Saint Joan

Overview

Six scenes and an epilogue, about a hundred and sixty pages including the preface, first performed in New York in December 1923 and in London the following March. Shaw was sixty-seven and it is generally agreed to be his best play; the Nobel Prize followed in 1925.

The timing is the point. Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909 and canonised in May 1920, and the canonisation process had produced published transcripts of both her trial in 1431 and the rehabilitation proceedings twenty-five years later. Shaw read them and built the play from them. Much of Scene 6 is taken from the record, condensed and reordered but not invented, and the effect of dramatising an actual trial is that the arguments are better than a playwright would have made up.

The preface is long, roughly the length of the play, and argumentative. It sets out Shaw’s case: that Joan was a genius and a nuisance, that she was tried fairly by the standards of her time, that her judges were not corrupt, and that a modern court would have done worse. Most programs that assign the play assign it too.

The form is a chronicle in Shaw’s usual manner, which is to say people talk. There is no battle onstage and almost no action. What there is instead is argument, and in this play the arguments are distributed so evenly that generations of readers have finished it unable to say who was right.

What happens

Scene 1. Vaucouleurs, 1429. Robert de Baudricourt is shouting at his steward because the hens have stopped laying. A country girl has been waiting outside for days, asking for a horse, armour and soldiers to take her to the Dauphin. He refuses, she reasons with him cheerfully and without deference, and he gives in. The hens immediately start laying again, and the steward cries that it is a miracle. This is the play’s method with the supernatural: it is always available and never confirmed.

Scene 2. Chinon. The Dauphin’s court, broke, defeated, and waiting for someone else to do something. Joan identifies Charles among the courtiers after he has been hidden, which everyone takes as proof. Shaw shows him as a whining, sensible, physically timid man who does not want to be a king and says so, and who is the only person in the play with no illusions about himself. She persuades him to give her the army.

Scene 3. Orleans. Dunois waiting for a west wind that will not come so the boats can go upriver. Joan arrives and the wind changes. It is the only unambiguous miracle in the play and Shaw puts it in a stage direction.

Scene 4. An English tent, and the scene the play is built around. Three men talk: the Earl of Warwick, Bishop Cauchon of Beauvais, and an English chaplain named de Stogumber who is a jingoist and provides the comic relief and later the horror.

Warwick and Cauchon discover, with perfect courtesy, that they want the same girl killed for incompatible reasons. Cauchon sees a soul that claims to hear God directly, with no Church in between, which he names as the heresy that will be called Protestantism. Warwick sees a peasant who tells kings they hold their land from God and the nation rather than from their overlords, which he names as the doctrine that will be called nationalism. Each is appalled by the other’s reasoning and they agree on the outcome. It is the clearest dramatisation of institutional self-defence in English drama.

Scene 5. Reims Cathedral after the coronation. Joan’s victory, and the moment it turns. She wants to go on and take Paris. Everyone else wants to stop: the Archbishop rebukes her for pride and tells her that her voices are her own wishes; Dunois explains, in the play’s most affectionate speech, that soldiering is a trade and that she has broken all the rules and been lucky; Charles says he is tired and it costs money. She learns that if she is captured nobody will ransom her, and she goes out alone saying she is stronger against them all than she would be against any one of them.

Scene 6. Rouen, 30 May 1431. The trial, taken largely from the transcript.

Cauchon and the Inquisitor conduct it scrupulously and Shaw makes them say so: they refuse improper questions, they suppress the charges they think trivial, they want a recantation and not a death. The Inquisitor delivers a long, quiet speech about the necessity of stamping out heresy in its small beginnings, which Shaw stages as the most reasonable thing anyone says all evening and which is the play’s centre of gravity.

Joan, exhausted, signs the recantation. Then she asks when she will be released and is told she will be imprisoned for life on bread and water. She tears the paper up. Her speech about the light of the sky and the sight of the fields, and the sound of church bells, is why she does it, and it is not a theological reason.

She is taken out and burned. De Stogumber, who has been baying for it, comes back from watching and is destroyed by it, sobbing that he did not know what he was doing, and that one should not do a cruel thing until one has seen it. An English soldier gives her two sticks tied into a cross.

Epilogue. 1456, twenty-five years later. Charles, now king, asleep in bed. The rehabilitation verdict is reported. Then the dead arrive one by one: Joan, Cauchon, Dunois, the soldier who gave her the cross and gets a day off from hell every year for it, de Stogumber grown old and gentle, the Inquisitor, and finally a clerical gentleman in 1920 dress who announces her canonisation.

They all praise her, kneel, and sing her virtues. Then Joan asks whether she should return to them as a living woman. One by one, with excellent reasons, every single one of them makes an excuse and leaves. The last line is hers, alone, asking God how long the earth must wait before it is ready to receive its saints.

How to read it

Read the preface after the play, not before. It is excellent and it will tell you what to think, and the play is better if you have to work it out.

Read Scene 4 twice. Cauchon and Warwick are Shaw’s real subject, and their conversation is where the argument lives: two institutions, each defending something it genuinely believes in, discovering they need the same execution.

Notice that Shaw refuses to settle the voices. He neither confirms them nor debunks them; Joan says in Scene 1 that they come to her through her imagination, and that is how God speaks to her. Whether that is a rationalist’s deflation or a real theological claim is left open on purpose.

Watch the recantation carefully. She holds out under threat of burning and breaks; then she hears the sentence of life imprisonment and chooses fire. What she cannot give up is not doctrine but the open air, and Shaw makes her martyrdom turn on something physical and unheroic.

Read the epilogue as the play’s argument rather than an appendix. Canonisation costs nothing. The test Shaw sets is whether anybody wants the saint back alive, and the answer is a unanimous and well-reasoned no.

And put it beside Antigone. Both are about a young woman who appeals to a law above the state’s, and both are written by authors who give the institutional side the better speeches than we are comfortable with.

Questions it raises

• If Joan’s judges were sincere, reasonable and procedurally correct, what exactly went wrong?
• Shaw has Cauchon name Protestantism and Warwick name nationalism a century before either existed. Is that illuminating or too neat?
• Joan breaks under the threat of burning and recovers under the sentence of imprisonment. What does that tell us about her courage?
• The epilogue shows everyone honouring a dead saint and refusing a living one. Is that a comment on sainthood or on institutions?
• Can a society tolerate people who take their orders directly from their own conviction?
• Shaw insists the trial was fairer than a modern political trial would be. Does that defend the trial or indict ours?