“You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread: when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times. I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.”—George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan (1923)In his preface to Three Plays for Puritans, George Bernard Shaw posed the question, “Better Than Shakesepear?”, referring to their respective treatments of Cleopatra. His answer, of course, was that his own was.
That particular point might be arguable, but not the question of whose treatment of St. Joan of Arc was superior. In the Bard’s Henry VI, Part I, Joan (here called Joan La Pucelle) is a villain, and her death at the stake for witchcraft celebrated. In St. Joan, Shaw depicts her as the surprising center of one of the great theatrical treatments of intolerance. The above monologue, when Joan recants her confession and rounds on her accusers, is one of the most eloquent passages in all of Shaw. (It is also the one that Jane Fonda’s Bree, on one of her fruitless auditions when she is not doing tricks as a call girl, recites in the 1971 thriller Klute.)
Shakespeare and Shaw are only two of the many writers--and, for that matter, filmmakers--who have been fascinated by the Main of Orleans, who was born on this date--the Feast of the Epiphany--in 1412. Schiller, Mark Twain, Anatole France, Jean Anouilh, and Mary Gordon are among the authors who have found this young girl (dead before she even reached 20 years old) a figure epitomizing what Kathryn Harrison, in an op-ed article for The New York Times, termed “Enduring Power.”
Filmmakers, too, have been drawn to her: Victor Fleming, Robert Bresson, Otto Preminger (in a 1957 adaptation of Shaw’s play), and, in one of the most powerful of all silent films, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). (The star, Maria Falconetti, is in the image accompanying this post.)
The script from Dreyer’s film drew heavily on the actual trial transcripts. That, along with testimony from more than 100 witnesses the 1456 “retrial” ordered by the Vatican that reversed the earlier judgment, have proven crucial to biographers. It is doubtful that any other ordinary, young European of the time has ever had her life documented so thoroughly.
This leads to a crucial point about Shaw’s take on the life of the saint. The playwright delighted in paradox, and from first (his preface states, “Though a professed and most pious Catholic..she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs”) to last (the Dominican friar Martin Ladvenu, her spiritual counselor in her last days, explains that “At the trial that sent a saint to the stake as a heretic and a sorceress, the truth was told [and] the law was upheld”], this play follows the same pattern as his other many plays.
But Shaw’s point--that the first trial was conducted honestly by well-meaning fanatics, while the “retrial,” a product of “shameless perjury, courtly corruption, calumny of the dead” nevertheless correctly exonerated Joan--simply flies in the face of the facts, including what was documented at the above-mentioned tribunals.
Joan was held for a year in a dank cell as a prisoner of war, then tried for heresy. As the Regine Pernoud/Marie-Veronique Clin biography, Joan of Arc: Her Story demonstrates, she should, according to canon law operative at the time, not only have been held in an ecclesiastical prison (where she would have been guarded by women rather than men, and thus been treated better), but would also have been entitled to legal representation. Instead, this provincial woman, under threat of death, faced off against multiple leading legal minds and intellectuals (the University of Paris was heavily involved in the proceedings). Despite Shaw’s contention that the condemnatory trial of 1431 delivered a wrong verdict despite the principals’ best intentions (Cauchon, her prosecutor, says, “I will not have it said that we proceeded on forced confessions”), the first trial was riddled with political biases from its inception.
And yet, Shaw still managed to convey much of the greatness of this simple rural girl who confounded older, more worldly men. As she defends herself against her clerical accusers, Shaw--whose will stated that his only religious belief was in “creative revolution”--gives some of the most eloquent words of faith to a saint who had to wait for posterity to be understood:
“I see now that the loneliness of God is his strength: what would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God; His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die. I will go out now to the common people, and let the love in their eyes comfort me for the hate in yours.”
(Incidentally, poet-biographer Ben D. Kennedy has his own blog devoted entirely to the Maid of Orleans.)
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