Saint Joan | Underlying Philosophy
In the following essay, the author discusses the underlying philosophy of Shaw’s
Saint Joan.
Saint Joan is full of surprises. The first surprise is that a nonreligious writer like Shaw (at least nonreligious in a conventional Christian sense) should even write on a topic like this: the martyrdom of a Christian saint. Indeed, when it was first announced that Shaw, the ‘‘professional iconoclast,’’ was writing on Saint Joan, at least one critic worried that the play would not be properly reverent. And critics in France, before the French version opened, were similarly nervous about how the irreverent Irishman would treat their national heroine.
But the...
[The entire page is 2140 words long]
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