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    A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman"
    A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman"
    A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman"
    Ebook37 pages25 minutes

    A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535828031
    A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" - Gale

      3

      Man and Superman

      George Bernard Shaw

      1903

      Introduction

      Subtitled A Comedy and a Philosophy, George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman is a comedy of ideas: its characters discuss ideas such as capitalism, social reform, male and female roles in courtship, and other existential topics in long speeches that resemble arias in an opera. The play’s verbosity makes it unwieldy to produce full scale, so the Epistle in the beginning and the Revolutionist’s Handbook at the end are usually not performed, and the scene in Hell, although containing the bulk of the play’s philosophical musings, is often dropped.

      What is left is basically a light-hearted parlor play demonstrating Shaw’s idea of the Life Force, the force that drives women to pursue a mate in order to attempt to produce a Superman. This theory, along with a theory of eugenic breeding to accompany it, preoccupied Shaw for the rest of his life. The theories expounded in the play are full of contradictions, typical of Shaw’s writing, and critics have devoted countless books and articles to sorting them out. Early critics called the play tedious and dramatically unsound, but today it is considered a landmark in the genre of the idea play.

      Author Biography

      George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, the youngest child of George Carr and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw. His mother was an opera singer and voice trainer; his father was an unsuccessful businessman and alcoholic who could not pull his family out of poverty, in spite of belonging to the genteel class of Protestant Irish gentry. Shaw once described himself as a downstart, one whose family had come down in the world. When Shaw was twenty, he moved to London with his mother. Lucinda earned the family’s living with her music; Shaw wrote five unsuccessful novels and furthered his education through reading. Music was central to his world and would later come to be essential to his

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