This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... middle ages. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, is more or less directly engaged in it, and so, when Shaw chooses conspicuous fighters in this war as the chief characters of his plays, he is but demonstrating his comprehension of human nature as it is manifested to-day. In "Man and Superman," for ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... middle ages. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, is more or less directly engaged in it, and so, when Shaw chooses conspicuous fighters in this war as the chief characters of his plays, he is but demonstrating his comprehension of human nature as it is manifested to-day. In "Man and Superman," for instance, he makes John Tanner, the chief personage of the drama, a rabid adherent of certain very advanced theories in social philosophy, and to accentuate these theories and contrast them strongly with the more old-fashioned ideas of the majority of persons, he places Tanner among men and women who belong to this majority. The effect of this is that the old notions and the new--orthodoxy and heterodoxy--are brought sharply face to face, and there is much opportunity for what theater goers call "scenes" --i. e. clashes of purpose and will. In all of the Shaw plays--including even the farces, though here to a less degree--this conflict between the worshipers of old idols and the iconoclasts, or idolsmashers, is the author's chief concern. In " The Devil's Disciple" he puts the scene back a century and a half because he wants to exhibit his hero's doings against a background of particularly rigid and uncompromising orthodoxy, and the world has moved so fast since Darwin's time that such orthodoxy scarcely exists to-day. Were it pictured as actually so existing the public would think the picture false and the playwright would fail in the first business of a maker of plays, which is to give an air of reality to his creations. So Dick Dudgeon, in "The Devil's Disciple" is made a contemporary of George Washington, and the tradition against which he struggles seems fairly real. In each of the Shaw plays you will find a shamsmasher like Dick. In...
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