Return to Bibliography of Willa Cather's Readings
Bibliography: The Devil's Disciple by Shaw, George Bernard
- Title
- The Devil's Disciple
- Author
- Shaw, George Bernard
- Date
- Genre
- drama
- Note Source
- Leader 3/29/1898
- Note Relating to Cather
- Calls the play "eccentric" like Arms and the Man, and continues: "The first act of The Devil's Disciple is sane, serious, rational, and constructed by the most approved methods. The scapegrace son returns to the stony bosom of his Puritan family, whose narrowness and selfishness and pretentious piety long ago sent him to the devil.... But in the third act Mr. Shaw leaps gaily into the domain of travesty and all his unbridled freakishness breaks out.... The worst of it is one always has a dark suspicion that this gaily inconsistent Mr. Shaw is not really so inconsistent after all; that his insanity is really the hardest kind of sense, that he only mocks at life because it is too sad and too sordid for tears.... In this play Mr. Shaw may let his serious motif fritter out in a comic opera air because he believes that the most exalted life-dramas usually end in a farce."
