Man and Superman

by Bernard Shaw

Overview

Man and Superman' is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950). The will of the late Mr Whitefield states that his daughter, Ann, is to be left in the care of Roebuck Ramsden and Jack Tanner. Ramsden is a respectable old man who distrusts Tanner, an eloquent gentleman full of revolutionary ideas. Despite Ramsden's protestations, Ann agrees to let Tanner be her guardian and, after a resisting Tanners revolutionary ideas, marries him instead of her persistent admirer, a young man named Octavious Robinson. An engaging and interesting play sure to appeal to discerning drama fans, 'Man and Superman' is a worthy addition to any collection and is not to be missed by fans of Shaw's seminal work. Written in 1903, this book is proudly republished here, complete with a new prefatory biography of the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781447417705
Publisher:	Read Books
Publication date:	07/11/2011
Pages:	271
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 - 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.

Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success. In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award. His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by the late 1920s he had largely renounced Fabian gradualism and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and left-he expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin. In the final decade of his life he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours including the Order of Merit in 1946.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 10 Up-Based on the Don Juan theme and, using all the elements from Mozart's Don Giovanni, Shaw reordered them so that Don Juan becomes the quarry instead of the huntsman.

School Library Journal