The long third act of the play, which shows Don Juan himself having a conversation with several characters in Hell, is often cut. Charles A. Berst observes of Act III:
Paradoxically, the act is both extraneous and central to the drama which surrounds it. It can be dispensed with, and usually is, on grounds that it is just too long to include in an already full-length play. More significantly, it is in some aspects a digression, operates in a different mode from the rest of the material, delays the immediate well-made story line, and much of its subject matter is already implicit in the rest of the play. The play performs well without it.Berst, Charles A. (1973). Bernard Shaw and the Art of Drama. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 126
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 Doña Ana (Ann) and the Statue of Don Gonzalo, Ana's father (Roebuck Ramsden) looking on. This third act is often performed separately as a play in its own right, most famously during the 1950s in a concert version, featuring Charles Boyer as Don Juan, Charles Laughton as the Devil, Cedric Hardwicke as the Commander and Agnes Moorehead as Doña Ana.
Review from Library Thing
Bernard Shaw
Man and Superman:
A Comedy and a Philosophy
Penguin Classics, Paperback [2004].
8vo. xix+270 pp. Definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. Preface (1903) and Postscript (1933) by Shaw titled Epistle Dedicatory [pp. 7-38]. Introduction by Stanley Weintraub, 2000 [vii-xiv].
First published, 1903.
First produced, 1905 [without Act III].
Don Juan in Hell presented as a one-act play, 1907.
First produced complete, 1915.
Revised text published in Collected Edition, 1930.
First published by Penguin, 1946.
First published in Penguin Classics, 2000.
Reprinted with a new Chronology, 2004.
Contents
Introduction
Chronology
Epistle Dedicatory: To Arthur Bingham Walkley
Man and Superman:
A Comedy and a Philosophy, 1901–2
Act I: Portland Place, London, Roebuck Ramsden’s Study
Act II: Richmond. The Avenue to Mrs Whitefield’s House
Act III, Scene 1: Evening in the Sierra Nevada
Act III, Scene 2: Beyond Space, Beyond Time
Act III, Scene 3: Early Morning in the Sierra Nevada
Act IV: Granada. The Villa Garden
The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion
by John Tanner, M.I.R.C. (Member of the Idle Rich Class)
I. On Good Breeding
II. Property and Marriage
III. The Perfectionist Experiment at Oneida Creek
IV. Man’s Objection to His Own Improvement
V. The Political Need for the Superman
VI. Prudery Explained
VII. Progress an Illusion
VIII. The Conceit of Civilization
IX. The Verdict of History
X. The Method
Maxims for Revolutionists
Man and Superman [cast list for the premiere]
Principal Works of Bernard Shaw
==============================================
Purely as a play, Man and Superman is a rather mediocre comedy of manners, quite predictable and without a single character left untouched by rigorous stereotyping. Granted the neat construction and the ready wit, many other playwrights could have come up with them in the late nineteenth century, not least the Other Irishman. It is the “philosophy” that makes this work unique. Nobody but Bernard Shaw could have written that.
In his typically concise “Epistle Dedicatory”, mere thirty pages of staggering verbosity, Shaw declares that “most wise men [...] read the play first and the preface afterwards”. I suggest you read it twice, once before and once after the play. Preachy, verbose and long-winded as he is, Shaw is also consistently lucid, amusing and, above all, thought-provoking. It doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with him. You are forced to do some intellectual exercise. Now, this is fun. It might even do you some good.
Shaw, much like his beloved Wagner, has a passion for self-explanation and is gloriously devoid of false modesty. He frankly admits he wrote this “trumpery story of modern London life” because he was appalled at the timid and hypocritical treatment of sexual relations on the English stage. He wanted to expose chiefly two things, the romantic fabrications of the male and the predatory instinct of the female: the former were gross exaggerations, the latter wrongly thought to be non-existent. Accordingly, he invented “characters” to illustrate his points. Trouble is, when you get the point, which you do soon enough, it’s not easy to be interested in these “people”.
Octavius (“Tavy”) is the proverbial poetic soul who worships women as the pinnacle of creation. Nothing can shake his conviction, not even his own part as a dupe which he is smart enough to recognise but too stupid to understand. I rather agree with Shaw’s confession that he took him “unaltered from Mozart”, though I must say I find the rather selfish Don Ottavio more interesting. But this may well be a side effect of the music! As for Ann Whitefield, sort of heroine here, she is a nice study of feminine manipulation, a female relentlessly and hilariously pursuing her chosen male, but except for a few flashes of brilliance towards the end (“Getting over an unfavourable impression is ever so much easier than living up to an ideal.”) she is quite a vacuous creature.
For a presumably feminist writer (“No man is a match for a woman, except with a poker and a pair of hobnailed boots. Not always even then.”), Shaw seems to have, at least in this play, a pretty narrow view of “Woman”. It never seems to occur to him that a woman may pursue a man, not to fulfil “her highest purpose”, but simply because she thinks the sex with him might be enjoyable. Nor does he think that a woman may have intellectual interests of her own. He does blame the misogynistic society for treating women as marriageable furniture, but he doesn’t stop to reflect that plenty of women, from the dawn of history right down to his own times, have quite successfully escaped this fate. Names like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, Caterina Sforza, Elizabeth I, Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Madame de Pompadour, Queen Victoria, Sarah Siddons, Jane Austen, Georges Sand, George Eliot, Lola Montez, Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt and Beatrice Webb, whatever the verdict of history or your personal opinion might be, cannot be accused of being ordinary women by any stretch of the definition.
The protagonist is one John Tanner, nicknamed Don Juan for no reason at all, progressive philosopher and scandalous revolutionist. He is on the stage entirely to shock the others with opinions like “marriage is the most licentious of human institutions: that is the secret of its popularity.” He is by far the preachiest and most irrelevant character of all. I suppose he was the reason for this play to become inflated from a mere “comedy” into the incomparably grander “a comedy and a philosophy”. But you can’t say you haven’t been warned from the beginning. Presumably talking to Mr Walkley, Shaw is typically blunt:
But my conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don’t like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.As a professional propagandist, Shaw knew only too well that “the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book”. Thus Tirso de Molina, a Spanish monk from the seventeenth century, invented a story about a trickster from Seville in order to teach the lesson that dissolute life is punished severely. “The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for tomorrow it may be too late.” But the public at large, far from accepting Don Juan as a cautionary tale, has embraced him as an inspiring example, partly for his conquests at the venereal front, which are the ultimate dream of many a stupid male, partly because of his heroic defying of God, a type of character which has been popular “from Prometheus to my own Devil’s Disciple”.
Among many other things in the preface, Shaw mounts massive attacks on Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare. As usual with him, he blames them for not being propagandists, moralists and philosophers – in short, for not being like him. They “had much to show and nothing to teach”. This is true, of course. It is also missing the point completely, to say the very least. Yet Shaw has plenty of positive things to say about Dickens and Shakespeare; and it would be foolish to dismiss his criticism outright, however outrageous some parts of it may be. A monstrous quotation is due here, but I’m sure you’ll agree it is justified. Brace yourselves and read:
I read Dickens and Shakespeare without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens’s sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear’s pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with light-hearted good humour. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punts his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great ‘stage of fools’ on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work. This is what is the matter with Hamlet all through: he has no will except in his bursts of temper. Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion: they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all Shakespear’s projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own appetites and instincts and humours. Richard III, too, is delightful as the whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make love to the corpse’s widow; but when, in the next act, he is replaced by a stage villain who smothers babies and offs with people’s heads, we are revolted at the imposture and repudiate the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus, Leontes are admirable descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed the play of Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespear’s comedies; but description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the author nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters into which he puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and Prosperos. If these characters are agonizing in a void about factitious melodramatic murders and revenges and the like, whilst the comic characters walk with their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing, you know that the author has much to show and nothing to teach. The comparison between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison between Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a Horatio or ‘Charles his friend’: what they call on the stage a feeder.Shaw admits his debt to Moliere and Mozart, but he would not admit that he borrowed the concept of Don Juan pursued by women from Byron. He is right that Byron’s hero is “not a true Don Juan at all”, as the poet undoubtedly intended, but to say that “Byron’s fragment does not count for much philosophically” is, again, missing the point with a vengeance. Just because a writer does not produce a comprehensive and coherent philosophic system does not mean that he is not a philosopher, still less that his work lacks philosophical depth. The hero of Byron’s Don Juan was Byron himself, and he was quite a match for any previous Don Juan as far as defying everything from common morality to God is concerned. Nevertheless, though I disagree with him, Shaw does suggest an interesting parallel:
Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a bolder poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a bolder king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley.Whom does Shaw admire, if anybody? “Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the English Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own.” He almost made me pick up The Pilgrim’s Progress. Almost. For the record, in the play itself (The Devil speaking), he also destroyed the most famous depictions of Hell and Lucifer in all literature:
Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever succeeded in wading through.The (in)famous Don Juan in Hell sequence, John Tanner’s dream among the brigands of Sierra Nevada which occupies nearly the whole of Act III, has often been staged separately as a one-act play ever since 1907. It is sort of sequel to Don Giovanni (brush up your Mozart, or your Wagner and Goethe for that matter, if you want to get the inside jokes) in which Don Juan meets again the Commendatore (as a statue, of course), whom he has murdered on earth but are now on very friendly terms with, his daughter Donna Ana whom he tried to seduce, and of course The Devil. The four of them have a mighty philosophical discussion that bears little relation to the rest of the play. I doubt it would work well on the stage, but it makes for a magnificent reading. The subject is no less than the destiny of Man.
Don Juan is an unflinching believer in the “Life Force”. This is yet another name of the so-called “Creative Evolution”, a concept which Shaw developed at greater length, as he is the first to recognise in the Postscript to the “Epistle Dedicatory”, some twenty years later in Back to Methuselah. Briefly, Don Juan contends that the Life Force works more or less consciously towards the production of the Man capable of knowing and understanding Nature. The use of this is “to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance.” Common men may be unaware of the Life Force and all the happier for that. But the philosopher is firmly in its grip, he is “possessed with a purpose”. He is the closest approximation, or rather the right way, to the Superman.
Except for the desire to know and understand nature, all this is, of course, pure nonsense. It is funny that a man of Shaw’s formidable intelligence could have believed it, but there is little doubt that he did. Ironically, Shaw was born only three years before the publication of The Origin of Species, the book which once and for all shattered all illusions of purpose in nature, at least as far as life on this planet is concerned. Not that it was impossible to disbelieve the Life Force before 1859, but it had to be done on shaky, non-scientific grounds. After Darwin’s masterpiece, it could be done much less subjectively. But Shaw never did get good marks in science; his notorious crusades against vivisection and vaccination are well-known. Unlike Darwin, who was a scientist par excellence and went where the evidence led him, Shaw had unshakable belief in his own prejudices and bent the evidence to defend them.
But Shaw must nevertheless be given some credit for intellectual honesty. The opposite point of view is clearly presented, if less densely argued, by The Devil. Shaw’s version of Mephisto is less witty, less intellectual and less compelling than Goethe’s Spirit of Negation (“Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint”, I.1338), but that is no reason to neglect his reflections.
The Devil asserts that “men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes.” Ergo, the Life Force, though it may exist, is nothing but a giant pendulum that swings to no ultimate effect whatsoever. To this Juan can answer with nothing but another rhetorical outburst. It sounds as hollow as they come. Juan refuses to believe that this “colossal mechanism” has no purpose. But The Devil is devastating: “None, my friend. You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one.” To this Juan cannot reply at all: he ventures into the perfectly idiotic (but very common, alas) argument that mistakes practical utility for divine purpose. The Devil’s two most deadly blows, as rhetorical yet substantial as anything in the whole play, argue that the Life Force is neither much of a force nor life-affirming at all:
As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.The surest sign of a great work of fiction is that there is nobody for whom to root wholeheartedly. Judged like this, Man and Superman is certainly a great work. I find myself torn between Don Juan and The Devil, and likewise I find Tanner’s progressive views quite a mixed bag. To be sure, the comedy did run away from Shaw, or rather with him in the realms of philosophy, but this is quite acceptable if you can do it that well. The play and the preface are the thing. Still, by way of conclusion, a word about the “bonus tracks”.
In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man’s industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. [...] I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, the electric chair; of the sword and gun and poison gas; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion is, in the words of one character from Act I, “the most infamous, the most scandalous, the most mischievous, the most blackguardly book that ever escaped burning at the hands of the common hangman.” In fact, it is a sort of outline for the next Revolution under the form of 30-page pamphlet, densely packed with detail and not very easy to go through.
Shaw’s general ideas, however, are clear enough. They sound bold, not to say shocking, even today, but it won’t do simply to ignore them. Property is to be abolished, of course, and so is marriage at least in terms of procreation, though as a form of companionship it may remain. Breeding is to be highly selective on eugenic principles. We now know this is much more complicated than they thought in the early twentieth century, but Shaw does have a point. Many people are simply unfit to be parents and must not be allowed to have children. Parenthood should be a subject of rigorous selection. If you need a hard-earned diploma to practice medicine or law, why should you need no hard-proven qualities for the tremendous responsibility of raising children? Of progress and prudery Mr Tanner (or Mr Shaw) does not want to hear, still less patience does he have with democracy: “riff-raff can neither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest bidder of bread and circuses. [...] The overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.”
Finally and significantly, Shaw does recognise that if we are to achieve all this, we must first make some fundamental changes in human nature. We must, that is, build a race of supermen. He is rather vague, however, on the rather important question how we are going to bring that about.
“Maxims for Revolutionists” is a bunch of epigrams by which Shaw intends to show that he can do that stuff just as well as the Other Irishman. Much like “The Preface” of Dorian Gray (1891), this “postscript” contains some dreadfully obvious things:
No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.
He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people’s labour.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
Some pure nonsense:
All men mean well.
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
And some pure wisdom:
The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice in him, however closely the imagination may associate them.
Waldstein | Nov 30, 2017 |
