![]() ![]() ![]() 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 continued to write plays and essays on relig- ion and socialism until his death in 1950. Saint Joan George Bernard Shaw 133 Kindle Edition 1 offer from 0. 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. It was an immediate success, securing him the Nobel Prize for Literature, although critics were initially divided by this frank approach – T.S. 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.įollowing 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’. Chronologically, Saint Joan follows the despairing play about war ( Heartbreak House, 1919) and his massive five-play cycle about Creative Evolution ( Back to Methuselah, 1921), which reflects. ![]()
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