Shaw began writing MAN & SUPERMAN in 1901 & 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 & 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 & his theory of Creative Evolution As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction this is the first great twentieth-century English play & remains a classic expose of the eternal struggle between the sexes