"Dame Joan, Saint Christabel"

"Dame Joan, Saint Christabel" SHEILA STOWELL Bernard Shaw wrote Saint .loan in 1923. His immediate impetus was the canonization of Joan of Arc on 16 May 1920, during a time of power politicking hard upon the horrors of the Great War. The irony of Joan's elevation five hundred years after her death amidst forces she would have opposed but had helped put into play was too great a temptation for Shaw to resist. On a domestic level, Shaw's wife, Charlotte, too insisted upon a role in the work's progress. In the face of her husband's initial resistance, she claimed to have strategically placed books on Joan around the house where Shaw was bound to see them, read them, and thus stimulated, embark upon the piay she wanted him to write. Others have explained Shaw's attraction to the figure of Joan as part of a personal religious pilgrimage, one characterized by G.K. Chesterton as consisting, in the first instance, of Shaw "running away from a religion," and in the second of his "running after one.'" I would like, however, to direct attention to another and anterior influence upon Shaw's Saint .loan, one that as far as I know has received little popular and no scholarly attention. I take as my starting point a well-known letter from Shaw to the eminent (if eccentric) actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Dated 8 September 1913, ten years before Shaw's composition of Saint .loan, and some seven years before Joan's canonization, it betrays a much earlier and quite different interest in Joan of Arc as the possible subject for a stage play. Shaw, vacationing in Orleans, the very heart of Joan country, proposes to Mrs. Pat that he write "a Joan play some day, beginning with the sweeping up of the cinders and orange peel after her martyrdom, and going on with Joan's arrival in heaven." Following a brief sketch of an English soldier offering Joan an improvised cross, an incident that Shaw did, of course, incorporate into the play he would write, the letter concludes that "English Literature must be saved (by an Irishman, as usual) from the disgrace of having nothing to show concerning Joan except the piffling libel in [Shakespeare's] Henry VI, Modern Drama, 37 (1994) 421 422 SHEILA STOWELL which reminds me that one of my scenes will be Voltaire and Shakespeare running down bye streets in heaven to avoid meeting Joan." Shaw ends with a teasing offer of his title role to Mrs. Pat, the actress who would, the following year, create Eliza Doolittle in the London premiere of Pygmalion: "Would you like to play Joan and come in on horseback in armour and fight innumerable supers?"2 Years later in his Preface to the published text of Saint Joan, Shaw would insist upon the true "Medievalism" of the play. Offering what he claimed was a corrective to such works as Andrew Lang's and Mark Twain's late-nineteenth -century "biographies," which, in his view, reinvented Joan as "a beautiful and most ladylike Victorian," Shaw, echoing his earlier references to a Joan clad in fighting mail, insisted (somewhat disingenuously, as we shall see) that "Joan in a nineteenth [or] twentieth century environment is as incongruous a figure as she would appear were she to walk down Piccadilly today in her fifteenth century armour."3 Yet in 1913 when Shaw first envisioned a "Joan ... on horseback [and] in armour," the spectacle of just such a figure, standard in hand, riding down Piccadilly was a palpable reality, a contemporary reference with important social and political resonances. For Joan, as Shaw well knew, was a central icon of the women's suffrage movement, a movement that, having languished through the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was revitalized by the sensational and highly theatrical tactics of the Women's Social and Political Union. Founded in Manchester in 1903 by Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, as an organization dedicated to the enfranchisement of women, the WSPU (as it was known) came to the conclusion that the vote could be won only by a violent rejection of the constitutional and...