Page 292 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes 23.7.2 Analysis

In the penultimate scene of his drama, Shaw depicts Joan as the proto-Protestant he holds her to be:
adamantly insisting upon the privileged position of her individual relationship to God, over and
against the Church’s magisterial authority to interpret and pronounce God’s will; denying that the
Church is wiser than she is, simply because the Church claims it is; and affirming her right of
conscience to obey God as she understands such obedience. All the arguments that Shaw has been
making about Joan throughout the play-her Nationalism, her Protestantism, her Rationalism, her
Imagination-come to fruition in this scene. Some readers may feel, ironically, that Shaw, although
he has set out to humanize Joan and strip away the “whitewashing” of centuries of legend and
piety, he has substituted an equally “mythic” Joan in the former construct’s place. On the other
hand, readers must remember Shaw’s intention, stated in the preface, to dramatize social forces,
and to have his characters speak as they never could have in history. To a large extent, this intention
accounts for Joan’s emergence in Scene VI as virtually the incarnation of the modern spirit-despite
her “imagery” (as Shaw called it in the preface) of saints and angels-in the face of the medieval
spirit.
Yet Shaw does not let modern audiences rest easy in congratulatory self-satisfaction-another of
Shaw’s stated intentions. For example, the Inquisitor’s lengthy speech justifying the Inquisition and
its courts as a kindness gives modern readers pause. We are all too aware that the worst of actions
can be justified under the best and most sincere of intentions. Indeed, as the Inquisitor himself
states, “Heresy at first seems innocent and even laudable. [Heretics] believe honestly and sincerely
that their diabolical inspiration is divine.” Shaw unsettles his audience, leading them to wonder, as
he does in the preface, if their own cherished “orthodoxies” are no less diabolical. Again, Shaw is
dramatizing what he sees as the horror of intolerance. Joan is, in this sense, a martyr to society’s
need to preserve itself a legitimate need, but only when not taken too far, as Shaw believes it was in
this case and still was in many cases in his own day. He does not offer any easy answers or solutions;
his purpose is to confront us with the dilemma, and that purpose has achieved.

23.8 Epilogue

23.8.1 Summary

A quarter-century after Joan’s death, King Charles VII is falling asleep over a book in bed when
Ladvenu enters his chambers to tell him that Joan, in a new ecclesiastical inquiry, has been
rehabilitated and judged innocent. Ladvenu reflects on the irony: at Joan’s first trial, justice was
administered fairly and truth was told, and yet she was burned; at her second, falsehood prevailed
in testimony and procedure, and yet the Maid has been justified. Charles’ sole concern is that he is
now no longer open to charges that he was crowned by a witch and a heretic. He also talks about the
hypocrisy of Joan’s latter—day judges: “If you could bring her back to life, they would burn her
again within six months, for all their present adoration of her.”
After Ladvenu leaves, Charles sleeps and dreams. Joan appears to him in his dream. Joan reacts to
news of her rehabilitation with typical commonsense: “I was burned, all the same. Can they unburn
me?” Charles admits, “If they could, they would think twice before they did it.”
More figures from the past-some dead, others who are also asleep, elsewhere, but whose spirits
have been mystically summoned by the spirit of Joan-enter Charles’ dream. Cauchon manifests
himself, relating how, as a result of the second inquest into Joan’s case, he is not allowed to rest in
peace; his corpse has been unearthed and flung into the sewer, so great is the public’s hatred of him,
so thoroughgoing has the vilification of him been. Dunois appears, telling Joan that he has kept his

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