Three Plays for Puritans

Resumen del libro

'I am as fond of fine music and handsome buildings as Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they were becoming the instruments of a systematic idolatry of sensuousness, I would hold it good statesmanship to blow up every cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite' Disgusted and bored by the trend for titillation and sham on the London stage, Shaw wrote these plays both to educate and entertain his audiences. In The Devil's Disciple, a clergyman turned soldier and the Shavian ideal of a Puritan hero - 'like all genuinely religious men, a reprobate and an outcast' - willingly risks his life for a stranger. C sar and Cleopatra, a brilliant satire on contemporary Britain, contains an utterly unexpected portrait of Julius Caesar ('part brute, part woman'). In Captain Brassbound's Conversion it is Lady Cicely's cunning manipulation of the truth that ensures that fairness, rather than justice, prevails.

Three Plays for Puritans reveals Shaw's constant delight in turning received wisdom upside down and celebrate the triumph of the individual conscience over accepted morality.

The definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence

Biografía del autor

(Dublín, 1856 - Ayot St. Lawrence, 1950) fue un polémico escritor irlandés, que cuestionó de forma radical los conceptos morales de su época. Su capacidad para la sátira le convirtió en el dramaturgo más influyente de su época, premiado en 1925 con el Premio Nobel de Literatura y el 1938 con el Óscar al mejor guion adaptado por "My Fair Lady", versión cinematográfica de su comedia "Pigmalión" (1912). Airado polemista, golpeó duramente las superstición inherente a las religiones y rechazó todos los galardones y honores público para los que fue propuesto por los gobiernos británicos.