Man and Superman has strong affinities to Mozart's Don Giovanni, the opera on which Shaw based his play. The opera is worth listening to as a way to understand Shaw's use of music and the musicality of the characters' language as well as to enjoy another version of the Don Juan story.

The perennial favorite Pygmalion is a Shaw classic, being the story of a street girl whom, on a bet, a gentleman trains to "pass" in high society by teaching her how to act and speak like a lady.

William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700) is an eighteenth-century comedy of manners centered on a courtship.

Lord Byron's unfinished Don Juan is poem describing the adventures of the lover Don Juan, interspersed with philosophical musings similar to those of Shaw's Don Juan.

Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra presents his...