The Shavian Ideal

“Masters and servants are both tyrannical; but the masters are the more dependent of the two.”

THE REVOLUTIONIST’S HANDBOOK AND POCKET COMPANION*
by John Tanner, M.I.R.C. (Member of the Ruling Class)
*published with Man and Superman

Today many literary critics consider Man and Superman George Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece, but in 1903, when Shaw tried to get theaters interested in his new play, no one would put it on the stage. So Shaw bravely published it himself, hoping that the reading public would appreciate his philosophy of sexual war. This was not the only time Shaw’s plays got him into trouble. His works often ignited contentious ill will. The Lord Chamberlain’s office–the British government’s official censor–banned Mrs. Warren’s Profession for thirty years, and the New York Police Department shut down the first American performance.

Now that Shaw has become a pillar of modern drama, audiences find it difficult to conceive of a time when Shaw’s plays outraged decent folk. Yet Shaw was a successful critic long before his plays triumphed. Shaw (1856-1950) left his hometown of Dublin when he was twenty. He moved to London to join his mother and sister, who had fled previously to escape Shaw’s alcoholic father. For the first nine years in London, Shaw floated from one job to another and wrote nothing of consequence.

Shaw’s luck as a writer did not improve until he met William Archer, distinguished critic for The London Times. Finding the young Turk well read and energetic, Archer gave Shaw one of his own jobs as art critic for The World. Not only did this position launch Shaw’s writing career, but it earned him more money in a year than he had earned in his entire stay in England. More importantly, Shaw started to make a name for himself in the republic of letters.

As a critic, Shaw was hard-nosed. He often ruined friendships with his reviews. Shaw and fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde, for example, fell out after Shaw’s virulent attacks on Wilde’s plays. In 1895 Shaw dismissed Wilde’s An Ideal Husband as a silly play fit for audiences who had only “two penn’orth of brains.” Shaw followed this assault with a scathing report on Wilde’s next play, The Importance of Being Earnest. “I cannot say that I greatly cared for The Importance of Being Earnest. It amused me . . . but unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. . . .” That Shaw was perplexed when Wilde cold shouldered him is remarkable since Shaw heartlessly ended the review by accusing Wilde of “stupendous laziness.” Shaw never hid his impudence from the public, and some of his closest friends, such as Ellen Terry, believed that insolence fueled his creativity.

Shaw was an active political man with a socialist agenda. The majority of people who read his articles and listened to him speak–Shaw was a gifted orator–did not agree with his views. Nevertheless, Shaw soldiered on. In accordance with Fabian philosophy, Shaw hoped to revolutionize the political economy of England that oppressed workers through an unequal distribution of the nation’s wealth. Shaw consistently urged the proletariat to question every law and every custom that kept them in their place.

Shaw’s zeal to improve humanity’s lot inspired his art. He believed that the theater could fulfill an important social function by teaching, but the plays that dominated the Victorian stage said nothing about the grim world the audiences lived in. Shaw accused British playwrights of sacrificing seriousness for success, and he targeted melodrama as an example of meaningless popular entertainment that merely diverted the public. In contrast, Shaw’s reviews, political pamphlets, and plays took aim at the “bored Philistinism” that permeated England.

In contrast to the froth that reigned on the British stage, Shaw believed Ibsen was blazing a trail to a new type of drama worthy to be called art. In Shaw’s mind, Ibsen’s plays touched greatness by sparking political and philosophical debate. Using the stage as a forum to cross-examine society, Ibsen showed Shaw how theatre could serve an ideal. Shaw articulated his artistic credo in a letter published at the turn of the century. “It is necessary for the welfare of society,” he wrote, “that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and, generally, to scandalize one’s uncles.”

The most progressive thinkers of his era influenced Shaw’s art: Karl Marx, Nietzche, Wagner, Ruskin, and H.G. Wells. These writers not only gave Shaw intellectual ballast, they also encouraged him to use art as a social weapon.

But Shaw’s first plays, among them Widowers’ Houses (1892) and The Philanderer (1893), had more high jinks than political freight. For the most part, Shaw’s early dramas satirized the frivolity and hypocrisy of the ruling classes. Shaw hit his stride as a playwright with Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), which turns the madam of a bordello into an allegory for the capitalistic exploitation of labor. The more plays Shaw wrote, the more his plays began to suggest solutions to social problems rather than merely pointing out evils. With Man and Superman (1902-3), Shaw strikes the perfect balance between entertainment and intellectual fireworks. The play is both a witty, romantic comedy and an unflinching examination of the lies we tell ourselves about sex.

The genesis of Man and Superman: A Comedy and A Philosophy is unusual. Arthur Bingham Walkley, a rival critic who often needled the playwright, challenged Shaw to write a Don Juan play. Walkley’s dare was a joke, meant to poke fun at Shaw, who was notorious for dalliance. But Shaw took up the gauntlet and wrote a play based on Don Juan, one of the great archetypes of the European imagination.

In his preface to Man and Superman, Shaw writes that Don Juan, Doña Ana, The Statue, and the Devil–the characters in Act IV, “Don Juan in Hell”–had been living in his head for over fifteen years. He was inspired by the long tradition of dramatic works created around the legendary seducer, but with Man and Superman Shaw set out to accomplish something vastly different from his predecessors. In a letter to Ellen Terry he wrote: “And now no more plays–at least no more practicable ones . . . it is time to do something more in Shaw-philosophy, in politics and sociology. Your author, dear Ellen, must be more than a common dramatist.” To escape the fate of “a common dramatist,” Shaw used Don Juan to explore the Life Force that drives human evolution.

Shaw, a student of Darwin’s natural selection, was drawn to Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman (Übermensch), and through Don Juan he sought to dramatize his beliefs about the genetic forces that drive mankind forward. In Act III, Don Juan articulates Shaw’s theory: “as long as I conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence. . . . This is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness and clearer self-understanding.”

“From the Tirso de Molina Burlador de Sevilla to the Mozart-Da Ponte Don Giovanni,” Robert Brustein observes in The Theatre of Revolt, “Don Juan has always been represented as a libertine and seducer who is finally punished by supernatural powers for his various sexual crimes. Shaw, on the other hand, is more attracted to the philosophical implications of the Don Juan story. Since Juan, while pursuing his own desires, inadvertently breaks moral, canon, and statute law, Shaw elects him as the agent of revolutionary Shavianism, envisioning him as a kind of Faustian rebel. . . . By this subtle trick, Shaw manages to ignore the sexual aspect of Don Juan entirely . . . , for he transfers Don Juan’s amorousness to ‘Doña Juana,’ the husband-hunting female.”

Shaw frames his Shavio-Socratic dialogue with, in his own words, “a trumpery story of modern London life, a life in which, as you know, the ordinary man’s main business is to get means to keep up the position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary woman’s business is to get married.” Thus, Shaw in Acts I, II, and IV dips into the grab bag of tricks from classical comedy–mistakes, misunderstandings, and a frantic love chase–to dramatize the economic and biological realities behind the myth of romantic love. In this witty comedy of sexual manners, Shaw reverses the traditional gender roles of male and female. Ann Whitefield, not Jack Tanner, is the sexual predator. Like Don Juan, she is a charming rogue: handsome and hypocritical, bold and manipulative. Cheerfully, she twists convention to her own advantage. Quaking in his boots, Jack, the prey Anne is stalking, expresses his opinion about her to her mother:

Jack: In short–to put it as a husband would put it when exasperated to the point of speaking out–she is a liar. And since she has plunged Tavy head over ears in love with her without any intention of marrying him, she is coquette, according to the standard definition of a coquette as a woman who rouses passions she has no intention of gratifying. And as she has now reduced you to the point of being willing to sacrifice me at the altar for the mere satisfaction of getting me to call her a liar to her face, I may conclude that she is a bully as well. She can’t bully men as she bullies women; so she habitually and unscrupulously uses her personal fascination to make men give her whatever she wants. That makes her almost something for which I know no polite name.

Mrs. Whitefield (in mild expostulation): Well, you can’t expect perfection, Jack.

“Ann, too, seems unconventional only by contrast with an extremely outmoded ideal of feminine behavior,” Brustein notes in The Theatre of Revolt. “She is hardly the ‘dutiful’ daughter that Ramsden thinks her, but neither is she that ‘Lady Mephisto-pheles’ that Tanner speaks of. One has only to compare this charming coquette with Strindberg’s Laura or Ibsen’s Hedda or Chekhov’s Arkadina to see that she has been created not by an antifeminist or a realist or a ‘natural historian,’ but rather by an archfeminist with a powerful admiration for women. Certainly, Ann’s ‘unwomanliness’ is not a fault but a virtue: she tells lies merely in order to win the man she loves. Despite the countless speeches in the play about the ruthlessness of sexual relations, therefore, Man and Superman confronts us not with a tragic combat between ‘the artist-man and the mother-woman’ but rather with a classical opposition between two gifted sex antagonists who, like Benedict and Beatrice or Mirabel and Millamant, are ideally suited for the marriage which inevitably will come.”

Jack Tanner, the prey Ann sets her sights on, is not without his faults. Intelligent, opinionated, impertinent, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Shaw himself, and like Shaw, he uses wit to drive home his radical points. In The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion by John Tanner, appended to Man and Superman, Tanner trumpets forth his political philosophy in a series of maxims:

Royalty
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

Women in the Home
Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.

The Social Question
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty: what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

Wit and political philosophy are Shaw’s stock in trade. What sets Man and Superman apart from Shaw’s other comedies is its unusual and masterful structure. Act I and II waltz along as a romantic comedy with outrageous coincidences and witty sexual duels. Yet once the journey to the Sierra Nevada–where Tanner flees to escape Ann–begins, Shaw transports the audience to a different realm. Shaw leaves behind the conventions of romantic farce. Tanner falls into a bizarre sleep that sends him on a supernatural adventure, and the playwright opens the audience’s imagination up to a magical dream space where we meet Don Juan, a noble philosopher, and his antagonist, the devil. Don Juan believes in a Life Force that is leading humanity onward and upward. The devil dismisses Juan’s idealism as a grandmother’s tale: “You think because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them.” Whereas Juan believes in the amelioration of society, the devil believes in the eternal return of the same sins until the human race will annihilate itself in an orgy of self-destruction. In this Shavian dialectic, no synthesis transcends the rift between hope and despair. Neither the devil nor the don convince each other, and Tanner wakes up to confront the worries and cares of daily life. And in his decision to marry Ann, start a family, and continue to foment revolution in England, we have the comedy’s response to the debate.

Similarly, the romantic comedy of Acts I, II, and IV works as a viable evening in the theater on its own and has frequently been put on without the dream sequence. But only when the two are performed together, can one appreciate the remarkable architecture of Shaw’s design. The worldly comedy of sex and the other-worldly meditation on the Life Force establish a dialogue that dramatizes the tension between Shaw’s optimistic political commitment and his nagging doubts, seeping up from an abyss of futility. Thus Don Juan withdraws from human life into a Platonic realm of contemplation, but John Tanner joins the dance of life with its confusions and compromises.

In 1950, Shaw died at ninety-four. Enigmatic and controversial, Shaw was his own biggest fan: “With the single exception of Homer,” he remarked, “there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear [sic] when I measure my mind against his.” Not everyone would share Shaw’s opinion of himself, but at his best, and Man and Superman is most assuredly Shaw at his best, the pugnacious Irish playwright fulfills his high ideal of theater: plays that instruct morally by making us laugh at ourselves.

Through the years, the American Repertory Theater has successfully staged Shaw’s plays, including Major Barbara (1990), Misalliance (1992), and Heartbreak House (1993), all directed by David Wheeler. Continuing with its tradition of bringing Shaw to Boston audiences, the A.R.T. will present Man and Superman: A Comedy and A Philosophy in May, again directed by Mr. Wheeler. An opportunity to see Man and Superman performed intact with “Don Juan in Hell” is a rare treat as it shows the contradictory genius of Shaw: revolutionary, philosopher, clown.

Michelle Powell is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training.