Man and Superman and Three Other Plays

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FROM THE PAGES OF
MAN AND SUPERMAN AND THREE OTHER PLAYS

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”

(Mrs. Warren's Profession, page 62)

 

“What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?—as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!” (Mrs. Warren's Profession, page 65)

 

“Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about?”

(Candida, page 144)

 

“God has given us a world that nothing but our own folly keeps from being a paradise.”
(Candida,
page 145)

 

“All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy, shy, shy. That is the world's tragedy.” (Candida, page 150)

 

“Man can climb to the highest summits; but he cannot dwell there long.” (Candida, page 176)

 

“I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller. I don't like beer.” (Candida, page 182)

 

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.”

(
The Devil's Disciple
, page 244)

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.

(Shaw's Epistle Dedicatory to Man
and
Superman, page 302)

 

“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. Good Lord, my dear Ramsden, we are ashamed to walk, ashamed to ride in an omnibus, ashamed to hire a hansom instead of keeping a carriage, ashamed of keeping one horse instead of two and a groom-gardener instead of a coachman and footman. The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.”

(
Man and Superman,
page 345)

 

“I had become a new person; and those who knew the old person laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.”

(Man
and
Superman, page 368)

 

“In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine.”

(
Man and Superma
n
, page 438)

 

“It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrades us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master.” (Man and Superman, page 442)

 

“Marriage is a mantrap baited with simulated accomplishments and delusive idealizations.” (Man
and
Superman, page 453)

 

“An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.”

(
Man and Superman
, page 464)

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Mrs. Warren's Profession
and Candida were first published in 1898, The
Devil's
Disciple in
1901, and
Man and
Superman in 1903.

 

Published in 2004 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, and For
Further Reading.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright © 2004 by John A. Bertolini.

 

Note on George Bernard Shaw, The World of George Bernard Shaw,
Inspired by the Plays of George Bernard Shaw, and Comments & Questions
Copyright © 2004 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics colophon are
trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

Man
and
Superman
and
Three Other Plays

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-067-9 ISBN-10: 1-59308-067-0

eISBN : 978-1-411-43263-5

LC Control Number 2003 1095 I I

 

Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

 

Michael J.
Fine, President & Publisher

 

Printed in the United States of America
QM

3 57 9 10 8 6 4 2

Dramatist, critic, and social reformer George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, into a poor yet genteel Dublin household. His diffident and impractical father was an alcoholic disdained by his mother, a professional singer who ingrained in her only son a love of music, art, and literature. Just shy of his seventeenth birthday, Shaw joined his mother and two sisters in London, where they had settled three years earlier.

There he struggled
^_
and failed—to support himself by writing. He first wrote a string of novels, beginning with the semi autobiographical Immaturity, completed in 1879. Though some of his novels were serialized, none met with great success, and Shaw decided to abandon the form in favor of drama. While he struggled artistically, he flourished politically; for some years his greater fame was as a political activist and pamphleteer. A stammering, shy young man, Shaw nevertheless joined in the radical politics of his day. In the late 188 os he became a leading member of the fledgling Fabian Society, a group dedicated to progressive politics, and authored numerous pamphlets on a range of social and political issues. He often mounted a soapbox in Hyde Park and there developed the enthralling oratory style that pervades his dramatic writing.

In the 1890s, deeply influenced by the dramatic writings of Henrik Ibsen, Shaw spurned the conventions of the stage in “unpleasant” plays, such as Mrs. Warren's Profession, and in “pleasant” ones like Arms
and the Man
and
Candida.
His drama shifted attention from romantic travails to the great web of society, with its hypocrisies and other ills. The burden of writing seriously strained Shaw's health; he suffered from chronic migraine headaches. Shaw married fellow Fabian and Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend.

By the turn of the century, Shaw had matured as a dramatist with the historical drama Caesar
and
Cleopatra, and his masterpieces Man and Superman and Major
Barbara.
In all, he wrote more than fifty plays, including his anti-war
Heartbreak
House and the polemical
Saint Joan,
for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Equally prolific in his writings about music and theater, Shaw was so popular that he signed his critical pieces with simply the initials GBS. (He disliked his first name, George, and never used it except for the initial.) He remained in the public eye throughout his final years, writing controversial plays until his death. George Bernard Shaw died at his country home on November 2, 1950