Saint Joan

Shaw takes the story of Joan of Arc and strips away both the halo and the villainy, presenting her instead as a plain-spoken country girl whose certainty unsettles everyone around her. The play follows her from the moment she persuades a reluctant captain to arm her, through the coronation of a king, to the church court that condemns her as a heretic. What makes it unusual is Shaw’s fairness to the prosecution: the bishops and inquisitors are not monsters but reasonable men defending an order Joan threatens simply by trusting her own conscience. An epilogue jumps forward to her rehabilitation and eventual canonization. The work helped earn Shaw the Nobel Prize. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.