Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Read Online Free PDF Page A

darker human impulses to dominate the more genial ones. For example, Frank woos Vivie by playing a fantasy-game with her in which the two imagine themselves as the Babes in the Wood covered with leaves. What Shaw would later convert into the ridiculousness of human romantic impulse he here makes ironically sinister: The Babes in the Wood of legend were young brother and sister orphans whose bodies, after the two children were abandoned in the Wood and starved to death, were covered in strawberry leaves by the birds. Frank’s invitation to Vivie to get covered with leaves, therefore, suggests that their potential sexual relations would be a perverse death for Vivie. But Shaw simply did not have the gloomy Norwegian’s relentless appetite for unrelieved irony and darkness, though he admired the depths of human nature Ibsen’s genius allowed him to reach.

CANDIDA
    After Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Shaw’s next four plays, including Candida (completed in 1894), more truly expressed his individual nature, personality, and idiosyncratic view of life. Shaw would later group Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written in 1893) with Widowers’ Houses and The Philanderer as “unpleasant plays.” He grouped Candida with Arms and the Man (1894; a satire of war as a force inimical to romance and sexuality), The Man of Destiny (1895; a one-act play about Napoleon’s involvement in a romantic intrigue), and You Never Can Tell (1896; Shaw’s response to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest) as “pleasant.” In 1898 he published these works, in two volumes, as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant.
    Like most socialists, Shaw had difficulty recognizing or acknowledging evil in this world—beyond the capitalist system, that is—and the world he creates in his “pleasant plays” is largely devoid of evil and tragedy, though not of sorrow or seriousness. Shaw’s turning away from a preoccupation with evil and death (because neither can be helped) meant turning toward the comic spirit that insists the most important thing about human beings is not that we die, but that men and women are sexually attracted to one another, get married, and produce children—a process Shaw found a boundlessly fecund source of humor.
    However, in the author of Candida one may find still the author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, but as if after a conversion. Where Mrs. Warren’s Profession presents George Crofts as a palpably repulsive “capitalist bully,” Candida portrays Candida’s prosperous father as a genial if scoundrelly businessman. The former acts the villain; the latter plays the comedy figure. With that shift, the banishment of outright evil, the play’s weather system becomes Shavian rather than Ibsenesque. Where Mrs. Warren’s “motherly” kiss of Frank provoked wonder and revulsion, Candida’s embodiment of young motherhood is her sexual attractiveness. And that change makes all the difference in the play’s atmosphere, which is not unpleasant but pleasant. Shaw has not abandoned seriousness, but he has become more his true self, expressing his serious ideas through the genre that suited his personality and temperament, comedy, just as Molière had before him.
    Candida is the wife of a Christian socialist parson, the Reverend James Morell (pronounced “moral”), the mother of three children, and the object of amorous worship by high-strung eighteen-year-old poet Eugene Marchbanks, who enters the Morell household as an invader, unconsciously intent on winning Candida’s affection away from her husband. Eugene’s contesting of Morell’s right to his wife tests the apparent happiness of the marriage, for the reverend finds himself wilting when the young poet imputes smug dullness to him and implies that his wife sees what a fool he is and despises him for it. And he becomes genuinely perturbed when she says something that