Abstract

This essay challenges the tendency in censorship studies to focus on banned works and causes célèbres. It suggests that critics need to attend more carefully to adversarial works that have eluded detection by authorities to better understand censor-avoiding and censor-baiting techniques. In examining Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, I argue that Shaw was subversive of morality and censorship through encoded attacks on the institution of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. This becomes clearer through analysis of Shaw’s censorship discourse in the years following the writing of the play in which he taps into its ethos and adopts the perspective of the title character, especially in his promotion of American-style post-performance trials of plays as against the British system of applying for licences before production. Shaw also undertook auto-intertextuality by drawing upon The Devil’s Disciple in composing The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, a play that intentionally provoked British censors and provided him with ammunition when he appeared before the Joint Select Committee on the Censorship of Plays in the summer of 1909. I end by noting how Shaw himself refused war-time productions of The Devil’s Disciple because of its threats to morality and its potential for instigating radical change.

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