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Saint Joan of Arc Novel SynopsisSaint Joan is a play by George Bernard Shaw about 15th century French military figure Joan of Arc.
Premiering in 1923, three years after her canonization by the Roman Catholic Church,
the play dramatises what is known of her life based on the substantial records of her trial.
Shaw studied the transcripts and decided that the concerned people acted in good faith according to their beliefs.
He wrote in his preface to the play
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Preface
Joan of Arc, a village girl from the Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908; and finally canonized in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and, like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of Catalina de Erauso and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to accept the specific woman's lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did.
As she contrived to assert herself in all these ways with such force that she was famous throughout western Europe before she was out of her teens (indeed she never got out of them), it is hardly surprising that she was judicially burnt, ostensibly for a number of capital crimes which we no longer punish as such, but essentially for what we call unwomanly and insufferable presumption.
At eighteen Joan's pretensions were beyond those of the proudest Pope or the haughtiest emperor.
She claimed to be the ambassador and plenipotentiary of God, and to be, in effect, a member of the Church Triumphant whilst still in the flesh on earth.
She patronized her own king, and summoned the English king to repentance and obedience to her commands.
She lectured, talked down, and overruled statesmen and prelates.
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