The life of fifteenth-century heroine Joan of Arc is the stuff of
legend, and her cruel death (burnt at the stake aged just nineteen) led
to her being declared a martyr, granting her an extraordinary legacy.
Following her canonisation in 1920, and against a history of overly
romanticised retellings of the story, Bernard Shaw put pen to paper to
give a more accurate account, without resorting to demonising her
persecutors; as he writes in his preface, 'there are no villains in the
piece'.
It was an immediate success, securing him the Nobel Prize for
Literature, although critics were initially divided by this frank
approach - T.S. Eliot was outraged, saying, 'instead of the saint or the
strumpet of the legends... he has turned her into a great middle-class
reformer.' Nonetheless - or perhaps even because of this controversy -
Saint Joan is considered one of Shaw's finest and most important
plays.
This edition has an introduction by Simon Mundy, who has spent several
years as Vice-President of PEN International's Writers for Peace
Committee, and extensive explanatory notes.
'He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr Johnson, a universal genius
who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade.' -
The Independent
