Describe "Man and Superman" as a Don Juan Play.

Man and Superman, the most significant philosophical play of G.B. Shaw is a Don Juan play where he takes up the suggestions of a traditional Don Juan story and makes it to his own ends. Shaw in his drama is seen more attracted to the philosophical implications of the Don Juan story and he portrays Don Juan as the messenger of his philosophical outlooks.

"Man and Superman" as a Don Juan Play:

Don Juan is a type by himself invented by a Spanish monk early in the 16^th century. He is an archetypal character who has passed through different ages. He was represented as an ardent rebel against God and religion. He took arms against a sea of conventional values about morality and ethics. Shaw appears as a veritable iconoclast in his treatment of this conventional Don Juan.

Shaw creditably discarded the type set by his predecessors, and gave the most original and challenging variation of all. His Don Juan has nothing in common with the Byronic libertine. On the contrary, the Shavian Don Juan is out and out philosophical and gifted enough to be exceptionally capable of distinguishing good and evil.

Shaw elects Don Juan in Man and Superman as an agent of revolutionary Shavianism aiming to represent him as a kind of Faustian rebel. Transformed into a messianic idealist and metaphysical saint, Shaw's Don Juan anticipates and predicts the coming of God-defying superman. In Man and Superman, Juan, the philosophic man resolves to discover the ultimate aim of creative evolution-the inner will of the world.

Shaw's Life force is a spiritual power in the universe; it strives to become both all-powerful and all-knowing through its own creations as Don Juan says in the play; "Life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself. Reason for him is predominant; he asserts: ...... To life, the force behind the man, intellect is a necessity, because without it he blunders into death."

Shaw is always philosophical in his literary works and in this drama, he, from his philosophical point of view, describes the men women relation from scientific insight. Don Juan who is the

mouthpiece of Shaw says, "Sexually, woman is the Nature's contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement. Sexually, man is woman's contrivance for fulfilling Nature behest in the most economical way."

Don Juan in Man and Superman is seemed to be an accomplished platform lecturer whose speeches embody the dominant ideas in the play. Shaw's main business in the play is to draw the Life force idea and it is Don Juan who speaks for it all over the play. Like Shaw, Juan's ambition is to spend the rest of his days in profound contemplation which will lead to the ultimate emergence of philosophic man-the superman of the future. And so, we may call the play a Don Juan play with a different outlook from traditional one.