Man and Superman (The Shaw library)

by George Bernard Shaw (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1988

  $11.95

  Man and Superman shows Shaw's wit at its most brilliant and his speculations at their boldest.The play, as Shaw explains in the preface, is on the Don Juan theme. Taking all the ingredients of the legend, as used by Mozart in Don Giovanni, Shaw reordered them to write a four-act play in which, characteristically, he turned the story on its head so that Don Juan becomes 'the quarry instead of the huntsman'. While Man and Superman contains high comedy of the order of Congreve, it is also a powerful drama of ideas in which Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society and his theory of Creative Evolution, a theme to which he returned twenty years later in his great dramatic cycle Back to Methuseleh.

• Used

  Paperback
  1946

  $3.43

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $11.65

  Shaw began writing MAN AND SUPERMAN in 1901 and determined to write a play that would encapsulate the new century's intellectual inheritance. Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this powerful drama of ideas, Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society, and his theory of Creative Evolution. As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction, this is the first great twentieth-century English play and remains a classic expose of the eternal struggle between the sexes.