Customer Reviews

Saint Joan (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is George Bernard Shaw's most important work. A successful drama that has enjoyed continuous popularity for nearly eighty years is worth a read. Most audiences find it very satisfying. Shaw has a gift for lucid dialogue that brings a centuries old story to life. This is one of the most approachable of the great English language plays.

Why then does "Saint Joan" fall short of five stars?

Fictional accounts of Joan of Arc's life are numerous and seldom accurate. Shakespeare makes her a witch. Voltaire makes her an idiot. Schiller makes her admirable - and gives her a magical helmet that protects her from harm until she falls in love.

In a rare exception to his usual satirical style, Mark Twain spent months in France researching her life and published a fictional biography. Readers who enjoy accurate historical fiction would do well with Twain's "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc." Twain considered this - not "Huckleberry Finn" - to be his finest work.

Shaw pays far more attention to accuracy than most fictionalizations. Several lines in the play are Shaw's own translations from her trial transcript. Shaw's long introductory essay aspires to be history as well as drama. Most scholars agree with his assessment of Joan of Arc's socioeconomic background. Shaw acknowledges a few dramatic economies: he combines the historical Jean d'Orleans and Duke Jean d'Alencon into a single character. What causes problems are Shaw's unacknowledged deviations from the factual record.

Shaw argues that Joan of Arc was a forerunner of Protestantism who got a fair trial. Among serious scholars this argument gains no credibility. A surviving letter from the English government that financed the trial guaranteed her execution even if the court found her not guilty. Joan of Arc never rejected the Roman Catholic Church: she rejected the authority of politically biased judges bent on discrediting her and, by inference, on discrediting the king she had crowned. Twenty-four years after her death the Pope reopened the case. The appeals court not only found her innocent but discovered such extensive violations of proper court procedure that it accused the late Bishop Cauchon of heresy.

Shaw's choice works as drama rather than as history yet he advocates it on historical grounds. He might be sincere but he is certainly not honest. To an academic scholar who has explained the facts to umpteen Shaw enthusiasts the difference can be infuriating. This is why "Saint Joan" collects a handful of scathing reviews.

A reader who understands this little shell game with history should have a lively time with the drama. If this is your first reading of "Saint Joan" then I envy you. Nothing quite equals the first encounter.

I have read this play and also performed the part of Joan on stage many times. Shaw's play brings the soul of Joan to life. A girl with no formal education - defeated the English, won a crown for a king, and was tried and burned as a witch - dead at or under the age of 23. No wonder she was made a saint. The story would almost be a horrible fairy tale, if it wasn't true.

What has most stuck in my mind, many years after having read Shaw's book, is the fact that it's more logical to think of Joan as a protestant saint, instead of Catholic, when one considers how she rejected the Catholic Church's authority and was, naturally, rejected in turn.

He makes a very good point when he says that, right as that Church was to ban her on those grounds, nothing could give it the moral right (or any other right, for that matter) to condemn a woman who disagreed with it on matters of faith. In all fairness, they should have simply excommunicated her and said: "If you think you have a better idea, then you go ahead and create your own Church".

It may be a thoroughly idealistic point of view of course, too democratic for that age (perhaps any age), but nonetheless it strikes me as completely fair.
If you like a club but object to some of its rules, and that club isn't willing to change for your sake, they may have the right to throw you out, just as you may have the right to start a new one on your own - but they shouldn't be given the right to take away your life for having dared to challenge their concepts.

This lesson has stayed with me and I recommend this book for the wisdom it contains.

Shaw was a close friend of a Benedictine Abbess, Dame Laurentia, who "vetted" his plays for fairness to the faith. This play is fun, takes lots of bites out of politicians and clergy, and says something beautiful about the imagination. This Joan is no dolt and had to be burnt at the stake. That is a complement to her faith.

While Shaw may have been a gifted playwright, his "Saint Joan" did an enormous disservice to the subject: the view it presents of Joan of Arc conflicts with the historical evidence on nearly every point, echoing instead the propaganda of her enemies. In truth, her trial was orchestrated by the English and their clerical allies (and even Shaw admits that the Inquisition overturned the verdict in 1456, shortly after the English were finally driven out of Rouen); nor was Joan a "rebel" except in the minds of her political opponents. By dredging up this fraudulent view of La Pucelle, Shaw's play was among the first popular works to undermine the efforts of countless scholars whose research had brought a more truthful view of the issue to light. For an historically accurate version, I would recommend any book by Regine Pernoud, many of which are offered here at Amazon.

Radical feminism, to which I pledge complete allegiance, has put gender issues at the forefront of historical interest in Joan of Arc, but historiography is scarcely pertinent to the reading of George Bernard Shaw's play 'Saint Joan.' I'm told that this awkward play was a smash hit and held the stage for decades in Britain, but it's hard to imagine how or why. The first problem is not gender but 'genre.' Is it intended to play as a farce, before an audience that will chuckle genteelly at hearing Jehan d'Arc speak with a Yorkshire brogue? Or as a philosophical tragicomedy, preparing the stage of the future for Samuel Becket? The dialogue is half music-hall burlesque and half pompous twaddle. I'd have a hard time declaring which is more juvenile, the humor or the sententious lecturing.

If anyone who reads this review has seen a staged production of the play, I'd be interested in hearing whether it was 'played for laughs' or performed earnestly. Shaw is of course taken quite seriously in the world of anglophone theater, though actual productions of his works are rare in the USA. Shaw was not reticent about assuring "us" of his intelligence, and not particularly chary of condescension, but this play features some of the dumbest jokes and most preposterous dialogue I've ever read. Any audience that wasn't overawed by Shaw's elevated reputation would groan out loud at Joan's flippant folksiness.

There seems to be a "Joan-of-Arc" effect on the minds of writers, which disposes them to bizarre extravagance. I turned to Shaw's 'Saint Joan' as a follow-up to reading Mark Twain's romantic novel/ biography "Joan of Arc.' Both works are based on historical sources, chiefly the trial records, yet neither can be interpreted as 'history' in a modern sense. Shaw was aware of Twain's book, and regarded it skeptically, yet the two works have more in common than not. Both are polemics against humanity's inability to comprehend sainthood.

"Cauchon: If you dare do what this woman has done - set your country above the holy Catholic Church - you shall go to the fire with her."

So speaks a more engaging, complex executioner of the legendary young soldier put forth by Bernard Shaw in "Saint Joan." Even if the Bishop put Joan to death for political reasons he likely believed that her execution was just. The Catholic Church's problems with Joan lingered for nearly 500 years. Her active assertion of nationalism as a holy endeavor intuited by her own judgment undermined the Catholic church's political authority, and yes, presaged the Reformation, even if Joan was not a Protestant (Shaw labels her "anti clerical").

And she willingly asserted a non-traditional feminine role (soldiering and politicking), which by its nature required non-traditional feminine behavior and dress. Reviewers who say that Joan wore armor to keep from being raped are half right, since Joan's soldiering included such occupational hazards, as with being wounded. But she did and thrived at it anyway. In fact, I agree with Shaw that the voices spurring her on were Joan's own subconcious, but that is another debate...

Those who are skeptical of Shaw's ideas would do well to consider the year of her Canonization: 1920. It's no accident that a year after the Great War, in which the world's powers successfully mobilized against each other in the name of Nationalism (the churches providing prayers and getting out of the way), that Catholicism threw up its hands and recognized the genius of the young French teenager. This too as women had been called on in support roles like nurses and ambulance drivers, and were being enfranchised by their European and American nations.

The play itself is typical Shaw - bright, smart, very worthwhile. None of the play's acts goes on too long. None is weak, except for Act III on the eve of the battle of Orleans, but Shaw is Shaw and seems embarassed by the warlike bluster. Joan herself, as others have observed, often speaks in lines that are taken directly from the trial transcripts. When she doesn't it's usually to give her a flash of wit that rarely seems contrived. This is Joan for grown-ups. And it is Joan for the 21st century: post-modern, the old sentiments put aside.

Also reccomended: Regine Pernoud's books. If you need to hear what a pretty, chaste, tear-provoking, goody goody of a girl Joan was buy Mark Twain (I myself donated that volume to the public library when I was 17).

Shaw's keen understanding of French Patriotism as illustrated in Joan of Arc story transcends borders, cultures, languages and skin colors. The legacy of Joan's heroism, her vision and her love of humanity and her country still haunts both Western and Eastern civilizations in each individual's effort to fulfill his "duties" in life.

it was so real and emotional , the physical and mental stamnia of the joan is eternal. she belivies so strongly in her voices and mission she will not give in . and defies all the court by suicide.

Well,I have read the applecart before reading this book and i had high expectations when i started saint joan.my expectations were truly met with.The best part of the book is the preface.Shaw clearly points out His Joan and not the Joan of a romantic author.if the play would have been any different from this i wouldnt have liked it because everyone knows there is nothing romantic about Joan.Well,the main topics of discussion between me and my friends about this book are " role of church in joan's time " and " Shaw's theory of Life Force when applied to Joan ".To sum it all up,it is a truly remarkable work by a genius of Shaw's calibre.