George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin and moved to London in 1876, where he worked as a music and theatre critic and became a leading member of the socialist Fabian Society. His plays of ideas, among them Man and Superman, Major Barbara and Pygmalion, joined comedy to argument and were usually printed with long prefaces. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925, two years after Saint Joan was first staged.
Frequently Cited
“Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.”
Saint Joan is Shaw's chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl from Domrémy who led the French against the English in the Hundred Years' War. In Scene I, set in 1429 at the castle of Vaucouleurs, the blustering squire Robert de Baudricourt is talked by Joan, and by his own officer Poulengey, into giving her a horse and an escort to the Dauphin; when she leaves, the hens that had stopped laying begin again.
