8. "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, pp. 101-159

Scenes 5, 6, and Epilogue

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JOAN. Isnt it strange, Jack? I am such a coward: I am frightened beyond words before a battle; but it is so dull afterwards when there is no danger: oh, so dull! dull! dull!

This sounds just right, the essence of the warrior mentality. And it gets at Joan's weakness, her "tragic flaw" if you will. Even fear (the fear of the pyre) is preferable to idleness (prison). The Archbishop will charge her with the sin of pride, though I think he mistakes bravado for pride.

ARCHBISHOP. ... The old Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris.
CHARLES. Yes: she thinks she knows better than everyone else.
JOAN [distressed, but naïvely incapable of seeing the effect she is producing] But I  d o  know better than any of you seem to. And I am not proud: I never speak unless I know I am right. 

This elicits hoots of derision from Bluebeard and Charles, but the Archbishop asks how she knows she is right. Her answer, of course, is her voices. But it falls to Dunois to talk sense:

I think that God was on your side; for I have not forgotten how the wind changed, and how our hearts changed when you came; and by my faith I shall never deny that it was in your sign that we conquer. But I tell you as a soldier that God is no man's daily drudge, and no maid's either.... For He has to be fair to your enemy too: dont forget that. Well, He has set us on our feet through you at Orleans; and the glory of it has carried us through a few good battles here to the coronation. But if we presume on it further, and trust to God to do the work we should do ourselves, we shall be defeated; and serve us right! ... King Charles: you have said no word in your proclamations of my part in this campaign; and I make no complaint of that; for the people will run after The Maid and her miracles and not after the Bastard's hard work finding troops for her and feeding them. But I know exactly how much God did for us through The Maid, and how much He left me to do by my own wits; and I tell you that your little hour of miracles is over, and that from this time on he who plays the war game best will win -- if the luck is on his side.

 He goes on to predict that Joan's self-assurance will not be enough to prevent her being captured:  "And then she will find that God is on the side of the big battalions."

He's right, of course, and then comes the big trial scene in which Shaw audaciously makes the Inquisitor a figure of reason and even compassion, even though he is aware that Joan is her own worst enemy. He tells Warwick, "You have an invincible ally in the matter: one who is far more determined than you that she shall burn.... The Maid herself. Unless you put a gag in her mouth you cannot prevent her from convicting herself ten times over every time she opens it." He is aware that such hotheads as the Courcelles and the Chaplain only undermine their own case in their zeal:

I will ask you, therefore, to say nothing, when The Maid is brought before us, of these stealings of horses, and dancings round fairy trees with the village children, and prayings at haunted wells, and a dozen other things which you were diligently inquiring into until my arrival. There is not a village girl in France against whom you could not prove such things: they all dance round haunted trees, and pray at magic wells. Some of them would steal the Pope's horse if they got the chance. Heresy, gentlemen, is the charge we have to try. ... Heresy begins with people who are to all appearances better than their neighbors. A gentle and pious girl, or a young man who has obeyed the command of our Lord by giving all his riches to the poor, and putting on the garb of poverty, the life of austerity, and the rule of humility and charity, may be the founder of a heresy that will wreck both Church and Empire if not ruthlessly stamped out in time. 

And in fact, the great heresies of the Reformation were promulgated by those who railed against the corruption of the Church and presented themselves as more pious than the established clergy. Joan's "excesses," the Inquisitor tells the court, "have been excesses of religion and charity and not of worldliness and wantonness." He also defends the Inquisition as more merciful than the mob: Without the Inquisition's formal inquiry, "the unfortunate wretch suspected of heresy, perhaps quite ignorantly and unjustly, is stoned, torn in pieces, drowned, burned in his house with all his innocent children, without a trial, unshriven, unburied save as a dog is buried: all of them deeds hateful to God and most cruel to man."

Nevertheless, Courcelles persists in his sadistic desire to torture a confession out of Joan, even after she admits that she'll say anything (and "take it all back afterwards") to be spared the pain.

LADVENU [disgusted] Do you want to torture the girl for the mere pleasure of it?
COURCELLES [bewildered] But it is not a pleasure. It is the law. It is customary. It is always done.
THE INQUISITOR. That is not so, Master, except when the inquiries are carried on by people who do not know their legal business.
COURCELLES. But the woman is a heretic. I assure you it is always done.

As the Inquisitor predicted, Joan, even without the customary torture, convicts herself:

JOAN. My voices do not tell me to disobey the Church; but God must be served first. 

CAUCHON. And you, and not the Church, are to be the judge? 

JOAN. What other judgment can I judge by but my own? 

THE ASSESSORS [scandalized] Oh! [They cannot find words]. 

Inevitably, a little bit of class conflict injects itself into the cross-examination:

LADVENU. My lord: what she says is, God knows, very wrong and shocking; but there is a grain of worldly sense in it such as might impose on a simple village maiden.
JOAN. If we were as simple in the village as you are in your courts and palaces, there would soon be no wheat to make bread for you. 

When she is convicted and sentenced to burn -- which her voices had told her would not happen -- Joan recants and puts her mark on the paper that will spare her from the fire, but then tears it up when she learns she will spend the rest of her life in prison.

But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times.... [W]ithout these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your council is of the devil, and mine is of God.

It is left to the Inquisitor to deliver the ironic truth:

I am accustomed to the fire: it is soon over. But it is a terrible thing to see a young and innocent creature crushed between these mighty forces, the Church and the Law.
CAUCHON. You call her innocent!
THE INQUISITOR. Oh, quite innocent. What does she know of the Church and the Law? She did not understand a word we were saying. It is the ignorant who suffer. Come, or we shall be late for the end.

But as Ladvenu says afterward, "This is not the end for her, but the beginning."

Would that it were the end of the play, however. The Epilogue seems to me a mistake -- part historical pageant, with the spirits of the characters in the play reuniting to pay obeisance to the newly canonized Joan, and part sermon, with Joan getting the last words: "O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?" I've never seen Saint Joan performed, but it would take skillful staging and brilliant acting to make the Epilogue seem anything but an anticlimax after the trial scene.

7. "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, pp. 86-100

Scene 4

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We meet the English parallels to the Archbishop and La Trémouille, the chaplain John de Stogumber and the Earl of Warwick, who get right to what Shaw sees to as Joan's greatest threat to the English: exalting nationalist sentiment over feudal loyalty. The introduction to this theme is designed to get a laugh:

THE NOBLEMAN [i.e., Warwick] Oh! you are an Englishman, are you? 

THE CHAPLAIN. Certainly not, my lord: I am a gentleman. 

Shaw goes on to develop the theme in their dialogue:

THE NOBLEMAN. ... Are these Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call themselves Frenchmen, just as our fellows are beginning to call themselves Englishmen? They actually talk of France and England as their countries. T h e i r s, if you please! What is to become of me and you if that way of thinking comes into fashion? ... Men cannot serve two masters. If this cant of serving their country once takes hold of them, goodbye to the authority of their feudal lords, and goodbye to the authority of the Church. That is, goodbye to you and me.

Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, enters, and a dispute over whether Joan is a witch follows -- the Englishmen convinced that they could not have been defeated except through witchcraft.

CAUCHON [fiercely] She is not a witch. She is a heretic.
THE CHAPLAIN. What difference does that make?
CAUCHON. You, a priest, ask me that! You English are strangely blunt in the mind. All these things that you call witchcraft are capable of a natural explanation. The woman's miracles would not impose on a rabbit: she does not claim them as miracles herself.
....
THE CHAPLAIN. ... Her prayers and confessions are endless. How can she be accused of heresy when she neglects no observance of a faithful daughter of The Church?
CAUCHON [flaming up] A faithful daughter of The Church! The Pope himself at his proudest dare not presume as this woman presumes. She acts as if she herself were The Church. She brings the message of God to Charles; and The Church must stand aside. She will crown him in the cathedral of Rheims: s h e, not The Church! ... Has she ever in all her utterances said one word of The Church? Never. It is always God and herself.

In other words, Joan is a Protestant, like Hus and Wycliffe -- or worse, like Muhammad:

CAUCHON. ... [A]n Arab camel driver drove Christ and His Church out of Jerusalem, and ravaged his way west like a wild beast until at last there stood only the Pyrenees and God's mercy between France and damnation. Yet what did the camel driver do at the beginning more than this shepherd girl is doing? He had his voices from the angel Gabriel: s h e  has her voices from St Catherine and St Margaret and the Blessed Michael.... What will the world be like when The Church's accumulated wisdom and knowledge and experience, its councils of learned, venerable pious men, are thrust into the kennel by every ignorant laborer or dairymaid whom the devil can puff up with the monstrous self-conceit of being directly inspired from heaven?

 So the case against Joan boils down to, as Warwick puts it: "I and my peers represent the feudal aristocracy as you represent The Church. We are the temporal power. Well, do you not see how this girl's idea strikes at us?... It is a cunning device to supersede the aristocracy, and make the king sole and absolute autocrat." Cauchon sees it this way:

When she threatens to drive the English from the soil of France she is undoubtedly thinking of the whole extent of country in which French is spoken. To her the French-speaking people are what the Holy Scriptures describe as a nation. Call this side of her heresy Nationalism if you will: I can find you no better name for it. I can only tell you that it is essentially anti-Catholic and anti-Christian; for the Catholic Church knows only one realm, and that is the realm of Christ's kingdom. Divide that kingdom into nations, and you dethrone Christ. Dethrone Christ, and who will stand between our throats and the sword? The world will perish in a welter of war.

Which it almost did in the seventeenth century.

6. "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, pp. 63-85

Scenes 2 and 3

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The Archbishop and the Lord Chamberlain, La Trémouille, arrange a test for Joan: will she recognize the Dauphin as the man she has come to persuade? So they arrange to put Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais, on the throne and hide the meek Dauphin in the crowd But the Archbishop knows the outcome in advance: everybody knows "that the Dauphin is the meanest-looking and worst-dressed figure in the Court, and that the man with the blue beard is Gilles de Rais."

LA TRÉMOUILLE [puzzled and a little scandalized] But that would not be a miracle at all.

THE ARCHBISHOP [calmly] Why not? ... A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. They may seem very wonderful to people who witness them, and very simple to those who perform them. That does not matter: if they confirm or create faith they are true miracles. 

LA TRÉMOUILLE. Even when they are frauds, do you mean? 

THE ARCHBISHOP. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.... [T]he Church has to rule men for the good of their souls as you have to rule them for the good of their bodies. To do that, the Church must do as you do: nourish their faith by poetry. 

Joan tries to persuade the Dauphin to send her to lift the siege of Orléans.

CHARLES. I can tell you that one good treaty is worth ten good fights. These fighting fellows lose all on the treaties that they gain on the fights. If we can only have a treaty, the English are sure to have the worst of it, because they are better at fighting than at thinking.
JOAN. If the English win, it is they that will make the treaty; and then God help poor France! Thou must fight, Charlie, whether thou will or no....
CHARLES. ... Why cant you mind your own business, and let me mind mine?
JOAN [again contemptuous] Minding your own business is like minding your own body: it's the shortest way to make yourself sick. What is my business? Helping mother at home. What is thine? Petting lapdogs and sucking sugar-sticks. I call that muck. I tell thee it is God's business we are here to do: not our own. 

Joan meets Dunois before the battle.

DUNOIS [recognizing her mettle, and clapping her heartily on the shoulder] ... You are in love with war. 

JOAN [startled] Oh! And the Archbishop said I was in love with religion. 

DUNOIS. I, God forgive me, am a little in love with war myself, the ugly devil! I am like a man with two wives. Do you want to be  like a woman with two husbands? 

JOAN [matter-of-fact] I will never take a husband. A man in Toul took an action against me for breach of promise; but I never promised him. I am a soldier: I do not want to be thought of as a woman. I will not dress as a woman. I do not care for the things women care for. They dream of lovers, and of money. I dream of leading a charge, and of placing the big guns. You soldiers do not know how to use the big guns: you think you can win battles with a great noise and smoke. ... I am a servant of God. My sword is sacred: I found it behind the altar in the church of St Catherine, where God hid it for me; and I may not strike a blow with it.

5. "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, pp. 49-62

Scene 1

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As a thinker, Shaw leaves much to be desired -- certainly when it comes to matters such as compulsory inoculation. But as a playwright, there's no questioning his skill. This first scene of Saint Joan is exemplary in matters of expository dialogue and characterization, and in the deft use of a punchline ("The hens are laying like mad, sir") at the end of the scene. Granted, we have all become used to this sort of thing, saturated as we are with dramatic formulae from watching TV, but paradigms have to come from somewhere, and Shaw was a master of crafting ways to identify characters and reveal things about them -- the overelaborate stage directions are hardly necessary (and in any case would be unavailable to the audience watching the play in its first performances).

He also has the knack of giving minor characters key speeches, such as in this exchange between Robert and the Steward about Joan:

ROBERT. You parcel of curs: you are afraid of her.
STEWARD [rising cautiously] No sir: we are afraid of you; but she puts courage into us.

Shaw manages to insert his ideas about Joan into the dialogue, as when he has Robert say, "she's not a farm wench. She's a bourgeoise."  It is Poulengey who reveals why the French are willing to accept Joan's leadership: She's their last resort.

What is the good of commonsense? If we had any commonsense we should join the Duke of Burgundy and the English king. They hold half the country, right down to the Loire. They have Paris. They have this castle: you know very well that we had to surrender it to the Duke of Bedford, and that you are only holding it on parole. The Dauphin is in Chinon, like a rat in a corner, except that he wont fight.... I think the girl herself is a bit of a miracle. Anyhow, she is the last card left in our hand. Better play her than throw up the game.... It is not a gamble. ... It is a certainty. Her words and her ardent faith in God have put fire into me.

And when Robert challenges Joan that her voices come from her imagination, she checkmates him (as Poulengey says) by admitting as much: "Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us."

Of course, Shaw's Joan is a good bit more "modern" than the actual one must have been. She is not willing to demonize the enemy:

They are only men. God made them just like us; but He gave them their own country and their own language; and it is not His will that they should come into our country and try to speak our language.... He gave us our countries and our languages, and meant us to keep to them. If it were not so it would be murder to kill an Englishman in battle.... If I went into England against the will of God to conquer England, and tried to live there and speak its language, the devil would enter into me; and when I was old I should shudder to remember the wickedness I did.

4. "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, pp. 33-47

"Preface," by George Bernard Shaw, concluded, from "THE LAW OF CHANGE IS THE LAW OF GOD"

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"[A]ll evolution in thought and conduct must first appear as heresy and misconduct. In short, though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance... [W]hen the Churches set themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against the law of God."

Shaw, who was opposed to compulsory vaccination against smallpox, regarded it as "crudely unscientific and mischievous anti-sanitary quackery" and regarded it as "replacing what was virtually compulsory baptism." 

Citing various instances, he asserts "that there was not the smallest ground for the self-complacent conviction of the nineteenth century that it was more tolerant than the fifteenth," and notes, regarding the British in Ireland, "Thousands of women, each of them a thousand times less dangerous and terrifying to our Governments than Joan was to the Government of her day, have within the last ten years been slaughtered, starved to death, burnt out of house and home." 

"'Don't argue: do as you are told' has to be said not only to children and soldiers, but practically to everybody. Fortunately most people do not want to argue: they are only too glad to be saved the trouble of thinking for themselves." 

"[C]hildren are never taught contemporary history. Their history books deal with periods of which the thinking has passed out of fashion, and the circumstances no longer apply to active life. For example, they are taught history about Washington, and told lies about Lenin. ...The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all." 

"I affirm that the nineteenth century, and still more the twentieth, can knock the fifteenth into a cocked hat in point of susceptibility to marvels and miracles and saints and prophets and magicians and fairy tales of all kinds. ... But why the men who believe in electrons should regard themselves as less credulous than the men who believed in angels is not apparent to me." 

"[T]here is not a breath of medieval atmosphere in Shakespear's histories. His John of Gaunt is like a study of the old age of Drake." 

3. "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, pp. 22-33

"Preface," by George Bernard Shaw, from "THE MAID IN LITERATURE" through "...but I will maintain my own ways before Him.'"

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Shaw posits that Shakespeare wanted to make Joan "a beautiful and romantic figure" in Henry VI, Part I" but was told that the play couldn't be produced if he did so, "but he may have tried to redeem it from downright infamy by shedding a momentary glamor on the figure of The Maid."

Discusses Joans by Schiller, Voltaire, Anatole France, Andrew Lang and Mark Twain, whose "Joan, skirted to the ground, and with as many petticoats as Noah's wife in a toy ark, is an attempt to combine Bayard with Esther Summerson from Bleak House into an unimpeachable American school teacher in armor."

"To see her in her proper perspective you must understand Christendom and the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the Feudal System, as they existed and were understood in the Middle Ages."

Joan "was tried, not as a traitress, but as a heretic, blasphemer, sorceress, and idolater. Her alleged offences were not political offences against England, nor against the Burgundian faction in France, but against God and against the common morality of Christendom." She

made it clear that her notion of a Catholic Church was one in which the Pope was Pope Joan. How could the Church tolerate that, when it had just destroyed Hus, and had watched the career of Wycliffe with a growing anger that would have brought him, too, to the stake, had he not died a natural death before the wrath fell on him in his grave?

"Many innovating saints, notably Francis and Clare, have been in conflict with the Church during their lives, and have thus raised the question whether they were heretics or saints. Francis might have gone to the stake had he lived longer."

Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the Throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else, his decision shall be taken as final.

As for the cruelty of medieval tortures and burning, our prisons are also cruel. "We have not even the excuse of getting some fun out of our prisons as the Middle Ages did out of their stakes and wheels and gibbets."

When the Church Militant behaves as if it were already the Church Triumphant, it makes these appalling blunders about Joan and Bruno and Galileo and the rest which make it so difficult for a Freethinker to join it; and a Church which has no place for Freethinkers: nay, which does not inculcate and encourage freethinking with a complete belief that thought, when really free, must by its own law take the path that leads to The Church's bosom, not only has no future in modern culture, but obviously has no faith in the valid science of its own tenets, and is guilty of the heresy that theology and science are two different and opposite impulses, rivals for human allegiance.

Joan's "canonization was a magnificently Catholic gesture of a Protestant saint by the Church of Rome."

2. "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, pp. 11-22

"Preface," by George Bernard Shaw, from "JOAN'S GOOD LOOKS" through "...the belittling scepticism that reacts against that romance."

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No one ever claimed Joan was either beautiful or ugly: "men were too much afraid of her to fall in love with her," although she "was the defendant in a suit for breach of promise of marriage, and ... conducted her own case and won it."

Shaw likens her to Shakespeare and particularly to the anti-Stratfordian view that "he was an illiterate laborer" despite evidence that "his father was a man of business" and that Shakespeare "knew as much Latin and Greek as most university passmen do: that is, for all practical purposes, none at all." Joan, on the other hand, "was absolutely illiterate" in a time when "many princesses ... might have said the same," but the view of her as "a hired shepherd girl" is incorrect: She was "the young lady of the farm."

"Socrates, Luther, Swedenborg, Blake saw visions just as Saint Francis and Saint Joan did," so we shouldn't hold that against her. "If Newton's imagination had been of the same vividly dramatic kind he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling."

The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up.... In the same way Joan must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her from her mother wit exactly as gravitation came to Newton.... If Joan was mad, all Christendom was mad too.... Luther, when he threw his inkhorn at the devil, was no more mad than any other Augustinian monk: he had a more vivid imagination, and had perhaps eaten and slept less: that was all.

Is the superstition that arose from Joan's religious education any worse than the quackery that arises from science?

"Had Joan not been one of those 'unwomanly women,' she might have been canonized much sooner."

"She was a thorough daughter of the soil in her peasantlike matter-of-factness and doggedness, and her acceptance of great lords and kings and prelates as such without idolatry or snobbery, seeing at a glance how much they were individually good for."

This combination of inept youth and academic ignorance with great natural capacity, push, courage, devotion, originality and oddity, fully accounts for all the facts in Joan's career, and makes her a credible historical and human phenomenon; but it clashes most discordantly both with the idolatrous romance that has grown up around her, and the belittling scepticism that reacts against that romance.

1. "Saint Joan," by George Bernard Shaw, pp. vii-11

"On Playing Joan," by Imogen Stubbs. "Introduction," by Joley Wood. "Preface," by George Bernard Shaw, through "...and not as a different kind of animal with specific charms and specific imbecilities."

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Imogen Stubbs is a charming actress, and so are her remarks about playing the part, specifically the point that Joan was a teenage girl -- and her cheeky comment that "the 47-year-old Sibyl Thorndike" is said to have played Joan "definitively."

Wood's introduction points out that Saint Joan is credited with being the play that won Shaw the Nobel Prize in 1925. "Joan's brash yet accurate critique of authority resonated with Shaw, and he realized that her canonization risked whitewashing this most Shavian quality of hers." In Shaw's vision of the character, "it is Joan's strengths, not her faults, that bring about her downfall."

Shaw saw the irony of how Joan, after four long centuries, was being brought into the fold of a suppressive authority she stood against. Thus when she is canonized a saint in the Epilogue, Shaw has Joan state ''But I never made any such claim.'' Joan's situation is ironically reflected in Shaw's winning the Nobel Prize for the play. In its own way the prize is a canonization of his spirit, yet it is hardly in keeping with the anti-establishment tone of his drama.

Wood characterizes the play as "a kind of absurdist social critique" in which Joan "is sent into an irrational situation" that only she sees as unsound "and this situation is then logically followed to it irrational conclusion."

Joan's desire to communicate directly with her god without an overly-bureaucratic clergy intervening reveals a church that has unknowingly placed itself above the deity.

Joan, Shaw says, "was pure upstart," so that "there were only two opinions about her. One that she was miraculous: the other that she was unbearable." He likens her to Socrates, also put to death for unconventional ideas:

His accuser, if born 2300 years later, might have been picked out of any first class carriage on a suburban railway during the evening or morning rush from or to the City; for he had really nothing to say except that he and his like could not endure being shewn up as idiots every time Socrates opened his mouth.

Unlike Joan and Socrates, Napoleon died in his bed, thereby "proving that it is far more dangerous to be a saint than to be a conqueror. Those who have been both, like Mahomet and Joan, have found that it is the conqueror who must save the saint, and that defeat and capture mean martyrdom."

The portrayal of Joan in "Henry VI, Part I" "grossly libels her." History has turned on her side, but Shaw thinks it is her judges who have continued to be libeled: "Joan got a far fairer trial from the Church and the Inquisition than any prisoner of her type gets nowadays in any official secular court; and the decision was strictly according to law."

Joan as genius and saint: "A genius is a person who, seeing farther and probing deeper than other people, has a different set of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever manner best suits his or her specific talents." Shaw, of course, thought of himself as this kind of genius.