The Devil's Disciple : A Melodrama in Three Acts

By Shaw, George Bernard

Book Id: WPLBN0000622735
Format Type: PDF eBook
File Size: 118.13 KB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	The Devil's Disciple : A Melodrama in Three Acts
Author:	Shaw, George Bernard
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Literature, Literature & thought, Writing.
Collections:	Blackmask Online Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Blackmask Online


Citation APA MLA Chicago Shaw, G. B. (n.d.). The Devils Disciple : A Melodrama in Three Acts. Retrieved from http://self.gutenberg.org/

Description
Excerpt: ACT I. At the most wretched hour between a black night and a wintry morning in the year 1777, Mrs. Dudgeon, of New Hampshire, is sitting up in the kitchen and general dwelling room of her farm house on the outskirts of the town of Websterbridge. She is not a prepossessing woman. No woman looks her best after sitting up all night; and Mrs. Dudgeon?s face, even at its best, is grimly trenched by the channels into which the barren forms and observances of a dead Puritanism can pen a bitter temper and a fierce pride. She is an elderly matron who has worked hard and got nothing by it except dominion and detestation in her sordid home, and an unquestioned reputation for piety and respectability among her neighbors, to whom drink and debauchery are still so much more tempting than religion and rectitude, that they conceive goodness simply as self?denial. This conception is easily extended to others ? denial, and finally generalized as covering anything disagreeable. So Mrs. Dudgeon, being exceedingly disagreeable, is held to be exceedingly good. Short of flat felony, she enjoys complete license except for amiable weaknesses of any sort, and is consequently, without knowing it, the most licentious woman in the parish on the strength of never having broken the seventh commandment or missed a Sunday at the Presbyterian church.

Table of Contents
Table of Contents: The Devil's Disciple, 1 -- George Bernard Shaw, 1 -- Act I, 1 -- Act II, 17 -- Act III, 32 -- NOTES TO THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE, 52