Man and Superman Study Guide

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, and political activist. He is known primarily for his comedies, which simultaneously examined high intellectual and moral issues. He was born in 1856 in Dublin and grew up in a musical atmosphere—his mother was a talented mezzo-soprano and would host gatherings of other musicians, including her teacher George John Lee, a well-known figure on Dublin’s music scene. Following a lackluster experience in school, Shaw found work as a junior clerk at a land agents’ firm in Dublin 1871, where he worked for several years. Lee moved to Dublin in 1873, and Shaw’s mother and two sisters followed shortly thereafter, ostensibly for financial reasons, leaving Shaw to live with his father. Shaw moved to London following his sister’s death from tuberculosis in 1876. Around this time, he began attending meetings with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and reading the works of Karl Marx. Shaw joined the Fabian Society, a socialist organization, in 1884 and published the grouop’s manifesto the following year. He would go on to write and edit several essays for the society. Some of Shaw’s political views are often characterized as controversial or contradictory—though he condemned anti-Semitism, for instance, he was not overtly critical of Hitler’s rise to power. Shaw’s writing career picked up in the 1880s with the publication of two novels and his takeover as art critic of The World, a weekly paper. He served as theatre critic for The Saturday Review in the 1890s. Shaw’s first commercial success as a playwright was the satirical comedy Arms and the Man (1894), though it was panned by critics. His career as a playwright took off around the turn of the century with Caesar and Cleopatra, which premiered in 1899; and with Major Barbara and Man and Superman, both of which premiered in 1905. His most successful play, Pygmalion, premiered in Vienna in 1913. Shaw continued to write into his 90s and remained in the public eye, though he moved from London to Ayot St. Lawrence, a country village in the south of England, following the death of his wife Charlotte in 1943. He died there in 1950, at the age of 94.  

Man and Superman was published in 1903 at the beginning of the Edwardian era in England, which began in 1901, following the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Victorian era. Shaw’s play evokes a changing culture in which the social norms that defined Victorian England gave way to a new, more socially permissive culture. Man and Superman evokes this changing culture, which saw older social norms clash with new ideals concerning everything from politics to social reform and family life. In Man and Superman, Ann Whitefield’s (albeit feigned) subservience to her father’s will reflects the importance of parental authority in the Victorian era. Roebuck Ramsden’s stated progressive ideals reflect the Victorian era’s emphasis on social reform and improvement, which carried into the Edwardian era. The busts he keeps in his office are of John Bright and Herbert Spencer—amen whose ideas shaped and defined some of the emerging ideas of the previous century. Herbert Spencer’s bust reflects emerging ideas the areas of in science and industry, though Spencer’s legacy is for more controversial—the English sociologist and philosopher is today best known for coining the expression “survival of the fittest,” a sociological take on Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Spencer’s ideas contributed to the broader pseudoscientific field of social Darwinism, which applies Darwin’s concept of biological natural selection to the social sphere and has given rise to a number of vile racist and otherwise problematic ideologies, among them Nazism. The Quaker John Bright was a British Radical and Liberal Statesman. He is best known for fighting the Corn Laws, a series of tariffs on imported food and corn. These tariffs benefited landowners at consumers’ expense as the tariffs raised food prices and benefited landowners’ interests. They went into effect in 1815 and were repealed in 1846.

Shaw is considered one of the most important playwrights of the 20th century, and he boasts an extensive body of work. Other of Shaw’s plays published or premiered around the time of Man and Superman (published 1903, premiered 1905) include Major Barbara and The Doctor’s Dilemma. Major Barbara follows an idealistic young woman named Barbara Undershaft and examines the morality of poverty. The Doctor’s Dilemma considers the moral predicaments posed by poverty and limited medical resources. The  “Superman” of Man and Superman refers to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch (alternately translated as the “overman” or Übermensch). Nietzsche develops this concept in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (first published in German as Also sprach Zarathustra in four volumes between 1883 and 1885). Nietzsche’s work of philosophical fictions explores concepts central to Nietzschean philosophy, including the death of God, the will to power, and eternal recurrence.  Finally, Man and Superman is Shaw’s adaptation of the Don Juan legend, which first appeared in the 1630 Spanish play El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina (1630). The first adaptation of the story written in English was Thomas Shadwell’s play The Libertine (1676). Other notable literary interpretations of the Don Juan story include German Gothic author E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story Don Juan (1812) and Lord Byron’s epic poem Don Juan (1821).