Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are mo… - George Bernard Shaw

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

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.