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 strikin… - George Bernard Shaw

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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.