Man and Superman and Three Other Plays
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dz Long live the females! / Long live good wine! (Italian); from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
ea Sustenance and glory / Of humankind (Italian); from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
eb The quote is from Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, the final chorus; the lines describe Heaven.
ec Shakespeare is the poet, Hamlet the speaker (act 2, scene 2).
ed Short-term savings account.
ee Shaw updated this to “the electric chair” in a later edition.
ef Shaw changed this to “animalism” in a later edition.
eg Greek comic dramatist (c.448-380 B.C.), in his play The Birds.
eh Apolitical person; political fence-sitter.
ei In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, the latter falsely claims to have seduced the former.
ej In these lines, Shaw lays out his sense of the Devil as the destroyer of will and purpose.
ek Adapted from the first stanza of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850): “I held it truth, with him who sings / To one clear harp in divers tones, / That men may rise on stepping-stones / Of their dead selves to higher things.”
el “Koheleth” is the Hebrew word, translated into Greek as Ecclesiastes (the Preacher), which names the Old Testament book from which the saying comes (Ecclesiastes 1:9): “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (KJV).
em Vanity of vanities (Latin), a key phrase in the biblical book Ecclesiastes (chapters 1 and 12).
en Said by Edgar in King Lear (act 3, scene 4).
eo John Tyndall delivered a heterodox speech on religion and evolution in 1874.
ep Cavalry regiment charged with guarding the British monarch’s life.
eq From Mozart’s Don Giovanni, when the Statue commands the Don to repent three times and is thrice refused.
er Shaw later revised this to Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House,” a poem that idealized woman.
es Not only the characters but the audience and the cosmos as well are laughing at Tanner’s destiny.