d and commits suicide; and the
man goes straight from her funeral to a fencing match. No doubt Nature,
with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of scheming:
Prospero knows that he has only to throw Ferdinand and Miranda together
and they will mate like a pair of doves; and there is no need for
Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady doctor in All's Well That Ends
Well (an early Ibsenite heroine) captures Bertram. But the mature
cases all illustrate the Shakespearian law. The one apparent exception,
Petruchio, is not a real one: he is most carefully characterized as
a purely commercial matrimonial adventurer. Once he is assured that
Katharine has money, he undertakes to marry her before he has seen her.
In real life we find not only Petruchios, but Mantalinis and Dobbins who
pursue women with appeals to their pity or jealousy or vanity, or cling
to them in a romantically infatuated way. Such effeminates do not count
in the world scheme: even Bunsby dropping like a fascinated bird into
the jaws of Mrs MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of
pity and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself
dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I have no
more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just as Woman did
in the plays of Shakespear.

And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the
tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the
quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense
of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which
finally overtakes him. The woman's need of him to enable her to carry
on Nature's most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his
resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw
away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and
dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far
transcends their mortal personal purposes.

Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some
of our own sex who are shocked at the "unscrupulousness," meaning
the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman
pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as
fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the
race. Is there anything meaner then to throw necessary work upon other
people and then disparage it as unworthy and