Man and Superman - Softcover

Shaw, Geirge Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 150050811X ISBN 13: 9781500508111

Verlag: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

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 it omitted the third 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. Mr. Whitefield has recently died, and his will indicates that his daughter Ann should be left in the care of two men, Roebuck Ramsden and Jack Tanner. Ramsden, a venerable old man, distrusts Jack Tanner, an eloquent youth with revolutionary ideas, saying "He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad".[3] In spite of what Ramsden says, Ann accepts Tanner as her guardian, though Tanner doesn't want the position at all. She also challenges Tanner's revolutionary beliefs with her own ideas. Despite Tanner's professed dedication to anarchy, he is unable to disarm Ann's charm, and she ultimately persuades him to marry her, choosing him over her more persistent suitor, a young man named Octavius Robinson. Although Man and Superman can be performed as a light comedy of manners, Shaw intended the drama to be something much deeper, as suggested by the title, which comes from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical ideas about the "Übermensch" (although Shaw distances himself from Nietzsche by placing the philosopher at the very end of a long list of influences). As Shaw notes in his "Epistle Dedicatory" (dedication to theatre critic Arthur Bingham Walkley) he wrote the play as "a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life".[5] The plot centres on John Tanner, author of "The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion", which is published with the play as a 58-page appendix. Both in the play and in the "Handbook" Shaw takes Nietzsche's theme that mankind is evolving, through natural selection, towards "superman" and develops the argument to suggest that the prime mover in selection is the woman: Ann Whitefield makes persistent efforts to entice Tanner to marry her yet he remains a bachelor. As Shaw himself puts it: "Don Juan had changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House and asserting herself as an individual". This is an explicit, intended reversal of Da Ponte's Don Giovanni; here Ann, representing Doña Ana, is the predator — "Don Juan is the quarry." Ann is referred to as "the Life Force" and represents Shaw's view that in every culture, it is the women who force the men to marry them rather than the men who take the initiative. Sally Peters Vogt proposes, "Thematically, the fluid Don Juan myth becomes a favorable milieu for Creative Evolution," and that "the legend...becomes in Man and Superman the vehicle through which Shaw communicates his cosmic philosophy"

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About the Author:

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He was also an essayist, novelist and short story writer.

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• Verlag: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• ISBN 10: 150050811X
• ISBN 13: 9781500508111
• Einband: Paperback
• Anzahl der Seiten: 234