George Bernard Shaw, Dan H. Laurence (Editor)

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. Caesar and Cleopatra, a brilliant satire on contemporary Britain, contains an utterly unexpected portrait of Julius Caesar ('part brute, part woman, and part god'). 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 celebrates the triumph of the individual conscience over accepted morality.