Man and Superman

John Tanner is the freest man alive, or so he believes: a wealthy young intellectual, author of the incendiary "Revolutionist's Handbook," a talker of dazzling, exhausting brilliance. He is also, though he is the last to see it, the quarry. The young and outwardly demure Ann Whitefield has decided, with serene and unshakable certainty, that she will marry him — and the whole action of Shaw's comedy is her patient, ruthless, irresistible pursuit of a man who spends four acts insisting he will never be caught.

Named for the legendary seducer Don Juan Tenorio, Tanner is Shaw's great joke: the Don Juan who is hunted rather than the hunter. He flees across Europe in his motor-car; Ann follows; and the machinery of biology and circumstance closes around him until he surrenders, not to love exactly but to something larger than either of them wants to name. The seducer's traditional damnation becomes the comedy of a clever man discovering that all his cleverness is no defence against a woman who has quietly decided his fate.

Man and Superman is the fullest statement of the comedy of ideas Shaw made his own — laughter as the vehicle for argument — and the first full dramatization of his philosophy of the "Life Force" and Creative Evolution: the belief that life itself has a will, striving through human reproduction toward higher being, with woman as its instrument. At its centre sits the famous dream-debate "Don Juan in Hell," a self-contained philosophical interlude — often performed on its own — in which Tanner dreams himself into Hell to argue life, heaven, and purpose with the Devil and the Statue. Around the play Shaw built a long prefatory Epistle and the appended "Revolutionist's Handbook" with its Maxims for Revolutionists; preface, play, and appendix together form one work.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the play in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection at the back.