Maybe Shaw wrote it in a vain effort to rid himself at one fell swoop of all the disquieting doctrines that infested his innards. Into it he unloaded Kropotkin, Noyes, Bakounin, Wilde, Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche, Netschajew, Wagner, Bunyan, Mozart, Shelley, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoi, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Plato—seized them by the heels and heaved them in, with a sort of relieved “God help you!” The result is 281 pages of most diverting farce—farce that only half hides the tumultuous uproar of the two-and-seventy jarring sects beneath it. It is a tract cast in an encyclopedic and epic mold—a stupendous, magnificent colossal effort to make a dent in the cosmos with a slapstick.
Why, all the saints and sages who discuss’d
Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth: their Words to Scorn
Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.
Shaw explains that he wrote the play in response to a suggestion by A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic of the London Times that he should tackle the subject of Don Juan. In his 37-page preface he traces, at length, the process of reasoning which led him to the conclusion that Juan, as he was depicted by the fathers, was a fraud and an impostor. In the business of mating, he says (after Schopenhauer) it is not the man but the woman that does the pursuing. Man’s function in life is that of food-getting. Woman’s is that of perpetuating the race. Hence man’s ordinary occupation is making money, and woman’s is getting married. To protect himself against “a too aggressive prosecution of woman’s business,” he says, man has “set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from him.” But the pretense is so shallow “that even in the theater, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down.”
And so, the hero of this new play, John Tanner (our old friend Juan Tenorio) is the pursued, and Doña Ana (Miss Ann Whitefield) is the pursuer. John is a being of most advanced and startling ideas. He writes a volume called “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion,” full of all sorts of strange doctrines, from praise of the Oneida Community to speculations regarding the probable characteristics of the Superman. He laughs at honor, titles, the law, property, marriage, liberty, democracy, the golden rule and everything else that God-fearing folks hold sacred; he has a good word for Czolgosz; he gives directions for beating children; he curls his lip at civilization; he ventures the view that “every man over forty is a scoundrel.” And then, with all this cargo of nonconformity afloat in his hold, fate sends him sailing into a haven of staunch orthodoxy.
He and Roebuck Ramsden, a gentleman who hangs Herbert Spencer’s portrait on his library wall as a sort of banner of his intellectual modernity, are appointed guardians for Ann, whose papa has just passed away, and John, to protect himself against being caught in ambush by the Life Force, as represented in his ward, endeavors to marry her off to Octavius Robinson, a harmless young man who has lived beneath her father’s roof since his childhood. John is aware of the faults of Ann and has no yearning to be enmeshed in her web. He notices that she is a liar and politely calls her attention to the fact; he observes her pursuit of him and makes open preparations for flight. Finally, in full cry, he runs away in an automobile across Europe. But the Life Force is more powerful than gasoline, and Ann, yielding to its irresistible impulse, follows him—across the English channel, to Dover, and across France toward the Mediterranean. In the Sierra Nevada mountains she brings her game to bay and in old Grenada poor John receives his coup de grace. Thus he sinks to earth:
Tanner. ... The trap was laid from the beginning.
Ann (concentrating all her magic). From the beginning—from our childhood—for both of us—by the Life Force.