Saint Joan

About

Shaw's 1923 masterpiece on Joan of Arc was written immediately after her canonization and is perhaps his finest play: the trial scenes are extraordinary, the Epilogue a philosophically bold theatrical gesture, and the character of Joan — practical, visionary, combative, and completely without self-pity — is one of drama's great heroines. Shaw's preface argues that Joan was a proto-Protestant and proto-nationalist burned by the medieval Catholic Church for the crime of being ahead of her time. The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Shaw partly on the strength of this play. It is simultaneously one of his most accessible and most philosophically serious works.