Saint Joan was first performed at the Garrick Theatre, New York, in December 1923, with Winifred Lenihan in the title role, and published by Constable in 1924 with one of Shaw’s longest and most brilliant prefaces. The play was the work that confirmed Shaw’s status as the greatest dramatist in the English language since Shakespeare — or, as Shaw would have preferred to put it, the greatest dramatist in any language since himself.
Shaw’s Joan is a figure of extraordinary complexity. She is devout but not pious, brave but not reckless, inspired but not mystical. She hears voices — Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, the Archangel Michael — and she obeys them without question, but her obedience is practical rather than ecstatic: the voices tell her to raise the siege of Orléans, and she raises it. She has no interest in theology and no understanding of the political forces she is unleashing; she simply knows what God wants and is impatient with anyone who stands in the way.
Shaw’s great innovation is to take the trial seriously. Earlier dramatists had treated Joan’s trial as a travesty — ignorant churchmen persecuting a saint — but Shaw argues that the Inquisitor and the Bishop of Beauvais were intelligent, sincere men who understood something Joan did not: that her claim to receive direct divine guidance, bypassing the authority of the Church, was the most dangerous idea in Christendom. If Joan could hear God without the Church’s mediation, anyone could — and the result would be the destruction of the institution that had held European civilization together for a thousand years. The Inquisitor does not want to burn Joan; he wants to save her, and he genuinely believes that her heresy will lead to chaos.
The epilogue — set twenty-five years after Joan’s death, when Charles VII has cleared her name — is Shaw’s most daring structural innovation. It brings Joan back from the dead to discover that she has been canonized, and her response — “Must I burn again? Are none of you ready to receive me?” — is both comic and devastating. The world that burned her as a heretic now worships her as a saint, but it would burn her again if she returned: the qualities that made her a saint are the same qualities that made her a heretic, and the world has not changed.
The play won Shaw the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 (he accepted the honor but declined the money, directing it to the establishment of an Anglo-Swedish literary foundation).
Collecting Saint Joan
First edition (Constable, London, 1924): Green cloth, with the lengthy preface.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $100–$300
- First American edition (Brentano’s): $60–$150
- Limited signed edition: $500–$1,500
- Later editions: $10–$25