In
the recent century, researchers have become increasingly focused on the famous
English writer George Bernard Shaw’s historical play Saint Joan. It is
generally accepted that Saint Joan is one of Shaw’s best works and seems
to illustrate Mr. Shaw’s mind more clearly than anything he has written before.
Most of these researchers have discussed general features of the French
military figure Joan of Arc. While this point of view has been very productive,
particularly in portraying personalities of the historical prototype and
enriching readers’ cognition about Shaw’s comments on Joan and background
knowledge in understanding that piece of history, this initial perception fails
to take into account Shaw’s fundamental differences from other cultural
depictions: that Shaw has his special views of the miserable condition of Joan,
which is mainly shown in the last Epilogue of this book.
To date, it has been universally acknowledged that
among all the “Joans” in previous works, Shaw’s is simultaneously “the most
intriguing”, “the most ambivalent”, “the most dramatically round” and “the most
revealingly relevant to leadership”. As Herbert indicates in his George Bernard
Shaw: Saint Joan (1988), Saint Joan is “a tremendous success” and
“the humor, fantasy, and anachronisms” that the critics have found in Saint
Joan become “accepted characteristics of the new genre of historical
drama”. Besides, some critics such as Michael Holroyd has characterized the
play as Shaw’s “only tragedy” and they tend to study Shaw’s thought by
analyzing the long Preface included in the text of the published play.
Generally speaking, Shaw’s play Saint Joan has
much to say about characteristics of Joan of Arc and it has become public
property. However, there has been scant systematic investigation of Saint
Joan’s special arrangement. This study will address the overall problem of
the role of the epilogue.
