Shaw's Devil's Disciple: The Subversion of Melodrama/ The Melodrama of Subversion

George Bernard Shaw is arguably the last great rhetorical playwright of the English-speaking stage. Giving theatrical night to the weightiest of notions, Shaw prompted his dramatic characters to consider, analyze, and debate the prolific body of ideas produced by the latter half of the nineteenth century. He managed to avoid tendentiousness by painstakingly voicing both sides of an issue — his habitual mode of expression is in fact the paradox. An alarming number of pundits have concluded that paradox provided not only the major theme of Shaw's work but, in the manner of a contemporary soft drink commercial, its apparent objective as weIl. But Shavian paradox is more than intellectual grandstanding. It is a verbal expression of the fundamental dialectic that informs drama as,well as the life it imitates: the underlying tension between form and matter, objective and realization, convention and imagination. The Devil's Disciple is an illustration of this tension in its purest, most melodramatic form, a conflict of polar opposites in which the conventions of society are exploded by a rhetorical strategy geared to subversion. Shaw attempts to subvert the very conception of reality commonly held by members of his genteel Victorian audience.