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

subtitled the play “A Mystery” for a number of reasons. One reason was that he intended Candida as his equivalent to the Virgin Mother of medieval and Renaissance paintings. Another was because in the Middle Ages a mystery play was a play that celebrated one of the many mysteries of faith—for example, how a virgin could also be a mother. Such plays were sponsored by one of the town guilds of craftsmen—that is, men who had mastered a particular craft or mystery, such as wheelmaking.
    A quarter century after the play was written, some students at Rugby wrote to Shaw in order to discover the secret in the poet’s heart. Shaw wrote back to them—he was always kind and considerate to children, as childless people like himself so seldom are—inviting them to submit their theories. Their proposals, charmingly articulated, ranged from the cliché that Eugene wanted to put “an end to his miserable existence,” to the ridiculous suggestion that Eugene planned to come back after Morell was dead, to the impertinent, “There is no secret, and it is only mentioned for the purpose of puzzling the reader.” Shaw was much amused and replied in a mock lament for the vanished spirit of Rugby. He dubbed all the proposals “wrong” and “pure sob stuff,” except for that of the “soulless wretch” who called the secret “a spoof secret.” He explained patiently that he meant the poet to be going to meet his writer’s destiny, into the night where “domestic comfort and cuddling” have no place. He ends by deferring his authorial authority: “It is only my way of looking at it; everybody who buys the book may fit it with an ending to suit his own taste.” So he returns the play to the realm of mystery again.
    But the secret in the poet’s heart is not the only mystery in the play. In truth, it is full of mysteries of all sorts, most of them revolving around Candida’s character, motivation, and inner life. How is it that Candida’s father, Burgess, speaks like an uneducated man with a thick local accent (which Shaw phonetically reproduces), while Candida herself talks grammar and speaks beautifully with no discernable accent? Why does Candida love and marry such a foolish man who knows himself so little? When she becomes so distracted while listening to Eugene recite his poetry, is it because the poetry is jejune or because she cannot really appreciate the poetry? Who imagined a spiritual resemblance between Candida and Titian’s Virgin of the Assumption and hung an autotype of her on the wall in homage to Candida? What does Candida mean when she says to her husband that if she knew she would prevent Eugene’s learning about sexual love from a prostitute by teaching him herself, she would do so as willingly as she would give her “shawl to a beggar dying of cold”—that is, if her love for her husband were not there to restrain her? (After hearing Shaw read the play aloud, Shaw’s socialist friend and co-founder of the Fabian Society, Beatrice Webb, called Candida “a sentimental prostitute.”)
    Many have fallen under the mysterious spell of Shaw’s idealized virgin mother, the epitome of womanly grace in strength, simultaneously both a husband’s fantasy figure of a wife and a boy’s Oedipal dream-mother. Indeed, Vladimir Nabokov fell under her spell, for though he found little to value as literature in modern drama, he made an exception (in his essay “The Tragedy of Tragedy”) of “Shaw’s brilliant farces, (especially Candida).” No doubt its depiction of an amorous affiliation between an eighteen-year-old poet and a thirty-three-year-old married woman particularly engendered admiration in the author of Lolita. The playwright who succeeded Shaw in dominating British theater during the 1940s and ‘5os, Terence Rattigan, named seven Shaw plays as the most popular