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From Hens' Eggs to Cinders: Avian Imagery in Shaw's Saint Joan Tony J. Stafford University of Texas at El Paso Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray opens with Aubrey Tanqueray enjoying a quiet and intimate dinner with two male friends. Shortly afterwards, the party breaks up with Mr. Misquith and Dr. Jayne bidding Tanqueray goodnight and vanishing from the play, never to be seen nor heard from again. Shaw, "some years later, took exception to the waste of Mr. Misquith and Dr. Jayne" (Dunkel 47), viewing it as poor workmanship to begin a play with a situation and characters which are never alluded to again. Shaw apparently felt that the disappearance of the two friends as a way of dramatizing Tanqueray's self-imposed ostracization from polite society was insufficient reason to mislead the audience and violate an even more important principle. W. D. Dunkel, a Pinero scholar, said that "Shaw's remarks should not be taken seriously," for he was frustrated and hungry at the time, the author of unpublished novels, stories, and plays. Everyone was praising Pinero's play, and it was a typical and characteristic Shavian procedure to pick a flaw in it. (47) In addition to making this unprovoked attack on Shaw's character, Dunkel also misses Shaw's point. Shaw knew only too well that in good drama as in good literature, every incident leads somewhere, all motifs come together, every reference has a purpose, and nothing is lost. For Shavian students this dogged insistence by Shaw that Pinero relate the opening of his play to later developments alerts us to the value of this principle in his own dramatic works. Shaw's Saint Joan opens with Baudricourt shouting at his steward, "No eggs! No eggs!! Thousand thunders, man, what do you mean by no eggs?" (697). The steward defends himself by saying that "the hens will not lay" because "it is the act of God," but Baudricourt finds his steward's self-appointed role as God's spokesman an opportunity to come down even harder on him: "you tell me there are no eggs; and you blame your Maker for it" (697). The steward, unintimidated, counters with, "I cannot lay eggs," and "we all have to go without eggs just as you have, sir. The hens will not lay" (698). Baudricourt feels compelled to remind his servant that the "three Barbary hens and the black are the best layers in Champagne" and that the steward had better not dare say "that there are no eggs!" (698). 213 214Rocky Mountain Review He thereupon orders his man to "bring me four dozen eggs ... in this room before noon, or Heaven have mercy on your bones!" (698). The steward can only reply that "there are no eggs. There will be none — not if you were to kill me for it — as long as The Maid is at the door" (698-99). With the introduction of Joan into the conversation, the subject changes, but the length of the conversation about hens and eggs and its emphatic primary position in the play will not let it be forgotten, and the audience's memory' keeps harking back to the opening encounter. At the end of scene 1 , the steward, after Baudricourt has agreed to give Joan a horse and armor, "runs in with a basket" announcing "gleefully" (for his bones are spared) that "the hens are laying like mad, sir. Five dozen eggs!" (710). With that, all direct references to 'hens and eggs cease. Is this one reference then Shaw's only subsequent development of the initial scene? Does Shaw open his play with a conversation over two pages in length, only to follow it up with a single reference at the close of scene 1 ? Has Shaw thus violated the same dramatic principle for which he faulted Pinero? If one assumes that later amplifications of an earlier episode are to be developed only in the dramatic action, then it would indeed seem that Shaw is guilty of an oversight. But if one concedes that an incident can be expanded upon in other ways such as allusions, descriptions, metaphors, images, objects in the setting, and reports of...

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