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Unit 23: Saint Joan: Detailed Analysis of the Text

Notes

In an arresting and provocative passage near the end of the preface, Shaw makes the
point again that modern society is no less credulous than medieval society. He categorizes
such spiritualist beliefs as mediums, clairvoyance and slate writing (i.e., “spirit writing”)
together with such scientific items as “astronomers who tell us that the sun is nearly a hundred
million miles away and that Betelgeuse is ten times as big as the whole universe” as well as
atomic researchers. He does so not because he believes the scientists are wrong and the
spiritualists correct, but rather to emphasize that “modern science has convinced us that
nothing that is obvious is true.” Modern science demands every bit as much “faith” as medieval
religion or the spiritualism of Shaw’s day.

Turning finally to his own drama, Shaw reminds the readers that he has, because of the practical
limits of the theatre, compressed the time frame in which events occurred and has combined some
historical participants into composite characters. In short, he has taken dramatic license. He defends
also the fact that his characters show, on the stage, awareness of their society that their historical
counterparts would not have had, or at the least would not have articulated. He argues that such a
theatrical device is needed to show the audience what impersonal societal forces were at work in
Joan’s day and, indeed, are still at work in their own. He criticizes the plays of Shakespeare for
creating the impression that “the world is finally governed by vulgarly ambitious individuals who
make rows.” Shaw could thus be said to be rejecting what some later, twentieth and twenty-first
century historians have referred to as the “Great Man” theory of history, in favor of a reading of
history that privileges the work of larger societal forces.
Further, Shaw insists, “There are no villains in the piece. It is what men do at their best, with good
intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their best
intentions that really concern us.” Shaw relegates villains to melodrama; he is concerned with tragedy.
He allows that tragedy, as a genre, inevitably falsifies its characters; but such falsification occurs for
the greater good of making them intelligible to the audience, and therefore helping the audiences to
better understand life. “[T]he things I represent these [characters] as saying,” Shaw states, “are the
things they actually would have said if they had know what they were really doing.”
In closing, Shaw rejects calls from critics for shortening his play (which he says runs the accepted
classical length of three hours for a tragedy), including calls to excise the epilogue. He defends the
play as he has written it: “I write in the classical manner for those who pay for admission to a
theatre because they like classical comedy or tragedy for its own sake, and like it so much when it is
good of its kind and well done that they tear themselves away from it with reluctance.”

23.1.2 Analysis

In his classic book The Quest for the Historical Jesus, the nineteenth-century theologian, historian, and
humanitarian Albert Schweitzer concluded that everyone finds the Jesus whom they intend to find.
Judging from Shaw’s preface, we might well say the same of Joan. “She comes to us as one unknown,”
we might say, revealing our own selves to us. Shaw hammers away at this point with his characteristic
wit and vigor throughout the preface. At one point, for instance, he states that most-indeed, perhaps
all-previous artistic interpreters and historians of Joan’s life “illustrate the too little considered truth
that the fashion in which we think changes like the fashion of our clothes, and that it is difficult, if
not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.” Readers
would be justified in applying Shaw’s own words to himself. To what extent does Shaw think in the
fashion of his day, and to what extent has he actually achieved the larger viewpoint that he seeks?
Shaw is quick to criticize other artists’ representations of Joan. Does he posit that he is offering a
superior view, or simply a different one? Whatever readers decide, they can at least credit him for

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