Saint Joan

Summary

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. In Scene II, at Chinon, the courtiers try to fool her by putting Gilles de Rais in the Dauphin's place, but she picks out the timid, mocking Charles and fires him with the will to fight. Scene III shows Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, waiting on the Loire for a west wind; Joan arrives, the wind changes, and the relief of Orleans begins. Scene IV, the heart of Shaw's argument, takes place in the English camp: the Earl of Warwick, his hot-tempered chaplain John de Stogumber and Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, discuss what Joan means. Warwick fears she will make kings answerable to no peers, which he names Protestantism; Cauchon fears she sets private revelation above the Church and her people above Christendom, which Warwick names Nationalism. Scene V, in Rheims cathedral after Charles's coronation, finds Joan isolated: the Archbishop, the king, Dunois and the court refuse to support her plan to take Paris, and she goes out alone, trusting God. Scene VI is her trial at Rouen on 30 May 1431. Shaw gives the Inquisitor a long, serious speech on how heresy grows from the piety of good people, and shows Cauchon and the Inquisitor genuinely trying to save her soul against English impatience. Frightened by the fire, Joan signs a recantation; but when she hears she will be imprisoned for life she tears it up, declares her voices right, and is burned. Stogumber returns broken by what he has seen, and the executioner reports that her heart would not burn. In the Epilogue, set in 1456 after the rehabilitation trial, Joan appears to the sleeping King Charles, and Cauchon, Dunois, Stogumber, an English soldier who once gave her a cross of sticks, and others gather; a gentleman from 1920 announces her canonization. All kneel to praise her, yet when she offers to return to life each makes an excuse and leaves, and she ends asking how long it will be before the earth is ready to receive God's saints. The library text, from the 1926 Brentano's printing, includes Shaw's long preface on Joan's genius, her voices, the fairness of her trial, toleration and the stage.

Top Lessons

• Sincere judges, tragic verdict

  Shaw refuses to make Joan's judges villains. Cauchon and the Inquisitor believe they are saving her soul and protecting Christendom, and the Inquisitor's speech gives the strongest case for their duty. The tragedy is that good men acting on serious principles burn a saint.

• The private conscience and the public authority

  Joan obeys her voices before the Church, and her king and peers alike before her own judgment. Warwick and Cauchon see in this the coming conflicts of Protestantism and nationalism, and the play lets each side argue in its own terms.

• Alone with God

  In Rheims cathedral, abandoned by king and comrades, Joan answers that France is alone and God is alone, and that she will find strength in that loneliness. Her courage does not depend on others' approval.

• Praising saints and receiving them

  In the Epilogue everyone honours Joan once she is safely canonized, but no one wants her alive again. Shaw asks whether people honour holiness more easily in the past than in their own day.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Shaw's preface is a notable early twentieth-century layman's argument about religious voices and sanity. He rejects the view that Joan was mad, argues that vivid imaginations can present their own insights as heard voices and seen figures, calls her a Galtonic visualizer after Francis Galton's studies of mental imagery, and contrasts her with criminal patients who obey commanding voices. He also takes up the charge that she was suicidal, citing her leap from the tower at Beaurevoir, and answers it by comparing her with soldiers who prefer death to captivity. In the play itself Robert de Baudricourt's objection that the voices come from her imagination is turned by Joan into her own account of revelation. De Stogumber's collapse after witnessing the burning, and his later wandering wits in the Epilogue, give a short study of horror and remorse. These are Shaw's interpretations and dramatic choices; retrospective diagnoses of the historical Joan remain contested and are not settled by the play.

• Preface, Joan's Voices and Visions; Joan a Galtonic Visualizer

  Shaw argues that Joan's voices were the form her own reasoning took and distinguishes her from patients who act on commanding voices.

• Preface, Was Joan Suicidal?

  The Beaurevoir leap and the charge of a suicidal tendency, answered by comparison with soldiers' daring.

• Scene I

  Robert says her voices come from her imagination; Joan replies that this is how God's messages come.

• Scene IV

  De Stogumber tells how at Orleans an English arrow pierced Joan's throat and she wept with the pain yet fought on all day.

• Scene VI (close)

  De Stogumber returns from the burning in a state of breakdown and the executioner reports that her heart would not burn.