Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy

Produced by Eve Sobol





MAN AND SUPERMAN

A COMEDY AND A PHILOSOPHY

By Bernard Shaw




EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY

My dear Walkley:

You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with
which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this
time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived:
here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit
per se. Its profits, like its labor, belong to me: its morals, its
manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to
justify. You were of mature age when you made the suggestion; and you
knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of
the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets,
made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by
making it a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you
cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion.
You meant me to epater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer
him to you as the accountable party.

I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall
suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The
fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such
becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and
comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do
grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately
Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your
chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that
new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event
its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its
portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum
into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not
allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the
most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this
is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was
at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When
I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of
twentieth century tumbrils.

However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not
be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero's
mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let
me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it
is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but
explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable,
fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a
reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the
temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt
that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public
distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none
the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is
always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who
discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty.
The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your
wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic
temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the
cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. 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.

In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of
our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with
cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents
of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that
I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat
this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough
to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we
have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must
accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people
whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage
laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the
tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful,
we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the
sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is
why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the
countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness
to our childish theatres.