Shaw’s Plays: Putting Faith in Faith

Abstract

This chapter continues the discussion of Shaw’s plays begun in the previous chapter, and considers plays that focus on Shaw’s fascination with religion. Back to Methuselah and Saint Joan feature the playwright’s attempt to forge his own religion, Creative Evolution. The spokespersons for Shaw’s beliefs are his interior authors, The Brothers Barnabus and Saint Joan.

Shaw, War, and Religion: Putting Faith in Faith

Although he firmly renounced the Protestant religion of his upbringing,¹ the adult Shaw never completely rejected belief in a higher being, whether a creative intellect or a divine will that drives humans to a better, more just world. As discussed in the Introduction, Shaw became famous (or rather, infamous) for his treatises on war and peace; however, his theories on religion appear just as fervently in his plays, although they suggest a different approach to the topic. The next two plays considered here, Back to Methuselah and Saint Joan, portray faith as a cure for humanity’s bellicose nature. Written in the aftermath of the horrors of World War I, these plays reveal what Fintan O’Toole terms Shaw’s “two overlapping strategies for dealing with the problem of how humanity could evolve beyond the ‘angry ape’ let loose on the Western Front. One was a rational social programme, the other a secular religion.”² Although both elements continued to be important in Shaw’s thinking, after World War I the religious solution became paramount. While for Shaw the social elements of the Life Force reflect the Fabian principles of equality of wealth, gender, and class, he realized that human aggression cannot be controlled by legislation and redistribution of capital. Thus, his answer to what he considered humanity’s most pressing issue became Creative Evolution, a new religion for a postwar world in shambles.³

Although Shaw delivered this message via his “talkie” plays, he never presented actual war on stage but relied on a kind of “war in the head” to depict the aggression he sought to control⁴ and the faith in peaceful human progress he longed to instill in his audience. Through his “Old Testament,” Shaw presented “The Word” in Back to Methuselah followed by “The Word Made Flesh” in the “New Testament,” Saint Joan. Here Shaw reveals the hesitant beginnings of Creative Evolution, first through the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas in Back to Methuselah Part II and then following humankind until the attainment of pure thought in Part V. His dramatic ploy of reverting to fifteenth-century history gives life to his New Testament Christ figure, Saint Joan.

Shaw himself often confused the public about his personal religion, using convoluted explanations in the prefaces to his plays and elsewhere. One key to understanding Shaw’s beliefs is to examine his blending of science and religion. To explain this conundrum, Stuart Baker utilizes Eric Bentley’s famous quotation: the essence of the Shavian approach, he wrote, is “not Either/Or but Both/And.”⁵ Combining both scientific and religious elements with his verbosity on the topic led to Shaw creating “complexity from simplicity.”⁶ However, at times Shaw could be very direct, distilling his theories into simple statements about his new religion. One example (upon which Shaw writes countless variations) is the following: “There is behind the universe an intelligent and driving force of which we ourselves are a part—a divine spark.”⁷

Despite his good intentions of generating peace through faith and his attempts to clarify his intentions, Shaw’s religion has been harshly criticized. For example, Harold Bloom condemns “Shaw’s very odd personal religion, the rather cold worship of Creative Evolution. Of this religion, one can say that it is no more bizarre than most and less distasteful than many but it is still quite grotesque.”⁸ More recently however, scholars have extolled Shaw’s capacity for generating emotion when presenting his Creative Evolution, especially in his plays. O’Toole conjectures that the emotion in Shaw’s plays is seldom where we expect to find it. Citing Luigi Pirandello’s review of Saint Joan in the New York Times (1924), O’Toole explains that Shaw’s New Testament saint generates “a deep and intense emotion” in an audience unprepared for this passion and hardly knowing how to respond.⁹ This emotion is found not only in Joan’s strong portrayal of her faith, but also when her passionate beliefs unexpectedly move those who ultimately destroy her. The normally stalwart Chaplain de Stogumber becomes distraught and never totally recovers from his guilt about Joan’s burning, and even the always composed Brother Martin Ladvenu resolutely affirms Joan’s death as being not her end but her beginning—hardly “cold and bizarre” responses to Shaw’s manifestation of his religion.

Hence, these two great dramas, when studied together, can be seen as attempts to create Shaw’s manifesto of faith (Creative Evolution), one that stresses the necessity of achieving peace in his time. A paraphrase of a famous Virginia Woolf statement written almost twenty years later during her struggles over England’s entry into World War II applies to both Shaw and Woolf: “Writing is my fighting.”¹⁰

Back to Methuselah (1921)

Back to Methuselah, the next play presenting Shavian interior authors, does not include an actual manifesto or a play-within-a-play. Rather, this monumental work, comprising five parts, features in Part 2 “The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas,” the program of Franklyn and Conrad Barnabas that outlines Shaw’s theory of Creative Evolution:

If you have read Back to Methuselah you will remember Franklyn Barnabas, the ex-clergyman who, with his gruff brother Conrad, the biologist, had come to the conclusion that the duration of human life must be extended to three hundred years, not in the least as all the stupid people thought because people would profit by a longer experience, but because it was not worth their while to make any serious attempt to better the world or their own condition when they had only thirty or forty years of full maturity to enjoy before they doddered away into decay and death.¹¹

Shaw’s need to convince the public about Creative Evolution (longer human life spans) became more urgent after World War I: Individual life could be prolonged at the same time that war was decimating the population.¹² Shaw illustrates this point by references to the war deaths of Lublin’s and Franklyn’s sons, and Savvy, Franklyn’s daughter, adds that her brother’s death also killed her mother (CPP 5: 436). Franklyn explains that people will live longer not because of their own wishes but because they will innately recognize that that they must more fully mature and become wiser to save the world and its children (CPP 5: 433).

Ultimately, Shaw does not incorporate the Gospel into Part 2; rather, he provides “living” proof of the brothers’ theory that humankind should live at least three hundred years to fully mature in Part 3, which takes place approximately three hundred years after the brothers have conceived their theory of necessary long life. Christopher Innes explains:

The premise of the dramatic world is that ideas have demonstrable effects. Simply overhearing the Brothers Barnabas’s evolutionary “gospel” can “unconsciously convert” other characters, thus bringing about biological change, and the cycle is clearly intended to evoke a comparable process in individual spectators. As one brother argues at a pivotal point, “We can put it into men’s heads that there is nothing to prevent [immortality] happening,” to which the other adds, “Spread that knowledge and that conviction; and as surely as the sun rises tomorrow, the thing will happen.”¹³

Shaw understood that what he called his Metabiological Pentateuch might be unproduceable; however, after meeting Barry Jackson and warning the independently wealthy impresario of his disregard for commercial success when writing the play, Shaw’s Gospel was staged, first in Birmingham and then in London (CPP 5: 691–92). Despite these issues of commercial success, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged Back to Methuselah at the turn of both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, proving that the play is still stageable nearly a century after its inception. Lively reviews followed, showing that Shaw’s “behemoth” was actually a “fairly frisky beast.”¹⁴ Interestingly, Shaw received praise for Back to Methuselah from Virginia Woolf. Stephen Putzel conjectures that Woolf read the play, which was published in 1921. In his letter thanking Woolf for her positive comments about the play, Shaw stated: “I’m glad you got the hang of it. It is not everybody’s book…. Your letter is reassuring; for I value your opinion very specially.”¹⁵

Yet, the challenge of changing people’s minds proves difficult in performance, even for a drama of ideas, and critical responses to this “Metabiological Pentateuch,” have been decidedly mixed. On the positive side, Max Beerbohm called Back to Methuselah Shaw’s “best book” because he does not hide behind characters, as he had with Tanner in Man and Superman.¹⁶ Eric Bentley designates some to the later sections of the play as Shaw “at his worst as a playwright,”¹⁷ while Michael Holroyd reports that Shaw himself called his play “tedious.”¹⁸ Even the dreaded censor eventually said, in effect, “don’t bother”: “It was considered too long and philosophical, meaning ‘that the complete plays were not to be judged as ordinary entertainment’.”¹⁹ Yet Back to Methuselah, which has received perhaps more scholarly than performative attention, cannot be ignored, possibly because, as Dietrich states,

With the understanding that “art has never been great when it was not providing an iconography for a live religion,” Shaw set about more explicitly than ever to create such an iconography—an imagery and a narrative that would compel belief in the Life Force’s dominion over the Death Force, that would give a reason to prefer life over death. Shaw began to write a new Bible: Back to Methuselah … constituting a new Old Testament and Saint Joan … providing a New Testament.²⁰

Too important to disregard because of its rich theological and philosophical ideas, Back to Methuselah, is therefore vital to this study because of the relationship of Shaw and his authors to censorship. This work proves a virtual trifecta of censorship, with Shaw himself, his fictional authors, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office all taking active roles in “managing” the often difficult message of the play.²¹

Censorship

To begin with, Shaw himself excised a portion of Part 2 because he found it boring,²² although the discarded section was eventually published as “A Glimpse of the Domestic Life of Franklyn Barnabas.”²³ This forty-page episode introduces Clara Barnabas, feisty wife of Franklyn, who dabbles in Eastern religions and not Creative Evolution;²⁴ her brother Immenso Champernoon, a caricature of G.K. Chesterton; and the mysterious Mrs. Eteen, the self-described woman who put “the flesh” on the Barnabas brothers’ theory of Creative Evolution.²⁵ Shaw expounds on the reason for his self-censorship:

It was with this thesis of the Barnabases that I was concerned when I wrote Back to Methuselah; and though I got interested enough in Franklyn personally to go a little way into his domestic history, I had to discard my researches as both irrelevant and certain to sidetrack my main theme and confuse my biological drama with a domestic comedy.²⁶

Accordingly, whether because he thought it boring or to maintain dramatic economy and focus, Shaw does not include “A Glimpse” in his epic drama, a perfect example of Shaw practicing artistic self-censorship.²⁷

Next, much like their author, the Barnabas brothers engage in self-censorship, but for completely different reasons. Franklyn and Conrad create a new Gospel to complement Conrad’s works on the possibility of human beings living for several hundred years (CPP 5: 378–89). They sense that the moment is right to discuss the theory of Creative Evolution with a wider audience: “[A]ll scientific opinion worth counting has been converging rapidly upon Creative Evolution. Poetry has been converging on it: philosophy has been converging on it: religion has been converging on it” (CPP 5: 429). Of course, the “Gospel” is nothing less than Shaw’s new religion, and Part 2 of Methuselah explores both the virtues and pitfalls of the extremely long life that his Gospel proposes. During an unexpected visit by the eminent politicians Joyce Burge (David Lloyd George) and Lubin (H.H. Asquith), Franklyn and Conrad decide to gauge their visitors’ reaction to their concept:Verse

Verse Franklyn. We have to find out how the world will take our new gospel…. Party politicians are still unfortunately an important part of the world. Suppose we try it on Joyce Burge. Conrad. How can you? You can tell things only to people who can listen. Joyce Burge has talked so much he has lost the power of listening. He doesn’t listen even in the House of Commons. (CPP 5, 389)

After a heated debate about party politics, Socialism, and Trade Unionism, the dignitaries prepare to leave in a huff, when Franklyn’s daughter Savvy insists that her father “tip them a chapter from the gospel of the brothers Barnabas” (CPP 5: 413). Lubin and Burge, sensing a new message to revitalize the current political debate, demand to know about the brothers’ program. After lengthy explanations of the Life Force and a human life span of three hundred years, Lubin, who has hoped for a concrete proposal from the brothers yet not finding one, calls their program “moonshine” (CPP 5: 434) and tells Burge, “They have just been pulling our legs very wittingly” (CPP 5: 436). After the politicians leave, Conrad, Franklyn, Savvy, and the Reverend Bill Haslam consider what has just transpired:Verse

Verse Conrad. Well, that’s how the gospel of the brothers Barnabas is going to be received! Franklyn. … It’s no use. Were you convinced, Mr. Haslam? Haslam. About our being able to live three hundred years? Frankly, no. Conrad [to Savvy] Nor you, I suppose? Savvy. Oh, I don’t know. I thought I was for a moment. I can believe, in a sort of way, that people might live for three hundred years. But when you came down to tin tacks, and said that the parlor maid might, then I saw how absurd it was. Franklyn. Just so. We had better hold our tongues about it, Con. We should only be laughed at, and lose the little credit we earned on false pretences in the days of our ignorance. Conrad. I daresay. But Creative Evolution doesn’t stop while people are laughing. Laughing may even lubricate its job. (CPP 5: 437–8)

Thus, the brothers shelve their project, at least for the moment. In a letter to Harley Granville Barker, Shaw explains why he did not give the brothers the strength and will to persevere with his own message: “You see if I make them all satisfactory, the reason for making them live three hundred years vanishes. What I have to do is not make them satisfactory, but to find an artistic treatment of their unsatisfactoriness which will prevent its being as disagreeable to the audience as the real thing.”²⁸ Is the brothers’ self-censorship, then, a sign of weakness or inferiority? Most probably, Shaw was merely setting the stage for Part 3, “The Thing Happens,” when several characters from Part 2—including Reverend Haslam, the Parlor Maid, and Conrad himself—appear as distinguished “long livers,” Shaw’s “proof” of his theory of Creative Evolution. Cleverly, Shaw purposefully crafts his authorial disciples, the brothers Barnabas, but denies one of them the full fruition of their work in order to establish the need for their proposed theory. But why does Conrad and not Franklyn achieve long-liver-status and appear in Part 3? Each brother represents a major element of Creative Evolution—biology and religion—so by having Conrad the biologist live longer, does Shaw favor science over faith? Conrad Barnabas becomes an authority on long life in “The Thing Happens,” yet he remains disappointingly ineffective in Part 3 as a mere keeper of numbers, without the inspiring ideas of Part 2 (CPP 5: 441).²⁹ This Shavian conundrum may actually be a manifestation of the need for theatrical economy, the actor doubling that occurred so often in the theater of the time.³⁰ Although Shaw denies Franklyn, the representative of faith, the opportunity to live to three hundred years, Shaw’s “faith in faith” reappears mightily in the companion to Shaw’s play about “the old religion,” in his New Testament, Saint Joan.

Nevertheless, the lack of brilliance in the characters of Part 2 did not keep the censor at bay completely. To complete the trifecta of censorship surrounding Back to Methuselah, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office required that Shaw amend three sections of his play. He stipulated the omission of the parody of the Athanasian Creed in Part 5, that “the usual conventionalities of dress” be observed in other characters, notably Adam and Eve, and that Shaw’s political characters in Part 2, Burge and Lubin, “not be made up to resemble Lloyd George and Asquith.” Shaw agreed to comply—at least insofar as to secure permission to stage his play. However, the Burge and Lubin caveat generated a particularly Shavian response:

As to making up the actors to resemble Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George, my own intention is that they shall not be made up at all. I do not think the practice of representing living persons in that way on the stage can be defended; and I have sometimes wondered why the Lord Chamberlain has never interfered when I myself have been the victim of it. But there is one aspect of it which the Lord Chamberlain may not be aware; and that is that both Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith will probably be disappointed and feel to some extent defrauded, if the actors are not make up to resemble them.³¹

But what of the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas itself, the never-actually-introduced centerpiece of Part 2? Franklyn drafts its manuscript at the beginning of Part 2, as Conrad enters, and they discover that they both independently conceived of the ideal length of life as three hundred years (CPP 5: 379). The illusive Gospel comes into sharper focus when considered emblematic of Shaw’s entire Metabiological Pentateuch—from the Garden of Eden to Shaw’s nirvana—as pure thought. Meisel elaborates:

The discourse by the Brothers… provides the creative evolutionary rationale of the cycle, the ground of the “religion that has its intellectual roots in philosophy and science….” The discourse expounds the significance of “in the Beginning: B.C. 4004. (In the Garden of Eden),” which is the first part of the cycle and Shaw’s Genesis; and it rationalizes the millennial advance toward the Kingdom of God in the last three parts of the cycle, Shaw’s Revelation. The Barnabas commentary on Genesis… like the Christian commentaries on the Old Testament, interprets the old truth according to the new light.³²

Therefore, the brothers Barnabas become the spokespersons for Shaw’s new religion, representing his challenge to the “old truth.” The interior author brothers are meant to mirror Shaw’s own philosophy of the Life Force, which in this case is enacted throughout all five sections of Back to Methuselah. As authors of the text of this philosophy, the brothers become meta-reflexive of Shaw’s own process of exploring methods of gaining public acceptance of his evolutionary theories. As a critical link in Shaw’s exploration of how to disseminate his major theories, the brothers share their author’s struggles, doubts, and even humiliation as they attempt to test their revolutionary ideas on the dubious public. They differ from other interior authors because there are two of them and both contribute to the same concept. Their personification of the twin principles of Creative Evolution—science and religion—has the potential to yield a Hegelian synthesis of a longer and better life that in turn would ultimately produce a more advanced civilization that could “sell” Shaw’s plan to the public. Their conversations and “give and take” as they conceive their Gospel are meant to engage the audience with their theories.

Modern

But do Franklyn and Conrad qualify as truly modernist thinkers even as they plot the discourse of the future while living in their own conventional “well-furnished” lives? The standards provided by Innes once again prove useful in assessing the brothers and the play’s hallmarks of modernism: the brothers clearly belong in a drama of ideas given their formulation of a program that supposedly leads to longer life and hence greater maturity for humankind. Their emphasis on the intellectual debates in biology, philosophy, and religion also contributes to the play’s modernist agenda. Franklyn and Conrad continue Shaw’s attack on idealism, as they debunk traditional religious and political views. They discredit socially conditioned reflexes with discussions of contemporary family life versus future family life, or lack thereof, in “long livers.” They deny their political leaders the traditional role of hero, as they refuse to take part in their search for a program to enliven the Liberal Party.

Finally, “some of the longer speeches in Back to Methuselah transparently lecture the audiences…,” anticipating Bertolt Brecht.³³ In effect, Shaw also proves to be a dramatic poet in this play, as he explores the metaphorical aspects of the imagination.³⁴ In his preface, Shaw refers to the Gospel as a legend, a philosopher’s stone, and his interior authors stress this aspect. During a discussion with Lubin, the brothers agree that the poets and storytellers have painted more accurate pictures of human life with the story of the Garden of Eden than with medical science. They also consider rewriting the Book of Genesis, much as Virginia Woolf’s Miss La Trobe will do in Between the Acts eighteen years later. Franklin explains: “The poem is our real clue to biological science” (CPP 5: 421–22), thus echoing Eve’s call for a word to describe the story of creation, and the wise Serpent response: “A poem” (CPP 5: 349). This admission further links Shaw’s interior author with their creator by stressing the true worth of the work of the imagination for which Shaw was famous.

Shaw’s poetic drama led to other major poets and novelists writing plays, thereby increasing the literary value of the dramatic output of the time.³⁵ Also, Shaw’s “Metabolocal Pentateuch” influenced the work of legendary modernist writers. James Joyce begrudged Shaw’s review of Ulysses as being “preoccupied with sex” and his condemnation of Joyce’s “art for art’s sake” philosophy. Nevertheless, Back to Methuselah became a major influence and a precursor of sorts to Finnegan’s Wake, as Joyce translates Shaw’s Metabiological Pentateuch into his own “Epistlemadethemolgoy” and the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas introduced debaters who appear as Joyce’s “peerless pairs” who achieve “DIAGNOSTIC CONCILATION” to pair with long life. Joyce even admitted, “I am most beholding to him [Shaw].”³⁶ Thus the brothers Barnabas’s modernist credentials, and those of their author, remain secure. This long play, which constitutes Shaw’s version of “the old religion,” sets the stage for his “new” one, the culmination of the Life Force in his Christ figure.

Saint Joan (1923)

My last interior author, Joan of Arc, could neither read nor write (CPP 6: 23). Yet Shaw, basing his portrayal on historical accounts, endows Joan with the abilities to communicate so forcefully that she becomes “…the Word made Flesh” (CPP 6: 56). In both preface and play, Shaw stresses that Joan, like most men and women of her era, was illiterate. However, this deficiency becomes a valuable tool in creating the stark, dramatic contrast between Joan and her “betters,” those representatives of church and state who rely on her natural talent to achieve their own purposes only to ultimately burn her as a heretic because she embarrasses them by accomplishing things that they cannot. Bertolini sees Joan as an “artist figure,” as Shaw “allegorizes the eponymous heroine as a figure of imagination, the source of all artistic work.”³⁷ However, I identify Joan as the interior author of her most positive and singular message, based on Shaw’s own statements about her abilities to communicate in multiple forms: her soaring speeches that project the messages of her “voices,” St. Catherine, St. Margaret, and the Archangel Michael; her letters, based on Shaw’s sources, instructing kings, nobles, and commoners alike in her belief in the individual’s access to God and the value of one’s living in one’s own place (CPP 6: 38), thereby anticipating Protestantism and nationalism (CPP 6: 14); and, lastly, on Shaw’s statements that Joan guided his hand as he wrote her play.³⁸ Joan the heretic becomes meta-reflexive of Shaw, who was often considered heretical, as her struggles to be heard and accepted mirror those of her creator. Perhaps more than any other Shavian interior author, Joan and Shaw share the burden of fighting against popular opinion to have their revolutionary voices heard. Although ultimately recognized as one of Shaw’s best and most powerful plays, public reception of Saint Joan was not always laudatory. Two examples have special connection to this study: in her biography of Saint Joan of Arc, Vita Sackville-West terms Shaw’s portrayal of Joan “brilliant but untrustworthy,”³⁹ while Virginia Woolf, in a letter to her friend Jacques Raverat, writes that she was puzzled about why people found the play so moving. She deemed it intriguing but not emotionally stirring (WL iii, 130). Woolf also compiled a “survey” of friends’ reactions to Saint Joan. In a letter to Roger Fry, she lists four friends in the “pro” Joan column (including Leonard Woolf), while three others were “contra” Shaw’s saint. She claimed to be neutral on the play, but disclosed that she had neither seen nor read it (WL iii, 123).

Yet, Shaw definitely saw the historical Joan as an “archetypical Superm[a]n or Superwoman” whose passion could inspire society to move toward reforming outmoded traditional values and achieving the more just world that he envisioned.⁴⁰ As the personification of the Life Force, Joan, with her bold confidence, becomes an “elevated form of being” whose example could propel humanity toward Creative Evolution. Shaw emphasizes the impact of Joan’s message throughout his preface, play, and epilogue. The preface states that Joan “claimed to be the ambassador and plenipotentiary of God, and to be, in effect, a member of the Church Triumphant whilst still in the flesh on earth” (CPP 6:15). Moreover, “It was never ‘I say so,’ but always ‘God says so,’” (CPP 6: 64), as Joan stresses her singular relationship with her Heavenly Father. At the conclusion of Scene I, Bertrand de Poulengey sums up the early reaction of the French to the Maid: “There is something about her…,” which is immediately followed by the news that the previously barren hens are now laying eggs. Robert de Baudricourt exclaims: “She did come from God” (CPP 6: 96). Shaw also employs no lesser figures than the Earl of Warwick and Bishop Cauchon to confirm that Joan’s message is dangerous to their respective positions:Verse

Verse Warwick. These two ideas of hers are the protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest or peer between the private man and his God. I should call it Protestantism if I had to find a name for it…. Cauchon. When she threatens to drive the English from the soil of France she is undoubtedly thinking of the whole extent of country in which French is spoken. To her the French-speaking people are what the Holy Scriptures describe as a nation. Call this side of her heresy Nationalism if you will….. (CPP 6: 139)

After her burning by the English, the Executioner informs Warwick, “You have heard the last of her”; but Warwick muses, “Hm, I wonder!” (CPP 6: 190). Lastly, in the epilogue, Joan’s once-determined persecutor Cauchon admits, “The girls in the field praise thee; for thou hast raised their eyes; and they see that there is nothing between them and heaven” (CPP 6: 205).

Thus, Shaw leaves little doubt about the singular importance of Joan’s message and its epoch-changing effect on generations to come. He emphatically legitimizes Joan’s voices and visions: “Socrates, Luther, Swedenborg, Blake saw visions and heard voices just as Saint Francis and Saint Joan did” (CPP 6: 24).⁴¹ Joan becomes the “Word made Flesh” most clearly while she addresses the Dauphin of France about leading his army: “And I come from God to tell thee to kneel in the cathedral and solemnly give thy kingdom to Him for ever and ever, and become the greatest king in the world as His steward and His bailiff, His soldier and His servant. The very clay of France will become holy: her soldiers will be the soldiers of God….” (CPP 6: 115).

Additionally, Shaw offers powerful proof of authorship through Joan’s impassioned and revolutionary speeches, often following his primary source closely, albeit often substituting his own elevated rhetoric for Joan’s vernacular tongue.⁴² Examples of this rhetoric include Joan’s first encounter with the King:

I come from the land, and have gotten my strength working on the land; and I tell thee that the land is thine to rule righteously and keep God’s peace in, and not to pledge at the pawn-shop as a drunken woman pledges her children’s clothes. (CPP 6: 114–45)

And when the King and Court refuse Joan’s plan to take Paris, she responds:

Do not think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone; and God is alone; and what is my loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God? (CPP 6: 154)

Then, when Joan learns that her recantation will involve perpetual imprisonment rather than the freedom she expected, she exclaims in one of her most soaring speeches:

Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times. (CPP 6: 183)

Finally, Joan has had enough of the Inquisition:

His ways are not your ways. He wills that I go through the fire into his bosom; for I am His child, and you are not fit that I should live among you. That is my last word to you. (CPP 6: 184)

Joan’s revolutionary ideas, translated into Shaw’s eloquent lines, reflect her passion for her mission, her belief in her God, and her willingness to die rather than reject her beliefs, thus creating a legacy that has endured throughout the centuries.

However, although Joan has spoken her last lines in the play, another record of her determination, natural leadership, and imagination exists in letters attributed to her. In the preface, play, and epilogue Shaw frequently emphasizes Joan’s ability to communicate in writing and describes her method: “If she could not write letters, she could and did dictate them and attach full and indeed excessive importance to them” (CPP 6: 123). In Scene II, after Charles entrusts the command of his army to Joan and she miraculously causes the west wind to enable Dunois’s army to cross the Loire, her singular abilities, including her letter writing, capture the attention of the Bishop of Beauvais and the Earl of Warwick during the play’s famous Tent Scene:Verse

Verse Cauchon. She sends letters to the king of England giving him God’s command through her to return to his island on pain of God’s vengeance, which she will execute…. Has she ever in all her utterances said one word of The Church? Never. It is always God and herself. Warwick. Her letters to them are going forth daily. It is not the Mother of God now to who we must look for intercession, but to Joan the Maid. (CPP 6: 134–35)Footnote

[Jules] Quicherat, Jeanne D’arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France: Being the Story of Her Life, Her Achievements, and Her Death, As attested On Oath and Set Forth in Original Documents [1841]. Trans. and ed. T. Douglas Murray (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co, 1902). The Introduction to Shaw’s primary source for the play, T. Douglas Murray’s 1902 translation by Jules Quicherat, states that Joan’s letter to Henry VI (1428) is “of doubtful” authority, but nevertheless this letter is included in the translation of the public examination of Joan during her trial as factual pp 36–8, 53. Also see Daniel Hobbins, The Trial of Joan of Arc (Harvard University Press, 2005) and Willard Trask, Joan of Arc in Her Own Words (New York: Books and Company: 1996).

Cauchon then adds that Joan’s letter writing “was the practice of the accursed Mahomet, the anti-Christ,” comparing Joan to other historical figures who wrote revolutionary letters and treatises, such as Hus and WcLeef (Wycliffe) (CPP 6: 137). Cauchon and Warwick become increasingly concerned about Joan’s authorship of these letters, mentioning them three times during the tent scene (CPP 6: 134, 135, 137) and treating them with no less importance because Joan dictated them. They fear that the message in these letters could “wreck the whole social structure of Christendom” (CPP 6: 137).

Consequently, representatives of church and state grow suspicious that Joan’s letters exemplify her much resented presumption to speak for and to both God and King, a presumption that eventually leads to her burning as a heretic in Rouen. And although Shaw does not include them, transcripts of letters attributed to Joan were available to Shaw and recommended by Shaw in his preface, play, and epilogue (CPP 6: 41–42; 235). Historian Kelly Devries notes that

Contemporary records make reference to seventeen letters ‘written’ by the Maid and what was contained in them. Three still exist which contain her signature: one written to the town of Riom on 9 November 1429, a second sent to Reims on 16 March 1430, with a third also sent to Reims on 28 March, 1430. Others exist as original, unsigned letters from her—six in total.⁴⁴

These letters detail Joan’s belief that God guided her mission and primarily reference attempts to drive the English out of France and crown Charles at Reims Cathedral.⁴⁵ Shaw relied on T. Douglas Murray’s 1902 translation of Jules Quicherat’s Jeanne D’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France⁴⁶ as his primary source, along with material provided by the Rev. Joseph Leonard, CM, who served as “technical advisor.”⁴⁷ Holroyd concludes that Murray’s translation of Quicherat provided authentic evidence of the real Joan.⁴⁸ Accordingly, armed with a reliable account of Joan’s brief life, her accomplishments, and the proceedings of her trial, Shaw often relied on Joan’s own words, which inform her speeches and conversations in his drama.⁴⁹ In the preface, Shaw states that he referred to her letters often and apparently believed in the veracity of her letters to the King: “[She] wrote letters to Kings calling on them to make millennial rearrangements” (CPP 6: 38). As shown above, in the play her letters figure prominently in the mighty debate between Cauchon and Warwick. And during the scene in which the Inquisitor examines Joan, her letters again become significant: “You have signed many letters before,” she is told, to which she replies, “Yes but someone held my hand and guided the pen. I can make my mark” (CPP 6: 180). This exchange may seem innocent enough; however, as evidenced in Article VI of the Twelve Articles of Accusations, Joan’s letters and the manner in which she signed them contributed to her verdict and condemnation.⁵⁰ In a 1931 BBC radio talk, Shaw lists Joan’s dictating letters as evidence of an “exceptionally and extraordinarily able woman” (CPP 6: 225).

Apparently, Shaw became so involved with the story of the Maid that he even credited Joan with writing crucial speeches in his play: “Shaw was to say that as he wrote, Joan ‘guided my hand, and the words came tumbling out’….”⁵¹ Holroyd notes Shaw’s attempt at telepathic communication with Joan as he “guided her forward with a series of complicated instructions into the twentieth century.”⁵² Thus, Shaw attributes the written word to his saint and Christ figure, adding to the mystique of the Maid and her profound historical effect on both church and state; Shaw called her “one of the first Protestant martyrs ... and one of the first apostles of nationalism” (CPP 6: 14). So, five years after the Great War, a Shavian saint becomes the embodiment of the Life Force, Shaw relying on historical war to demonstrate his concern with humanity’s destructive power. With this drama about war and faith, Shaw continues to reveal his belief that religion must provide answers to the world’s growing inclinations toward self-destruction.⁵³

Joan’s enduring popularity as a hero for the British Suffragette movement and other revolutionary causes most likely influenced Charlotte Shaw and “several actresses” to encourage Shaw to write a Joan play.⁵⁴ These encouragements proved prescient, as Saint Joan, after a somewhat awkward beginning, garnered the literary world’s highest accolades and became an enduring hallmark of his legacy. After the play’s New York premier in 1923, “American critics protest[ed] that Shaw had made Joan a ‘super-flapper’ surrounded by puppets;” critics and audiences alike also objected to the play’s length. Nevertheless, those same critics also found Joan “a great triumph” and “exasperating though brilliant.” Perhaps the highest praise came from Luigi Pirandello: “the writing of Joan proved ‘there is a truly great poet in Shaw.’”⁵⁵ Holroyd also avers that for most London critics, the actress playing Joan almost overshadowed the playwright: “Generally it was agreed that the play’s faults belonged to Shaw, while its strengths derived from Sybil Thorndike’s heroic acting….”⁵⁶ Subsequently, the role of Joan has become a star vehicle for premier actors following Thorndike’s legendary performance. “Select Shavian characters hold the promise of the exceptional dramatic experience because these roles demand a level of performance that draws only the foremost actors of each era. Saint Joan belongs to this exclusive category.”⁵⁷ Despite the critics and the renowned actors, Saint Joan proved a capstone in a now-recognized brilliant career. “Shaw had sent out his play to rescue Joan from canonization and restore her heresy, but found it was to lead to his own canonization with the [1925] Nobel Prize for Literature.”⁵⁸

Censorship

Incredibly, even Shaw’s saint could not escape censorship. In the play, Joan must overcome the suppression of her family, church, and state during her short life. Her father and brothers attempt to condemn her to the life of a conventional French girl from the countryside: “My father told my brothers to drown me if I would not stay to mind his sheep while France was bleeding to death” (CPP 6: 154). Nevertheless, when Joan manages to escape her family, after a brief but legendary career as a leader of men, both the French church and state denounce her and perform the ultimate suppression of her message and life—or so they believed. At the conclusion of his great disquisition on Protestantism and nationalism and on Joan’s role in potentially undermining their way of life, Warwick summarizes the pact between church and state to rid themselves of the menace that Joan has become: “Well if you will burn the Protestant, I will burn the Nationalist” (CPP 6: 140). Later, his ecclesiastical counterpart pronounces Joan’s ultimate censorship with these chilling words: “And now we do cast thee out, segregate thee, and abandon thee to the secular power” (CPP 6: 185). Thus, Joan suffers the ultimate censorship: excommunication and execution by those who could not understand that a lowly maid could speak for God. However, Shaw negates this final silencing and gives Joan the last word (and Shavian laugh) to those who banished and burned her. The famous epilogue, Shaw’s version of writing beyond the traditional ending, which takes place twenty-five years after Joan’s death and subsequently in 1920, provides Joan with the opportunity to face her one-time supporters and opponents and to learn of her canonization by those who took her earthly life. Although her comrades and accusers still do not want Joan in their lives, she takes this rejection in stride, famously stating, as the play closes, “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?” (CPP 6: 208).

Nevertheless, Joan’s burning and eventual canonization were not enough for Shaw to escape a close call with the English censor, or as Shaw once called the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, “the Knights of the Blue Pencil” (CPP 6: 74). Brad Kent explains:

Religion in Saint Joan was also a worry for [Examiner of Plays George] Street who, though he considered the play ‘worth twenty ‘Back to Methusalahs’ [sic],’ fretted about Catholic reaction to the announcement of Joan’s canonization. Yet the Lord Chamberlain brushed this concern aside, suggesting that there was not ‘any reasonable ground’ for such complaints.⁵⁹

Modern

Because censorship and modernism go hand-in-hand in Shaw’s era, the many varieties of censorship surrounding the creation of his “New Testament” establish Saint Joan as one of Shaw’s most modern plays. Undoubtedly the drama qualifies as an extended discussion play; the well-known Scene IV, in which Cauchon and Warwick debate Joan’s contribution to nationalism and Protestantism, alone would merit this designation. Even the Archbishop counsels the less prescient members of Charles’s court: “There is a new spirit rising in men: we are at the dawning of a wider epoch” (CPP 6: 107). In fact, these deliberations on stage ran so long that theater managers and critics alike advised Shaw to cut the play, which of course he refused to do.

Shaw’s Saint Joan also provides insight into his artistic methods. O’Toole describes Saint Joan as a prime example of Shaw’s reliance on a triangular structure to facilitate his “ideological dialectics.” He identifies the Inquisitor, Warwick, and Joan as the ideological threesome in the drama who carry the action and the soul of the play in another of Shaw’s Hegelian syntheses. This structure does away with the need for a single star performer but requires three leading roles.⁶⁰ For example, although Joan, as the titular character, in effect becomes the star of the drama, the Inquisitor, Joan’s accuser and stage nemesis, possesses dignity and a sense of justice. “He can hold the stage and hold his own.”⁶¹ Shaw employs the Inquisitor’s fierce accusations against Joan for heresy and immorality to represent Joan’s struggles, which relate to the meta-reflexive manner in which Shaw himself was castigated in the past for his own views. Hence, “heresy and immorality are part and parcel of Shaw’s idealized Creative Evolution—the willed betterment of humankind by such a genius and strong individual as Joan.”⁶²

The play also examines religious and political theory, class, and gender issues. Shaw fashions Joan as a proto-feminist, and his comments on Joan as the anti-type of traditional gender roles illustrate his views on gender issues (CPP vi, 36), gender and class issues (CPP 6: 22–24), and religion and gender (CPP 6: 24–26). Joan’s modernist characteristics also include Shaw’s trademark attacks on idealism, as he makes plain in the preface: “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. In war she was as much a realist as Napoleon…” (CPP 6: 37). Joan exemplifies this when she lectures Dunois about his old-fashioned style of combat: “I tell you, Bastard, your art of war is no use, because your knights are no good for real fighting. War is only a game to them, like tennis and all their other games…” (CPP 6: 149). In addition, Shaw depicts Joan as a foil to traditional heroes and villains and addresses these stereotypical figures in his preface:

When Jingo scurrility had done its worst to her, sectarian scurrility … used her stake to beat the Roman Catholic Church and the Inquisition. The easiest way to make these institutions the villains of a melodrama was to make the Maid its heroine. That melodrama may be dismissed as rubbish…. she was not a melodramatic heroine: that is, a physically beautiful lovelorn parasite on an equally beautiful hero, but a genius and a saint, about as completely the opposite of a melodramatic heroine as it is possible for a human being to be. (CPP 6: 19–20)

As previously noted, several critics have recently studied emotion—or lack thereof—in Shaw’s work. As they have shown, Shaw has been repeatedly attacked for a lack of emotion in his work. However, this is hardly the case with Saint Joan. Although Stephen Watt explains that Shaw succeeded in avoiding the overall melodramatic interpretation of Saint Joan of Victorian historical drama, he could not avoid depicting the emotions associated with a young girl’s struggles against the mighty forces of the patriarchal church and state. Also, the “passionate nationalism”—generally associated with the Victorian hero—becomes the failure of Joan’s persecutors Cauchon, Warwick, and de Stogumber in a classic example of Shaw’s genre-antitype: these characters do not demonstrate the characteristics of their expected heroic or villainous roles. Yet audience members reacted visibly to early productions of Saint Joan, with each in his/her own manner.⁶³ Moreover, Ellen Dolgin suggests that the historical character of Joan embodies Shaw’s plea for “tolerance and hope.” Shaw exploits the weakness of those around Joan, demonstrating how they often lose their composure when dealing with her. Dolgin cites King Charles’s emotional rant at the end of Scene IV, as he realizes that Joan can easily undercut his authority. He fumes that she should simply go home in a misogynistic outburst about the court and its battles being no place for a young girl.⁶⁴ De Stogumber, Chaplain of the Earl of Warwick, becomes the King’s counterpart in staging emotional displays for trite reasons as he rails against Joan’s hearing her voices in French, not English (CPP 6: 162). Similarly, de Courcelles, Canon of Paris, rages that Joan’s supposed theft of the Bishop of Senlis’s horse has been removed from the formal charges against her by the Inquisitor (CPP 6: 162–163). These trivial tirades by men of high rank evince Shaw’s denigration of church and state and elevate his most unlikely saint. Lastly, Kent focuses on Saint Joan as a study of shame, an emotion Shaw also sometimes felt in both his personal and professional life. Although Joan’s great sin of pride becomes associated with the charge of heresy, shame, writes Kent, is a major factor in Joan’s story: “[S]he exemplifies both the radical and the conservative affect of the messianic heretic.” She feels no shame in rejecting the major social and religious forces of her time, yet shames others who reject her views.⁶⁵

In the epilogue, Shaw breaks through the fourth wall to address the audience, again anticipating Brecht.⁶⁶ Writing beyond the conventional ending of his familiar subject, Shaw “scripts” a scenario that allows Joan—now Saint Joan—to return in a Shavian dream to confront those involved in her burning. Predictably, both her colleagues and captors are happy to see her but pray that she will not remain on earth. Here Joan’s literary father humorously illustrates that the world is still not ready to receive its saints.⁶⁷

Cleverly, Shaw’s most unconventional interior author, illiterate save for the exalted voice of God as her guide, delivers Shaw’s most profound and deeply religious message, his “New Testament” depicting the struggle for the evolution of the Life Force to achieve higher levels of being, as exemplified by Joan. If indeed Joan spoke to Shaw while he wrote his play, surely Shaw and the Maid must share the accolades it has received, including literature’s highest award—unusual praise for a young woman who, by her own admission, did not know A from B.

Epilogue

Lastly, why does Shaw place such emphasis on these interior authors? Each character proves different from other interior authors and reveals his or her own personal characteristics and circumstances—some playful, others deadly serious. In You Never Can Tell, Shaw tests a mild form of censorious actions through Mrs. Clandon’s rebuking children perhaps to experiment with a stage form of the social ill that was already plaguing him at the time. In Fanny’s First Play, Shaw’s first commercial and popular success, GBS spoofs the critics who lobbed criticism at him while delving deeper into a more overt form of censorship in both the frame and inner plays. In Man and Superman, Shaw offers proof of his hero’s authorial abilities, only to have Tanner’s “Revolutionist’s Handbook” roundly censored by his extended family. The question remains: Is Tanner’s treatise a sound philosophical text, a collection of favorite maxims, or a dilatant’s toy? Back to Methuselah, Part 2, becomes a crucial tenet of Shaw’s Old Testament, as the brothers Barnabas test the theory of long life through Creative Evolution and withdraw their own work because the world is not ready for their advanced ideas, even as Joan will later conclude that the world is not ready to accept its saints. Finally, Joan of Arc, Shaw’s most profound and historically relevant interior author, gave Shaw—and the world—hope with her positive message. Shaw eliminates her final censorship by giving stage life to her eternal life in a distinctly Shavian way: with humor and irony.

More generally, these interior authors—Shaw’s curious, often eccentric characters who create their own narratives much as Shaw creates his own stories—offer proof of Shaw’s continuing struggle with censorship: he could not leave it alone, even while crafting some of his most memorable characters. That struggle establishes the main connection between Shaw and his characters in relation to a central tenet of his time: modernism and its discontent with the status quo. Through these characters, Shaw could also add to the current dialectic of censorship and depict his revolutionary ideas without risk of being censored. His interior authors can dramatize the harm brought about by censorship and the unmitigated silliness of some of its consequences. Many of these modernist interior authors expose the hypocrisy of stage censorship and the emotional, in one instance physical, damage done to individuals when the censor, in one of his many forms, strikes. Ultimately, however, the censorship of these characters underscores how new ideas and creative endeavors designed to move society forward can be stymied by the suppression of their revolutionary spirit.

Shaw thus explains why the establishment—those holding fast to traditional values—enforce censorship of the stage, which is in effect the artistic incubator for social change and for modernism itself. Hence, Shaw’s interior authors, viewed in chronological order, span a wide range of texts both physical and spiritual: Mrs. Clandon’s seemingly backward-thinking Treatises, Jack Tanner’s “Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Fanny O’Dowda’s play, the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, and the Word made Flesh in Saint Joan. These interior authors at first exhibit only the mere spark of revolutionary fervor, but one that eventually ignites to become the embodiment of Shaw’s most profound and abiding message: the urgent need for the nurturing and acceptance of the Life Force.