Synopses & Reviews
With Saint Joan, Shaw reached the height of his fame as a dramatist. Fascinated by the story of Joan of Arc (canonized in 1920), but unhappy with "the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition," he presents a realistic Joan: proud, intolerant, naïve, foolhardy, always brave-a rebel who challenged the conventions and values of her day.
Synopsis
Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of Shaw's powerful historical drama about Joan of Arc, which led him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature--part of the official Bernard Shaw Library With
Saint Joan, which distills many of the ideas Shaw had been exploring in earlier works on politics, religion, feminism, and creative evolution, he reached the height of his fame as a dramatist. Fascinated by the story of Joan of Arc, but unhappy with the way she had traditionally been depicted, Shaw wanted to remove "the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition." He presents a realistic Joan: proud, intolerant, na ve, foolhardy, and brave--a rebel and a woman for Shaw's time and our own.
This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume includes Shaw's Preface of 1924; the cast list of the first production of Saint Joan; a chronology; and the essay "On Playing Joan" by Imogen Stubbs.
Synopsis
One of Shaw's most unusual and enduringly popular plays. With SAINT JOAN (1923) Shaw reached the height of his fame and Joan is one of his finest creations; forceful, vital, and rebelling against the values that surround her. The play distils Shaw's views on the subjects of politics, religion and creative evolution.
Synopsis
'Everything she did was thoroughly calculated; and though the process was so rapid that she was hardly conscious of it, and ascribed it all to her voices, she was a woman of policy and not of blind impulse'
With Saint Joan, Shaw reached the height of his fame as a dramatist. In this magnificent play he distilled many of the ideas he had been trying to express in earlier works on the subjects of politics, religion and creative evolution. Fascinated by the story of Joan of Arc, but unhappy with the way she had traditionally been depicted, Shaw wanted to remove 'the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition'. He presents a realistic Joan: proud, intolerant, naive, foolhardy, always brave -- a rebel who challenged the conventions and values of her day. As Imogen Stubbs writes, 'All Joans are relevant but some Joans are more relevant than others -- I think Shaw's Saint Joan is the right one to be received by the twenty-first century'.
The definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence