Comedy and Philosophy in <i>Man and Superman</i>

Abstract

Man and Superman is sub-titled ‘A Comedy and a Philosophy’. Shaw himself, in his discussion of the play and its antecedents in the Epistle Dedicatory addressed to A. B. Walkley, tends to encourage the notion that the comedy and philosophy are largely unrelated entities in the work. He refers to the Dream sequence as something ‘totally extraneous’ to the ‘perfectly modern three-act play’, and compares himself, in his offering Walkley a glimpse of the Mozartian Don Juan and his antagonist in the Dream, to ‘the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to the public eye.’1 But the dramatic artist at work in Man and Superman brings the play and the philosophical Dream into a much more closely integrated relation than this comparison suggests. The play and the Dream are mutually modifying and mutually illuminating, and the ‘philosophy’, that complex amalgam of views on politics, evolution, art, the relations of the sexes, and human nature in general, which emerges from the work, is partly defined in its import and directions by the shape and development of the comic action.