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Epilogue, § ii

Saint Joan ~ Program Note written by George Bernard Shaw

Title page

This note was included in the program on the first London production of the play.

PROGRAM NOTE

For the convenience of professional critics, and the satisfaction of the general interest in Saint Joan, I had better point out how far the play this evening will depart from historical facts. It does not depart from ascertainable historical truth in any essential particular; but historical facts cannot be put on the stage exactly as they occurred, because they will not fit into its limits of time and space.

The visit of Joan to the castle of Vaucouleurs, and her conquest of its captain, occupy about twenty minutes on the stage. Actually she made three visits before she carried her point with him. The apparent miracle which impressed him was the news of the Battle of Herrings. Joan learnt this from the mouth-to-mouth wireless of the peasantry. She was therefore able to tell him what had happened several days before the news reached him by the official routine of mounted messenger. This seemed to him miraculous. A much simpler form of miracle has been substituted in the play to save tedious and unnecessary explanations.

Joan's second adventure: the visit to Chinon and the conquest of the Dauphin, has been compressed in the same way. Actually, Joan was received after days of hesitation, and sent to Poitiers to be examined by a body of Churchmen there before she was sent with reinforcements to Orleans. The miracles of the drowned blasphemer and the change of wind on the Loire are historical.

Joan's unconscious confessions of heresy at her trial, her recantation, her relapse, and her execution, occupied several days. On the stage they occupy forty minutes; but nothing essential is misrepresented; and nothing is omitted except the adjournments and matters irrelevant to the final issue.

The Epilogue is obviously not a representation of an actual scene, or even of a recorded dream; but it is none the less historical. Without it the play would be only a sensational tale of a girl who was burnt, leaving the spectators plunged in horror, despairing of humanity. The true tale of Saint Joan is a tale with a glorious ending; and any play that did not make this clear would be an insult to her memory.

But this play is more likely to puzzle by its conflict with current fictions about Saint Joan than by its adaptation of facts to the stage. In any generally accessible work of reference, and in such well known books as those by Mark Twain and Andrew Lang it is stated that Joan's trial was corrupt, her judges scoundrels, and the questions put to her devised to trap her into fatal admissions. For these slanders of the Church and the Inquisition there is not a shred of evidence in the records of the trial. Joan's judges were as straightforward as Joan herself; and the law took its regular course. She was burnt for heresy because she was guided by her inner light to the position taken two hundred years later by the Society of Friends, for which women were judicially flogged mercilessly at the instance of the Church of England, and would have been burnt had they been Joan's contemporaries. Her insistence on wearing male attire is still a punishable offence. The opinion of the court that her visions were temptations of the devil was quite sincere. Like all prisoners of war, Joan was tried by her political enemies Instead of by an impartial international tribunal; but a medieval Catholic court was far more impartial than a modern national one. How violently the English were prejudiced against her may be seen in the scurrilous popular representation of her in the XVI century play of Henry VI (supposed to have been touched up by Shakespear); but it was not an English court that excommunicated her; and she would have been burnt equally if the Hundred Years War in France had been a purely civil one. Not until the Church privileged her private judgment and classed her visions and her inner light as celestial by canonizing her in 1904-1920 was the verdict of 1431 really reversed. Thus it cannot be too clearly understood that there were no villains in the tragedy of Joan's death. She was entirely innocent; but her excommunication was a genuine act of faith and piety; and her execution followed inevitably.

All the characters in the play are historical to the extent that they bear the names of persons who actually existed in Joan's time and were concerned with her as represented. But the information we have about them varies from such comparatively documented lives as those of Charles, Dunois, and Warwick, to that of Chaplain de Stogumber, who is known only by his having lost his temper and called Cauchon a traitor for accepting- Joan's recantation. His Devonshire name is borrowed for the occasion. The English soldier represents a cherished tradition if not an authentic fact.

Several of the speeches and sallies in the play, especially those of Joan, are historical; and some of them may possibly sound like modern jokes: for instance, her use of the word godons (God damns) to denote English soldiers. One or two speeches have been transposed for stage purposes, and it has been assumed that the military conversation of Dunois may safely be founded on that of his colleague the Duc d'Alençon, who does not appear in the play.

To the more romantic spectators, I must break the news that though Joan inspired strong likes and dislikes, and was not at all bad looking, she had no love affairs. There is overwhelming testimony that her complete neutrality in this respect was accepted as evidence of her divine mission by her soldier comrades.

No portrait of Joan was made to her knowledge; but a head sculptured at Orleans by an artist who presumably saw her is so extraordinary, being obviously a portrait and yet stranger in its impressiveness and the spacing of its features than any ideal head, that it can be accounted for only as an image of a very singular woman; and no other such woman than Joan is discoverable.