Page 282 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes Joan was not, argues Shaw, a beauty; or a poor “beggarmaid”; or illiterate; or unmindful of the
political scene in which she moved. Nor, he insists, was Joan insane, despite the fact that she claimed
inspiration and guidance from the voices and visions of saints and angels. In fact, Shaw posits, her
voices and visions, so far from being evidence of insanity, are evidence of keen rationality and of
superior imagination—a point to which Shaw returns repeatedly throughout the preface and, indeed,
the play. Shaw argues that visionaries—those who are “geniuses,” those who see “farther and [probe]
deeper than other people”-are judged by the results, or practical effects, of their visions. Joan’s
visions were, for Shaw, simply the expression of her “mother wit.” Joan’s aims-raising the siege of
Orleans and securing the enthronement of Charles VII at Rheims-were sound and sane, even though
Joan claimed these aims came to her in messages from Saint Catherine. Shaw thus distinguishes
between the content of Joan’s policy and the forms in which it came, which establish, not insanity,
but “her dramatic imagination.” Joan was not “mentally defective” but “mentally excessive.”
Shaw praises Joan as “very capable” and “a born boss,” but reminds us that she was, after all, an
adolescent girl. Her undeniable military and political successes, he argues, can only be attributed to
“simplicity.” Her goals, for all their far-reaching consequences, were “simple” ones—that is, they
could be decisively and unambiguously accomplished through force of arms. Her naïve nature
aided her in this regard, Shaw says, but hurt her when she ran up against impersonal forces that
drive and shape society—in Joan’s case, such forces as “the great ecclesiastical and social institutions
of the Middle Ages.” As he will state later in the preface, “From the moment when [Joan] failed to
stimulate Charles to follow up his coronation with a swoop on Paris she was lost.” She could not
effect a further success to bolster her cause—and, as a “theocrat”, she learned the lesson that success
after success is essential for the continuation of theocracy.
Shaw does not dispute that “a great wrong [was] done to Joan and to the conscience of the world by
her burning.” He does, however, object that this wrong proves the medieval world “uncivilized” as
compared to the modern world. He recounts childhood memories of public burnings in Dublin,
and composer Richard Wagner’s recollection of crowds clamoring to see a man broken on the wheel,
as evidence that modern bloodlust is all too real. Further, Shaw does not blithely pardon or excuse
the Church for its part in Joan’s death. He argues, “The Churches must learn humility as well as
teach it.” Only such humility leaves room for persons of genius, for visualizers, for giants of the
imagination—such as Shaw believes Joan to have been—to move humanity forward. As Shaw says,
“[W]hen the Churches set themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against
the law of God.”
Not only the Churches, Shaw argues, but all societal institutions must be on guard against stifling
change and growth, of opposing what he has earlier called the “evolutionary appetite.” Granted,
that “society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime,”
we must still “be very careful what we persecute.” Shaw, therefore, argues for a broad tolerance,
with limits of acceptability defined liberally rather than conservatively, widely rather than narrowly.
As cautionary examples, he mentions such incidents as the imprisonment of pacifist Quakers during
wartime and the 1920 attack of the British Government upon Irish “advocates of a constitutional
change which it [i.e., the British Government] had presently to effect itself.” Shaw reminds his
readers that Joan’s society afforded her a fair trial even during the stress and strain of civil war
(between those French who supported the Dauphin and those who did not). Therefore, Shaw
concludes, “there was not the smallest ground for the self-complacent conviction of the nineteenth
century that it was more tolerant than the fifteenth.”

Shaw returns at several points to the practice of inoculation. “Various forms of
inoculation were used from ancient times in China, India, and Persia, but it remained for the English
physician Edward Jenner in the late 18th century to demonstrate its feasibility to the Western world”.
Judging from Shaw’s comments in the preface, all controversy regarding the practice and the
mandating of it had not yet died down.

276 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY