Joan and Her Sisters

Joan of Arc is perhaps the most famous woman of Europe, particularly in France. A poem from Joan's lifetime, written in July 1429, the month of King Charles's coronation in Rheims, at the height of Joan's success, presents her as a victorious general, not as a martyr. She was tried as a witch and executed in 1431, declared a martyr twenty-five years later by Pope Callixtus III, but beatified only in 1909 and canonized in 1920. Shaw was very fascinated with Joan of Arc in 1924 when he wrote Saint Joan: the very first play to be written about her after she was declared a saint and arguably one of Shaw's greatest plays. He had a political point to make in rejecting all the romantic images of Joan (as well as defending Voltaire) in his preface. Joan is "a sane and shrewd country girl of extra-ordinary strength of mind and hardihood of body" while characterizing her divine visions as demonstrating that "her dramatic imagination played tricks with her senses." Following on this realistic focus, Shaw presented Joan of Arc as a social reformer: "The question raised by Joan's burning is a burning question still," Shaw declared. "That is why I am probing it. If it were only an historical curiosity I would not waste my readers' time and my own."

John Pendergast's Joan of Arc on the Stage and Her Sisters in Sublime Sanctity examines Schiller's play Die Jungfrau von Orleans and adaptations thereof. The book's main aim seems to be to identify features of sanctity inspired by Iphigenie as a critical element in Schiller's play. He is clearly very well versed in Russian literature and has a deep, intimate knowledge of Schiller's Johanna. The author reasons that since the Virgin Mary never appears on stage, it is Johanna's own joy "earned at the price of great suffering and attained through her extraordinary exertion of will" (75) that rescues her at the end. "At the moment of her death, she experiences this joy as a sublime sensation, seemingly eternal, brought about by the restoration of her reputation among the people through the sanctity of her singular devotion to their shared mission" (75). Unlike Shaw, Pendergast argues, Schiller does not claim to be historically accurate. The author takes great exception to Shaw's claim of historical accuracy and his criticism of Schiller's play. Chapter 4 is by far the strongest and most intriguing part of the book.

Chapter 4 is divided into two parts—one about Zhukovsky and his translation of Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans and one about Tchaikovsky and his opera The Maid of Orleans.¹ A detailed biographical overview of Zhukovsky takes up a large part of the first half of this chapter and is not really needed for the argument. The same can be said for the second half of the chapter, which is taken up with a detailed biographical overview of Tchaikovsky, much of which is centered around his sexuality.² This chapter displays a deep knowledge of Russian literature and the translation of Schiller's play, showing how several of Schiller's ideas of romanticism were changed in the translation. Pendergast identifies three kinds of changes: "a tendency to embrace antiquated or intentionally conservative styles, especially those expressive of loss or longing; the prominence of explicitly religious terminology, in place of the more generally spiritual; the exaltation of patriotism over nationalism, a distinction more significant than it may seem at first" (133). He also points out that while many characters get altered, the part of Queen Isabeau is the one to change most significantly. Pendergast shows how Zhukovsky's changes produces a drama that results in "the amalgamation of the two leading tendencies of incipient Russian drama of the nineteenth century: Social political dramas of the sort that Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy would produce; and introspective psychological dramas of the sort for which Chekhov would become famous...