Subverting the Melodramatic in The Devil’s Disciple Available to Purchase

Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple utilizes the tropes of Victorian melodrama to set up a comedic plot in which a married woman is tempted to commit adultery, leaving her respectable husband for the seemingly satanic Dick Dudgeon. The play has echoes of the first play Shaw ever wrote about as a critic for the Saturday Review, Sydney Grundy’s Slaves of the Ring. While Grundy’s play melodramatically questions the legitimacy of marriages arranged for reasons other than love, Shaw’s comically subverts marriage itself, implying that Dudgeon could be the heroine’s true husband, while her legal marriage might be a lie. Identity becomes destabilized, as one person transforms into another’s role as easily as exchanging coats. This opens up a new world of possibilities that Shaw imagines for individuals freed from the tyranny of convention.