George Bernard Shaw - The Devil’s Disciple

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in a family belonging to the Irish Protestant gentry. Apart from the musical education he received from his mother, he was practically self-educated. At the age of 20 he went to London and set to work as a novelist. He wrote five novels in all, but none of them made him famous. In 1884 he joined the newly formed Fabian Society, a large society of socialistic intellectuals whose leader he was between 1884 and 1900. He edited Fabian Essays (1887) which was influential in forming socialist opinion in Britain.
Before starting his career as a dramatist, G. B. Shaw wrote much theatre and music criticism for a number of papers. In 1891 he published The Quintessence of Ibsenism, a study on the Norwegian dramatist whose plays of social criticism impressed him very much for bringing a new perspective in drama. In Shaw’s plays though it is the ideas and not the characters that really matter, his characters do not talk in order to define themselves but to make speeches.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925.
His most famous plays are probably: Man and Superman (1903); Major Barbara(1905); Pygmalion(1912); Heartbreak House(1917); other plays: in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant(1898) - Widower’s Houses; in Plays for Puritans(1901) - The Devil’s Disciple; Caesar and Cleopatra; other plays after 1918: The Art Cart; In Good King Charles’s Golden Days.
The Devil’s Disciple, written in 1897, is the first of the Plays for Puritans (published in 1901), followed by Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899).
In order to give his criticism a note of harmlessness, Shaw sets the action of the play in New England, back in the year 1777, during the rebellion of American colonies against British dominion. Probably, no description of that year is better then Shaw’s: “The year 1777 is the one in which the passions roused by the breaking-off of the American colonies