Man and Superman

by George Bernard Shaw

Overview

One of Shaw's finest and most devilish comedies, Man and Superman portrays Don Juan as the quarry instead of the huntsman. John Tanner, upon discovering that his beautiful ward plans to marry him, flees to the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where he is captured by a group of rebels. Tanner falls asleep, and dreams the famous "Don Juan in Hell" sequence, which features a sparkling Shavian debate among Don Juan, the Devil, and a talkative statue. With its fairy-tale ending and a cast literally from hell, Man and Superman is a hilarious cocktail of farce, Nietzschean philosophy, and Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625580610
Publisher:	Start Publishing LLC
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	136
File size:	247 KB

About the Author

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is one of the world’s greatest literary figures. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he left school at fourteen and in 1876 went to London, where he began his literary career with a series of unsuccessful novels. In 1884 he became a founder of the Fabian Society, the famous British socialist organization. After becoming a reviewer and drama critic, he published a study of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen in 1891 and became determined to create plays as he felt Ibsen did: to shake audiences out of their moral complacency and to attack social problems. However, Shaw was an irrepressible wit, and his plays are as entertaining as they are socially provocative. Basically shy, Shaw created a public persona for himself: G.B.S., a bearded eccentric, crusading social critic, antivivisectionist, language reformer, strict vegetarian, and renowned public speaker. The author of fifty-three plays, hundreds of essays, reviews, and letters, and several books, Shaw is best known for Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

Dan H. Laurence (series editor; 1920–2008) was series editor for the works of George Bernard Shaw in Penguin. Formerly a New York University faculty member, Mr. Laurence left his tenured position in 1970 to dedicated his life to the collection and curation of Shaw's life, work, and letters. He served as the official literary advisor to Shaw's estate and published four volumes of his correspondence.

Stanley Weintraub (introducer) teaches at the Institute of Arts and Humanistic Studies at Penn State University.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 10 Up-Based on the Don Juan theme and, using all the elements from Mozart's Don Giovanni, Shaw reordered them so that Don Juan becomes the quarry instead of the huntsman.

School Library Journal

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“[Shaw] did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity.” —Thomas Mann
 
“Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles, questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe from him.” —Michael Holroyd
 
“In his works Shaw left us his mind. . . . Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense.” —The Sunday Times
 
“He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr. Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade.” —The Independent
 
“His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity, but they were also hits—and still are.” —The Daily Mail

From the Publisher

Shaw’s comic, intellectual masterpiece concerns a descendant of Don Juan Tenorio, who is pursued by a woman he loves but doesn’t like. The story is explicated in a dream--a conversation in hell between Juan, a very charming Satan and two other characters. Sir Peter Hall has directed a distinguished cast in the whole magilla which features witty musical bridges based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The ensemble gives us a lusciously droll performance, which highlights the intellectual vigor of the playwright’s wittily presented ideas. They show off what Shaw did best, namely, making ideas dramatic, arresting and funny. Nearly stealing the show, John Wood plays the Spanish/Jewish brigand, Mendoza, who appears in the dream as Satan. His sense of mischief mirrors the playwright’s own. Y.R. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 98 - AudioFile