Saint Joan
by George Bernard Shaw
Summary
Shaw dramatizes Joan of Arc's short public life across six scenes and an epilogue, and he refuses from the first scene to make her either a mystic or a victim. His Joan talks her way past a skeptical garrison commander, Robert de Baudricourt, on sheer practical confidence rather than by working a miracle in front of him, then persuades the weak, indecisive Dauphin to let her lead troops to break the English siege of Orleans. She wins that battle and gets the Dauphin crowned at Reims, and Shaw gives the men around her, church officials, feudal lords, military professionals, genuinely reasoned arguments for wanting her stopped rather than making them simple villains: they see a peasant girl who answers to nobody, claims direct authority from God over the heads of bishops and princes, and refuses to leave once her usefulness runs out, and each of those things frightens an institution built on obedience for good reasons of its own.
The trial in the sixth scene is the play's center. Joan, cornered and alone, signs a confession to escape execution, then tears it up the moment she understands the alternative is life imprisonment rather than freedom, telling her judges she cannot live shut away from light and open fields. She is burned at the stake offstage. An epilogue set twenty five years later, after a retrial has cleared her name, brings her back in a dream to the men who condemned her, now including an emissary who announces her eventual canonization as a saint; when Joan asks whether she should simply come back to life now that everyone agrees she was right, every single person in the room, friend and enemy alike, makes an excuse and leaves, unable to actually want a living saint back among them.
It reads as a genuine argument rather than a simple tragedy, since Shaw gives real weight to both sides of Joan's trial, and its epilogue's cold final joke, that sainthood is something people prefer at a safe historical distance, lands harder once a reader has just watched the trial scene in full.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave George Bernard Shaw the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature for work marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often carrying a singular poetic beauty, and Saint Joan, which had premiered on Broadway in December 1923 and in London in March 1924 not long after Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan of Arc in May 1920, is the play most closely tied to that citation. Shaw had considered writing about Joan since 1913, and it was her formal sainthood, more than the centuries old legend, that finally sent him to the subject.
Shaw at first declined the prize money outright, saying his own readers and audiences already gave him more than he needed, before accepting the honor and letting the money found the Anglo Swedish Literary Foundation in 1927 to support literary exchange between Britain and Sweden. Reviewers at the time argued openly over whether Shaw had earned the right to reinterpret a canonized saint as a shrewd, occasionally comic political operator; T. S. Eliot called the portrayal close to sacrilege, while other critics praised exactly the same choice as the play's nerve.