Man and Superman.

SHAW, George Bernard.

$3,500.00

Item Number: 132653

Westminster: Archibald and Constable & Co., Ltd, 1903.

First edition of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “To Charles Roebuck Ramsden Goodhart from G. Bernard Shaw 21st May 1905.” In very good condition. Housed in a custom half morocco and chemise box. Rare signed and inscribed.

George Bernard Shaw began writing Man and Superman in 1901 and determined to write a play that would encapsulate the new century's intellectual inheritance. Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this powerful drama of ideas, Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society, and his theory of Creative Evolution. As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction, this is "the first great twentieth-century English play" and remains a classic exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes. Man and Superman was the first drama to be broadcast on the BBC's Third Programme on October 1st, 1946. To celebrate Radio 3's 50th anniversary, the play was directed by Sir Peter Hall,