Saint Joan - George Bernard Shaw
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Few playwrights have understood the human and philosophical dimensions of historical and cultural mythmaking as well as George Bernard Shaw. The high-minded sensibilities present in many of Shaw’s characters—heroism, social utopianism, romantic idealization—are counterbalanced by characters representing antiheroism, individualism, and pragmatism, all of whom force consideration of the conundrums present in varying points of view with an end toward reaching a realistic and compassionate understanding of human nature and society. In Saint Joan saintliness, spirituality, questions of individual conscience, nationalism, and theology are added to the Shavian philosophical mix in a play concerning one of history’s most heroic figures.
Shaw had established himself as a popular and critically successful playwright during the 1904–07 seasons at the Royal Court Theatre, which featured 988 performances, of which 701 were plays by Shaw. These included MAN AND SUPERMAN (1904), MAJOR BARBARA (1905), and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906). The second phase of Shaw’s career as a dramatist solidified his reputation with three works produced between 1911 and 1914. Fanny’s First Play (1911) set a first-run box-office record of 622 performances. Androcles and the Lion (1912), a philosophical farce about early Christianity, explores a recurring theme in Shavian drama: that there are causes worth dying for. Pygmalion (1913), loosely inspired by Ovid’s story of a sculptor who brings a lovely statue to life, further popularized as a 1938 film, earned Shaw an Academy Award for his screenplay and undergoing an adaptation, six years after his death, became the hit Broadway musical My Fair Lady.
After two decades of struggle Shaw was now Britain’s leading playwright. However, he did not write any dramas immediately after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. Instead he produced a long pamphlet, with Swiftian overtones, titled Common Sense About the War, which appeared in November 1914 and sold nearly 75,000 copies. In it Shaw contended that Britain and its allies were as much to blame for the war as the Germans, characterized the hostilities as inevitably ruinous for all participants, and called for peace and negotiation. The pamphlet made Shaw internationally notorious. It proved to be a boon for German propaganda. In Britain, with patriotic fervor running high, Shaw was castigated as a traitor, the prime minister even going so far as to publicly express the view that he should be shot. His antiwar speeches were censored by British newspapers; he was turned away from the Dramatists’ Club, although he had been its most eminent member; and he suffered a further diminishment in his popularity when, in 1915, he publicly dismissed the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat. By 1917 public opinion had shifted and even some in the British government recognized the validity of Shaw’s earlier arguments against the war. He was asked to report from the front in Flanders for the Daily Sketch and produced a series of articles that were reprinted in the 1931 volume What I Really Wrote About the War. By 1918 his reputation had been restored, and he was looked upon by many as the only public figure who had understood the futility of the war from the start.
Shaw emerged from his wartime experiences with a considerably more somber perspective on humanity. He also produced what many critics consider to be three of his greatest plays. Heartbreak House (1920), an examination of the prewar spiritual impoverishment that contributed to the outbreak of the war, called by Shaw his KING LEAR. Back to Methuselah (1922), a five-part cycle of plays in which Shaw begins with Adam and Eve and develops a theory of creative evolution to attempt to explain and resolve humanity’s “evolutionary appetite,” played out in the human tendency toward self-destructiveness. Neither Heartbreak House nor Back to Methuselah was received with enthusiasm; it would take the third play in Shaw’s postwar canon, and his third full-length historical play, Saint Joan, to restore him fully to a public perception of dramatic greatness. He would receive the Nobel Prize in literature in 1925.
The writing of Saint Joan was a project Shaw apparently intended to pursue as early as 1913 (Joan had been beatified in 1909); he mentions the idea of doing “a Joan of Arc play some day” in a letter to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, written from Orléans in September of that year. His creative energies, exhausted after the strenuous effort put into Back to Methuselah, were revived after Joan’s canonization in 1920, and he decided to pursue the writing of a chronicle play about her. Although set during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between the French and the English over disputed French territory, Saint Joan reflects aspects of post–World War I culture, such as new views concerning gender roles, science versus religious faith, and unthinking English chauvinism and imperialism. Creative evolution plays a role in Saint Joan, and his charismatic title character embodies Shaw’s earlier philosophy of a “life force” that keeps evolving and producing extraordinary individuals throughout history who contest outworn methods within an existing social order.
Saint Joan contains six scenes and an epilogue. The first scene takes place at the castle of Vaucouleurs on a spring morning in 1429, where Squire Robert de Baudricourt is chiding his steward for not providing eggs for his breakfast, a situation the steward attributes to “an act of God.” The hens will not lay, he claims, as long as Joan the Maid is kept waiting at the door. After the squire shouts out the window for her to come up, Joan appears. Shaw describes her as “an ablebodied country girl of 17 or 18, respectably dressed in red, with an uncommon face” and “normally a hearty coaxing voice, very confident, very appealing, very hard to resist.” Joan astonishes de Baudricourt by stating simply that the Lord has directed her, through Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, whose voices she hears every day, to obtain from him a horse, armor, and soldiers to accompany her to the Dauphin, hiding out in Chinon Castle. He, in turn, will provide her with more soldiers so that she can raise the English siege at Orléans, after which victory, she will see the Dauphin crowned king at Rheims. Joan, with a mixture of logic and faith, argues that if the divided French forces will abandon their fear and their mercenary aims and learn from her to fight for a higher purpose, in this case, “the will of God,” they will unite and drive the English from French soil. The squire is won over and agrees to Joan’s requests. The steward rushes in to report that the hens have begun laying again.
The second scene is set in the throne room of Chinon Castle where Tremouille, the Lord Chamberlain and the army’s commander, discusses with the Archbishop the lack of royal funds. The two attempt to bully the craven, excitable Dauphin, Charles, into refusing to admit Joan. A courtier, Gilles de Rais (“Bluebeard”) suggests he impersonate Charles to see if Joan can penetrate the disguise; if she can, it will prove she has been sent by God. Joan easily identifies the Dauphin, kneels before him, and reveals her mission. The Archbishop, now convinced of her piety, affirms her right to speak to Charles alone. Joan responds to “Charlie’s” litany of financial woes by earnestly stating, “I tell thee that the land is thine to rule righteously and keep God’s peace in, and not to pledge at the pawnshop as a drunken woman pledges her children’s clothes.” Carried away by Joan’s assertion that he will become “the greatest king in the world as [God’s] steward and His bailiff, His soldier and His servant,” Charles gives command of the army to her, to the ire of Tremouille.
More evidence of Joan’s simple faith in God and her ability to inspire even experienced soldiers and to provoke miracles occurs in the third scene. Outside of Orléans, the army’s commander, Dunois (“the Bastard”), is skeptical that Joan can mount an attack, given the lack of a favorable wind that will allow the soldiers to cross the Loire upstream. He wants Joan to go to church and pray for a west wind; when she cries out that she will go and pray to St. Catherine, the wind changes. Dunois says that God has spoken and he will follow Joan “for God and Saint Dennis!”
Theology, military strategy, and politics converge from the opposition’s point of view in the fourth scene. The French have scored several victories, and in a tent at the English camp, the Earl of Warwick, his chaplain, and Peter Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, discuss the inevitable crowning of Charles. Warwick rationalizes Joan’s military successes as the workings of a sorceress, but Cauchon believes she is not a witch but a heretic whose soul must be saved to save the English cause. Warwick wants to “burn the woman” to destroy “the cult of the Maid” that threatens to overwhelm the social order of Europe; Cauchon reviews the history of famous heretics who presumed to follow their “voices” and to ignore the authority of the nobles and the religious establishment. Joan acts as if she, herself, were the church and must be saved from her individualism, which Cauchon labels “Protestantism.” Since the church only recognizes one realm, the kingdom of Christ, Joan, he argues, is committing another form of heresy by appealing to the people’s sense of nationalism. Finally, she is rebelling against Nature by wearing men’s clothes. All agree she must be captured; Warwick tells Cauchon, “if you will burn the Protestant, I will burn the Nationalist.”
The play and its central character reach a decisive turning point in scene five, set in the cathedral at Rheims after Charles’s coronation. In response to Joan’s assertion that she will return to the farm once she has taken Paris, Dunois chides her for her naiveté in believing that the men of the court, who are jealous of her military success, will support her. The king wants a treaty with the Burgundians to end the fighting, and the Archbishop condemns Joan’s spiritual hubris and warns of tragic consequences if she falls into the hands of Cauchon. She will not be ransomed and will be disowned by them all. The Archbishop tells her: “You stand alone; absolutely alone, trusting to your own conceit, your own ignorance, your own headstrong presumption, your own 320 THE DRAMA 100 impiety in hiding all these sins under the cloak of a trust in God.” Joan cries out that she has always been alone, like France and God himself; this loneliness is God’s strength, and “In his strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die.” Comforted by the love she receives from the common people, which will repay her for the hatred of the court, she goes out, leaving the men of the court to express their various feelings about her. Charles, perhaps, speaks for them all when he says, “If only she would keep quiet or go home!”
Scene six, set in 1431, resolves the climax that was reached in the previous scene and contains a more detailed discussion of the theological issues with regard to Joan’s crime of heresy introduced in the fourth scene. Captured by the Burgundians nine months earlier at Compiègne, Joan has been brought by Warwick to the ecclesiastical court at Rouen to stand public trial for heresy. This is her seventh, and last, trial, and Joan responds to the intense questioning with spirit and confidence in the validity of her own spiritual judgment. However, when she sees the executioner standing behind her, ready to lead her to the stake, she recants in fear and is sentenced to “perpetual imprisonment.” For Joan this verdict is worse than death, and she tears up the recantation, proclaiming that she does not dread the fi re “as much as the life of a rat in a hole.” Her voices, she claims, were right, that by wanting to take “the light of the sky and the sight of the fi elds and flowers” from her “or from any human creature,” she knows that “your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.” Her fate is sealed; she is burned as a relapsed heretic in an execution that gives no one joy. The executioner reports that only her heart would not burn but that Warwick has seen the last of her. Warwick smiles wryly and wonders aloud if he has.
There is a tragicomic and symbolic dream epilogue to Saint Joan that represents the rehabilitation of Joan of Arc that began in 1456. The scene is set in the bedroom of Charles VII, 25 years after Joan’s execution. A flash of lightning reveals the silhouette of Joan in the window. Charles tells Joan of her victory in receiving justice that day and tries to convince her that it was his doing. They are joined by Cauchon, Dunois, Warwick, Warwick’s chaplain, the executioner, and an English soldier now in hell, all of whom respond, according to their own sense of politics and theology, to Joan’s execution and rehabilitation. A clerical-looking gentleman dressed in the fashion of 1920 appears, to the mirth of the others, to announce the elevation of Joan to sainthood. By now the Archbishop and the inquisitor are on hand, and all kneel to an enraptured Joan, offering her praise in the name of the people, the soldiers, the wicked, the foolish, the unpretending, and the heroic. Joan asks if she should work another miracle and come back from the dead. This provokes consternation from the men, each of whom offers apologies and excuses that reveal that they all prefer her to be dead. They steal away, and the king goes back to bed, leaving Joan alone, at the stroke of midnight, bathed in a white, radiant light, and asking, “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will SAINT JOAN 321 it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?” The addition of the epilogue frames Saint Joan in the context of history and in Shaw’s “life force” philosophy, articulated in Joan’s last, anguished question. In his extensive preface to the published version of the play, Shaw, with characteristic sly humor, explains that, “As to the epilogue, I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by implying that Joan’s history in the world ended unhappily with her execution, instead of beginning there.” The preface performs a similar function, comparing the historical Joan of Arc with the legendary martyr. For Shaw Joan, although a Catholic, is “one of the fi rst Protestant martyrs,” following her conscience in defi ance of offi cial authority. A blend of common sense and innocence, Joan of Arc is less a fi gure of romance than a visionary reformer destroyed by an infl exible system. At its core Saint Joan is a philosophically powerful drama of the Middle Ages, in which a teenage country girl who is by turns courageous, miraculous, and unbearable and men possessed of both credulity and certainty vie, tragically and comically, for the soul of a complicated era.