Man And Superman

In an epistolary preface to Man and Superman (1903), Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw writes a letter to Arthur Bingham Walkley, his friend and a theatre critic for The Times, who had inspired the play by asking Shaw why he had never written a play based on Don Juan, the legendary fictional Spanish lothario. This presented a particular challenge for Shaw, who had been writing works that challenged the popular romanticism that dominated theatre at the turn of the century. Shaw complied by employing the Don Juan featured in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, a lover-turned-philosopher who has rejected romance in favor of higher thought.

The first performance of Man and Superman in 1905 at the Royal Court Theatre in London did not include the third act; no performance did until 1915. Though subsequent productions have typically omitted the scene, “Don Juan in Hell,” it’s often performed as a separate play. As a whole, Man and Superman questions the nature of love and whether a married man can remain a revolutionary, or if he will stagnate with domestic life. This guide references page numbers from the public domain edition of the text, available on Project Gutenberg.