The Cosmology of Man and Superman

THE COSMOLOGY OF MAN AND SUPERMAN IN 1921 SHAW STATED THAT Man and Superman was his major attempt before Back to Methuselah to write a play that would be a contribution . towards a modern religion. But the new religion in Man and Superman went unnoticed, he said, because it was confined to one part of the work and obscured by the rest. "I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable of Creative Evolution. But being then at the height of my invention and comedic talent, I decorated it too brilliantly and lavishly. I surrounded it with a comedy of which it formed only one act, and that act was so completely episodical (it was a dream which did not affect the action of the piece) that the comedy could be detached and played by itself."l This view, that the religious element in Man and Superman is to be found in one detachable scene-the Hell Scene-has been the prevalent one over the years.2 It is my feeling that Man and Superman as a whole, including both the Hell Scene and the closely related Comedy, is much more of a religious drama than is usually recognized, and that a view of the relationship between hell, heaven and earth underlies the whole of Man and Superman and unites it. The key to the symbolic nature of the play is in the Hell Scene. In the Hell Scene, hell and heaven are metaphors for opposing sets of values governing the way in which life is lived on earth. The frontier between hell and heaven, the Statue tells Don Juan, is "only the difference between two ways of looking at things," and earlier in the scene the Devil explains to Dona Ana that the "great gulf fixed" between heaven and hell is "the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament."8 The difference between these temperaments or sets of values has to do with attitudes towards the improvement of life on earth. The diabolic point of view is based on the assumption that no improvement is possible. As the Statue says near 1 Preface to Back to Methuselah (London: Constable, 1949), lxxxiv. 2 Eric Bentley discusses the Hell Scene and the remaining part of the play separately in different sections of his influential Bernard Shaw (New York: New Directions, 1957), calling the three-act Comedy (Acts I, II and IV) Man and Superman and arguing that it is essentially a Victorian farce. An examination of Man and Superman that does stress connections between the Hell Scene and the Comedy is Frederick P. W. McDowell, 'Heaven, Hell, and turn-of-the-century London: Reflections upon Shaw's Man and Superman,' Drama Survey, II, No.3 (Feb. 1963), 245-268. 3 Man and Superman (London: Constable, 1947), 129, 97. Subsequent references to Man and Superman will be to this edition, with page numbers indioated parenthetically in the text. 298 1971 THE COSMOLOGY OF Man and Superman 299 the beginning of the Hell Scene, "Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself." (93) The nature of the diabolic amusements is indicated in the Devil's speeches, with their repeated references to joy, love, happiness, beauty, warmth of heart, sincere unforced affection, and so on. Hell is the home of the sentimental pleasure seeker who refuses to face the world of solid fact and real problems. Even the pleasures of hell are not actual physical pleasures but the worship of incorporeal abstractions-"sheer imaginative debauchery ," Juan calls it. (91) Hell offers the escape from the real that sentimentalists on earth long for; here romantic ideals are not mocked by physical reality. Conventions are unchallenged. In hell, Juan says, You are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you...