page_title: Saint Joan (play)
section_title: Criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Saint Joan (play) / Criticism
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Statue de Jeanne d'Arc sur la place des Pyramides à Paris. Commettant Daniel Iffla (1889) Date&#160;: Août 2004 Photographe amateur&#160;: Photographie prise par François Trazzi
context_page_description: Saint Joan is a play by George Bernard Shaw about 15th-century French military figure Joan of Arc. Premiering in 1923, three years after her canonization by the Roman Catholic Church, the play reflects Shaw's belief that the people involved in Joan's trial acted according to what they thought was right. He wrote in his preface to the play:
  There are no villains in the piece. Crime, like disease, is not interesting: it is something to be done away with by general consent, and that is all [there is] about it. 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 intentions, that really concern us.
  Michael Holroyd has characterised the play as "a tragedy without villains" and also as Shaw's "only tragedy". John Fielden has discussed further the appropriateness of characterising Saint Joan as a tragedy.
  The text of the published play includes a long Preface by Shaw.
context_section_description: One historian at the time (1925) reacted to the play by arguing that it was highly inaccurate, especially in its depiction of medieval society.
  Shaw states that the characterization of Joan by most writers is "romanticized" to make her accusers come off as completely unscrupulous and villainous.
  More general interpretation of Joan's character is to describe her as a rebel against general institutional authority, such as that of the Catholic Church and to the feudal system.  Contemporary comments have noted her particularly strong form of religious belief and how it borders on religious fanaticism.
  Tony Stafford discussed Shaw's use of imagery related to birds in the play.  Frederick Boas has compared the different treatments of Joan in dramas by Shakespeare, Schiller, and Shaw.
  T. S. Eliot, discussing the play after its premiere in London in 1924, wrote that although Saint Joan was not the masterpiece that some claimed it to be, the play "seems to illustrate Mr. Shaw's mind more clearly than anything he has written before." And although he credited Shaw with providing an "intellectual stimulant" and "dramatic delight", he took issue with his portrayal of the heroine: "his Joan of Arc is perhaps the greatest sacrilege of all Joans: for instead of the saint or the strumpet of the legends to which he objects, he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer, and her place is a little higher than Mrs. Pankhurst" (the militant leader of the British suffragettes).
caption: Jeanne d'Arc statue at Place des Pyramides, Paris by Emmanuel Frémiet, 1874
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