Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy

Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, a play by Bernard Shaw, first published 1903, first performed (without Act III) in 1905 by the Stage Society at the Court Theatre.

The play is Shaw's paradoxical version of the Don Juan story, in which his hero, John Tanner (Don Juan Tenorio), witty ideologue and author of the Revolutionist's Handbook (a work which appears in full as an appendix to the play), is relentlessly if obliquely pursued by Ann Whitefield, who is more interested in him as a potential husband than she is in his political theories. Ann has been entrusted as ward by her dead father jointly to Tanner and to the elderly respectable Ramsden, who expects her to marry the devoted and poetic Octavius. Tanner is made aware of Ann's intentions by his chauffeur, Straker (the New Man of the polytechnic revolution), and flees to Spain whither he is pursued by Ann and her entourage, which includes her mother and Octavius's sister Violet, who demonstrates, through a matrimonial subplot, the superior force of women. Act III consists of a dream sequence set in hell in which Tanner, captured by the brigand Mendoza, becomes his ancestor Don Juan, Mendoza the Devil, Ramsden ‘the Statue’, and Ann becomes Ana: in one of Shaw's most characteristic ‘Shavio-Socratic’ debates, the four characters discuss the nature of progress, evolution, and the Life Force, the Devil arguing powerfully that man is essentially destructive, and Don Juan arguing for the saving power of ideas and rational effort, for the philosopher as ‘nature's pilot’. In the last act Ann achieves her object; the play ends with the announcement of their impending marriage and Tanner's submission to the Life Force.

The concept of the Life Force bears some similarity to Bergson's ‘élan vital’, although Shaw was not at the time familiar with Bergson's work: the echo in his ‘Superman’ of Nietzsche's ‘Übermensch’ (Also sprach Zarathustra) is, however, deliberate.