Shaw's Don Juan in Hell and Schiller's Die Rauber
Was it a slip, or only a coincidence, that as Bernard Shaw was anticipating the publication of Man and Superman in January 1903, he addressed a letter to his new German translator, the Viennese journalist Siegfried Trebitsch, as "My Dear Trebitsch-Spiegelmann"—or "Mirrorman"? It seems a brief glimpse into the complexities of the creative mind, for the play was announced by Shaw as his reworking of Mozart's Don Giovanni, with some Mephistophelian adaptations from Goethe and Gounod. Something seems missing. "Spiegelmann" suggests a recent reading of Schiller.
Possibly the most striking character in Shaw's play, emerging in Act 3 and metamorphosed in its "Dream Interlude" into a quick-witted, Faustian Devil, is Mendoza, the brash and cosmopolitan Jewish brigand, who seems to echo the scruffy but boastful Jewish highwayman Moritz Spiegelberg in Friedrich Schiller's first play, The Robbers (1781).1 Perhaps to deflect such suspicions that Mendoza and much else is borrowed from Schiller, Shaw offers an alternative confession in the preface to his play: "The theft of the brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate." But for Mendoza's operating out of the mountains of Spain, rather than Germany, the Conan Doyle connection seems superficial. His bourgeois poet-brigand El Cuchillo appears in The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896). "I thought nothing of Sherlock Holmes," Shaw claimed to his biographer Hesketh Pearson in the 1930s, "but the Brigadier Gerard stories were first rate."
Advising young Golding Bright, source of the only "boo" from the audience at the premiere of Arms and the Man in 1895, on theatrical matters, Shaw had suggested, among other recommendations, "Read all of Goethe's plays and a lot of Schiller's." Presumably he had already taken his own advice, but as a prodigal son melodrama, Die Räuber seems not to have generated any special interest in Shaw.2 He had long read Schiller, and referred to him often, sometimes unfavorably. The [End Page 393] only play by Schiller that Shaw saw on stage was Maria Stuart (1800), starring the great Adelaide Ristori, in a performance which impressed him enough that decades later he was still quoting its lines and recalling some of its scenes.
More negatively, Shaw would claim that his Saint Joan rescued the Maid from Schiller's "romantic nonsense" in Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), "which has not a single point of contact with the real Joan, nor indeed with any mortal woman that ever walked this earth." (Schiller's improbable Joan dies on the battlefield and is resurrected.) Yet Shaw admired Schiller's powerful Wallenstein (1799), and would write to Trebitsch a week after his earlier letter, much as he often referred wryly to Shakespeare: "Remember that though we may be no bigger men than Goethe and Schiller, we are standing on their shoulders, and should therefore be able to see farther & do better. And after all, Schiller is only Shaw at the age of 8, and Goethe [only] Shaw at the age of 32. This, by the way, is the highest compliment ever paid to Goethe." It seemed no compliment to Schiller.
Shaw owed something to Goethe in Man and Superman, as he made clear in his preface to the play. His leading lady, Ann Whitefield, intended as an embodiment of vitality, was his Ewig-Weibliche, or Eternal Feminine, out of Goethe, and his concept of Man at his best as endlessly striving for an unattainable but insistent perfection, was his equivalent to Goethe's sense of unending quest in Faust. "As our German friend put it in his poem," Don Juan quotes Goethe to Ana, the dream equivalent to the frame-play's Ann, "the poetically nonsensical here [in the luxurious Shavian Hell] is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us upward and on—without getting us a step further." In...
