I am as fond of fine music and handsome building 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 every cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite Disgusted and bored by the usual titillating fare of 'stage sensuousness, musical farce and sham Ibsen', Shaw set out to write three paradoxical Plays for Puritans. Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's answer to Antony and Cleopatra, is a brilliant satire on contemporary Britain that contains an utterly unexpected portrait of Julius Caesar part woman, and part god). Captain Brassbound's Conversion is an 'adventure' set in Morocco, while The Devil's Disciple presents a clergyman turned soldier and the Shavian idea of a Puritan hero, like all genuinely religious men, a reprobate and an outcast, who willingly risks his life for a stranger. 'I have always been a Puritan in my attitude towards Art. Shaw claims in his typically fiery Prefrace. The plays inspired by his creed are supremely skilful pieces of stagecraft, which reveal a constant delight in turning received wisdom upside-down.