The scalawag Dick Dudgeon of the earlier play, who was not truly villainous but only unorthodox and unconventional in his manners and morals, here becomes the truly opprobrious artist-scoundrel Dubedat, while the minister and man of peace, Anthony Anderson, who turns into a man of war and rebellion, becomes Dr. Ridgeon, medical miracle worker and murderer.

Judith Anderson becomes Jennifer Dubedat. We may note that in the transformation Shaw shifts the woman’s position in the triangle: In the later play, she is the wife not of the socially respectable older man, but of the transgressive young artist; and she has become the erotic object of the older Ridgeon, who sees in her some fantasy of female artistic beauty, a fantasy for which he is willing to kill by withholding his medical skill. The perfect irony of Ridgeon’s infatuation is matched by Jennifer’s tragi-comic fantasy of her husband as the noble artist. The poisonous ending of the play keeps her a primarily comic figure because she remains perfectly happy in her deluded picture of her dead husband, while Ridgeon is turned into a mainly tragic figure by the mere addition of self-knowledge. He comes to see himself through the woman’s eyes: a jealous old man who “committed a purely disinterested murder” (p. 357).

That Shaw self-consciously reworked the psychological pattern of the woman’s role in the rivalry of the Doubles from The Devil’s Disciple to The Doctor’s Dilemma can be seen from his having given Jennifer a line virtually identical to a line he gave Judith—a line, moreover, that describes the relationship of the two men to be that of psychological twins. In the earlier play, Judith reproaches Dick Dudgeon for being jealous of her husband: “Can you not forgive him for being so much better than you are?” In the later play, Jennifer reproaches Ridgeon: “Can you not forgive him for being superior to you? for being cleverer? for being braver? for being a great artist?” (p. 326). Where the earlier pair’s rivalry centered on a question of relative moral worth, each wanting to be the better man, each discovering the truth about himself, the later play’s pair of Doubles compete as twin artists. (For Shaw the defining characteristic of the artist was that he or she should create new thought; hence, he regarded scientists like Ridgeon, inventor of a new treatment for tuberculosis, or Henry Higgins, the phoneticist in Pygmalion, as artists in that broad sense.)

There is yet another link between the two plays. Shaw asserted that the idea for The Doctor’s Dilemma resulted from hearing his friend, the great physician Sir Almoth Wright (upon whom and whose development of opsonin Shaw based Ridgeon’s story), when asked if he could take on an extra patient, say that he would have to consider whose life was more worth saving. In The Devil’s Disciple the saving of lives (and souls) based on moral worth is at issue, for Dick saves the minister’s life, and the minister in turn wants to save Dick’s soul but changes to saving his life. Implicit in each play is the question: Whose lives are worth saving? In the more optimistic and comic vision of The Devil’s Disciple, there is obviously so much goodness in each of the two men that the answer to the question would seem: Everyone’s life is worth saving. In the darker Doctor’s Dilemma, the answer would seem: hardly anyone’s.

The most prevalent paradigm for stories of Doubles—The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, to take examples contemporary with The Doctor’s Dilemma—is that the destruction of one’s Double means the destruction of oneself. When Doctor Ridgeon kills Louis Dubedat he is trying to kill his unrealized self. In an unguarded moment, after discovering Dubedat’s true nature to be that of an unscrupulous liar, cheat, and monstrous egotist, Ridgeon remarks to his old patron and friend, Sir Patrick: “I’m not at all convinced that the world wouldnt be a better world if everybody behaved as Dubedat does than it is now that everybody behaves as Blenkinsop does” (pp. 300—301). That is, he feels the world would be better if everyone behaved with regard to self-interest and without regard to the interest of others. Sir Patrick challenges Ridgeon to explain why he then does not behave so. Ridgeon replies that he cannot. He would like to act that way but cannot get up the courage. He calls it a dilemma, and thus explains the title: To think one way and to live another is the doctor’s dilemma. Finally, though, he tries to resolve his dilemma by killing Louis. But as the play’s final scene—one of Shaw’s greatest—shows, in doing so he destroys himself, for Jennifer categorically rejects his attempt to take Louis’s place in her bed and in her heart. She has married someone else, according to her husband’s dying wish.

Historian and critic Jacques Barzun says that if you open a Shaw play to any scene and begin reading, you quickly become convinced that the characters are talking about life and death matters. So intensely do they listen to one another and turn every assertion, query, and rejoinder into blows, thrusts, and shots, that one feels both of them cannot possibly emerge from the “discussion” alive. This is particularly true of Ridgeon’s final confrontation with Jennifer.