Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Read Online Free PDF

seems to confirm Eugene’s implication. The final scene in the play, in which Candida solicits bids for her care from her two wooers, is one of the most suspenseful in dramatic literature, for Shaw has cunningly made us care equally for each of the three actors in the contest so that we do not see how to choose. How Shaw resolves the impasse, the paradox according to which Candida makes her choice, I will leave the reader to delight in discovering.
    I suggested earlier that in moving from Mrs. Warren’s Profession to Candida, Shaw had moved into a different weather system, from a frosty-ironic Ibsenesque climate to a more balmy and clement Shavian one. Nevertheless, Shaw did not discard the Ibsen influence altogether, for in many ways Candida responds to Ibsen’s pre-feminist play A Doll’s House. When at the end of Ibsen’s epoch-making play, his heroine, Nora, walks out of her home and leaves behind her husband and children—in order to fulfill her duty to herself as an individual, to get experience, and to decide for herself what she thinks about life, religion, and morality—she slams shut the door of her house of illusions, her doll’s house, her unreal life. Shaw was so impressed by Ibsen’s courage in making his dramas out of his characters’ struggles with the major social and moral issues of his time that he wrote the first sustained critical examination of Ibsen’s plays both as works of art and as social criticism, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).
    A Doll’s House particularly made its mark on Shaw not only for its bold critique of the restricted roles of women inside the typical respectable middle-class marriage but also because of what Shaw noted as its technical innovation in the art of play-making. For Ibsen, having set up an elaborate situation involving financial fraud and blackmail, does not resolve the crisis in the usual manner, with suicide, but with a discussion between the husband and the wife. Shaw knew that he wanted to do his own version of Ibsen’s critique of modern marriage, and Candida was it. But in Shaw’s version the modern husband suffers as much as the wife from unreality in a marriage based on illusions. Candida reveals that her husband’s public success as a forward-thinking socialist preacher has come at a cost to the women in his family—his mother, his sisters, and his wife—all of whom have guarded him from the quotidian bothers, worries, and responsibilities of life, so that he may win glory and be worshiped in the public arena, a truth the young poet had intuited. Shaw suggests that Morell is as much of a doll living in a doll’s house as any wife. But the revelation does not lead to his exiting the house. Instead the young poet slams the door on domestic solace in favor of pursuing the adventure of his life into the unknown region of poetic ambition. And there Shaw leaves the play poised between the two values of domestic love and a poet’s destiny. The play celebrates but separates the two realms. And they will not be brought back together until several years later in Man and Superman.
    Shaw bases the separation on a mystery, each realm’s unknow ability to the other. The final stage direction tells us that after Eugene leaves, Candida holds out her arms to Morell and “they embrace.” But then Shaw adds a direction only for the readers of the play, “But they do not know the secret in the poet’s heart” (p. 190). Of course, no audience has this stage direction available because it cannot be acted. The secret in the poet’s heart is a secret between the playwright and the reader. It is Shaw’s invitation to the reader to imagine the separate-ness of the realm of the poet, the line he follows out into the unknown night of poetic creation, the mystery of that craft, while the couple’s realm is the circle their arms trace, their embrace, the mystery of marriage. Shaw