Man and Superman [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONIn a cartoon by Max Beerbohm about Man and Superman, the Danish critic Georg Brandes asks Bernard Shaw what he would take for his modey clothes, and Shaw answers, 'Immortality.' The sophisticated Brandes scoffs, 'Come, I've handled these same goods before! Coat, Mr. Schopenhauer's; waistcoat, Mr. Ibsen's; trousers, Mr. Nietzche's ''Ah,' counters Shaw, 'but look at the patches!' And the patches are a collection of other influential writers to whom Shaw was allegedly indebted. Beerbohm's mockery failed to disturb Shaw. He would write, in the preface to another play, 'I did not cut these cerebral capers in mere inconsiderate exuberance. I did it because the worst convention of the criticism of the theatre current at that time was that intellectual seriousness is out of place on the stage____My answerto all this was to put all my intellectual goods in the shop window under the sign of Man and Superman. By good luck and acting, the comedy triumphed on the stage 'He began the scenario in July 1901, determined not only to write a play that would be for all seasons, but one that would encapsulate the new century's intellectual inheritance. 'Accordingly,' he wrote,' I took the legend of Donjuán in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable.' He also took some of his Don Juan from Lord Byron's verse satire, where the alleged philanderer is not the pursuer, but the pursued, a concept Shaw also attributed to 'Shakespearean law,' where 'the woman always takes the initiative.' From the Victorian comedy fashionable in Shaw's earliest days he took the twin themes of love and money, giving one heroine an inheritance but not the man she wants to share it with her, and the other the man, but not the money his father wants to withhold if he marries the wrong woman.'I should make formal acknowledgment,' he wrote in his preface to the play, 'to the authors I have pillaged in the following pages if I could recollect them all.' His 'brigand-I