Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue
1924
Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan explodes the myth of the mad saint to reveal something far more dangerous: a shrewd, practical visionary whose conviction shakes empires. In this chronicle play, a peasant girl convinces the Dauphin of France to give her an army, leading besieged forces to victory and securing a coronation at Reims, all while insisting her 'voices' are simply intense imagination, not divine revelation. Shaw constructs no simple tale of heroism and martyrdom. Instead, he depicts Joan's trial and execution as a tragedy produced not by villains but by ordinary men, Bishop Cauchon, the Earl of Warwick, the Inquisitor, each acting according to their institutional logic. The collision between individual conscience and institutional authority resonates far beyond medieval France. Shaw's Joan is rebellious, politically astute, and unbearable to the powerful precisely because she will not stop. Nearly a century after its premiere, the play endures because it asks the same question facing every age: what happens when genuine vision meets the machinery of established power?
