I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands. - George Bernard Shaw

We must be conventional, Jack, or we are so cruelly, so vilely misunderstood. Even you, who are a man, cannot say what you think without being misunderstood and vilified

There are those who look at things the way they are and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

Shaw’s employment of the language proves no less self-sufficient in this uncostumed and unset “reading” of “Don Juan in Hell.” Yet there is a striking difference. Shaw has no interest in conjuring images to evoke a physical setting. He makes fun of Dante for having described hell as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents. He is equally contemptuous of Milton for having introduced cannon and gunpowder as a means of expelling the Devil from heaven. Shaw’s hell is visually nonexistent. In his own words “there is nothing; omnipresent nothing. No sky, no peaks, no light, no sound, no time nor space, utter void.” There is only somewhere the faint throbbing buzz of a Mozartian strain and a pallor which “reveals a man in the void, an incorporeal but visible man, seated, absurdly enough, on nothing.