shaw from financial anxiety, and he soon set off on an entirely new course dramaturgically. After Caesar and Cleopatra and The Perfect Wagnerite he wrote one more play, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899), before he set to work on a new kind of play that would mark the beginning of his second and most productive phase as a dramatist. Man and Superman was not finished until late 1902, and was published in 1903 with a preface, “Epistle Dedicatory,” followed by the very lengthy play, a concluding essay — The Revolutionist’s Handbook, purportedly written by the central character, Jack Tanner — and finally, appended to the Handbook, Tanner’s “Maxims for Revolutionists.” The Penguin edition runs to 264 pages. Certainly nothing quite like this had been seen before, and Shaw was clearly exhilarated by his breakthrough as a dramatist for the entire work is charged by an energetic sense of discovery, a feeling, sometimes a bit overbearing, that he has hit on the secret of the universe.
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Notes
It is usual for critics to refer to the three plays as a trilogy, and Shaw himself in a 1919 letter to Trebitsch referred to them as “the big three.” In that same letter Shaw suggested the title Comedies of Religion and Science for a German edition of the plays. See Louis Crompton, Shaw the Dramatist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969) 75
Alfred Turco Jr. See Shaw’s Moral Vision: The Self and Salvation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 224.
Quoted in Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social Imperial Thought, 1895–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960) 72–73.
Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. 2, 1898–1918: The Pursuit of Power (New York: Random House, 1988) 71.
J.W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 101.
“Thus were laid the foundations of my life-long hatred of poverty, and the devotion of all my public life to the task of exterminating the poor and rendering their resurrection for ever impossible.” Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1975) 15.
Nickolas Pappas, Plato and the Republic (London: Routledge, 1995) 11.
Plato, The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2000) 176.
Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (New York: Meridian Books, 1957) 125–26.
“Savonarola, not being witty, was burnt alive by those whom his bludgeon hurt. Shaw, on the other hand, confesses that his mother wit has many times saved him from the stake’s modern equivalent.” The heretic, the reformer, the prophet, the revolutionary must always march ahead of the times, never with them. That is their function. And if they are successful they will be duly stoned, burnt, hanged, imprisoned, or banned, according to the age and place they live in. Nor will they escape these fates unless they happen to possess, as Shaw possesses, in addition to disturbing visions and iconoclastic zeal, the specific artistic talent of the mountebank. Then they will be spared, as Shaw has been spared, because the mountebank’s amusing antics divert the mob’s attention from the reformer’s dangerous preachings. Maurice Colbourne, The Real Bernard Shaw (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1940) 134
R.F. Rattray, Bernard Shaw: A Chronicle (London: The Leagrave Press, 1951) 237.
Maurice Valency, The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of George Bernard Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 429.
Warren Sylvester Smith, Bishop of Everywhere: Bernard Shaw and the Life Force (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982) 31.
Quoted in Carl H. Mills, “Shaw’s Superman: A Reexamination.” Critical Essays on George Bernard Shaw. Ed. Elsie B. Adams (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991) 134.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library Edition, 2000) 784.
Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002) 106.
Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) 173.
Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View (Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1984) 83.
The Dionysian theme is strong throughout, but especially at the close of the second act when Barbara, having lost her faith, remains desolately behind while Cusins and Undershaft march off the stage in a swelling of Bacchic musical ecstasy. Shaw was influenced by the translator of Euripides Gilbert Murray at this time, but this is also probably Shaw’s most Nietzschean play. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell is also a major source for the play, and so Barbara’s new religion, no longer recognizing evil—“there is no wicked side: life is all one” (vol. 1, 444)—will involve a marriage of heaven and hell, Undershaft representing the hellish influence throughout. See Margery M. Morgan, The Shavian Playground: An Exploration of the Art of George Bernard Shaw (London: Methuen, 1972) 134–57.
Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite. Major Critical Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1931) 249.
Barbara Bellow Watson, “Sainthood for Millionaires.” Bernard Shaw’s Plays. Ed. Warren Sylvester Smith (New York: Norton, 1970) 359.
Bernard Shaw, “Sixty Years of Fabianism.” Fabian Essays: Jubilee Edition. Ed. Bernard Shaw (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948) 224–28.
Bernard Crick, “Shaw as Political Thinker, or the Dogs that did not Bark.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies Volume Eleven: Shaw and Politics. Ed. T.F. Evans (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991) 27.
“Shaw cherished a photograph of Djerjinski which is still on display at Shaw’s Corner, Ayot St Lawrence.” Bernard Shaw, The Rationalization of Russia. Ed. Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964) 132
Not all critics are in denial about the radical nature of Shaw’s solutions to certain social problems. In his discussion of Caesar and Cleopatra Louis Crompton admits and defends Shaw’s view that unredeemable criminals, like dangerous wild animals, should be killed. See Louis Crompton, Shaw the Dramatist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969) 71–72.
Gareth Griffith, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw (London: Routledge, 1993) 130.
Maurice Valency, The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of George Bernard Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 426.
Stuart E. Baker, Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion: A Faith that Fits the Facts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
Bernard Shaw, “The Transition to Social Democracy.” Fabian Essays: Jubilee Edition. Ed. Bernard Shaw (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948) 186–87.
Shaw writing to Henry James, January 1909, Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1898–1910. Ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972) 827–28.
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© 2013 Matthew Yde
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Yde, M. (2013). From Hell to Heaven: Creative Evolution and the Drive toward the Military-Industrial-Religious Complex: Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara. In: Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330208_4
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