- Dunois calls Joan ‘my little saint’ (pg 101). It took until 1920 for the Church to endorse his estimation.
- George Bernard Shaw refers to the cathedral’s bells as a medium for the voices Joan hears.The sound of the bells acts as a focus for the vivid work of her imagination. When Charles asks why the voices do not visit him, as king. Joan replies, ‘They do come to you; but you do not hear them’ (pg 106). George Bernard Shaw believed that receptiveness was a quality crucial for greatness. Joan had the capacity to become an agent of the Life Force, enabling it to operate through her actions and words.
- To Dunois’ observation, ‘We never know when we are beaten’. She retorts, ‘You never know when you are victorious’ (pg 106). The positive single-mindedness of her vision is a source of great strength, but it also results in a naïve incapacity to grasp the political reality of her situation. She is incapable of understanding, until it is spelled out for her, that the men who wield power regard her as a threat, and will take drastic action to negate her influence.
- Identifying Joan’s pride the archbishop remarks, ‘The old Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris’ (pg 106). Despite her chirpy colloquial speech, Joan is intended as a tragic hero, and George Bernard Shaw makes that explicit here. ‘Hubris’ is the term used in Greek tragedy to identify self-confidence that blinds tragic figures to the inevitable fate that will follow their indifference to laws authorized by the gods. There are no gods of that order in George Bernard Shaw’s play; rather, it is the nature of power, the character of those who possess it, and above all the weight of tradition, that determine the immediate outcome of Joan’s life. It is the function of the play’s Epilogue to show how Joan, after her death, will rise above those factors that circumscribed her earthly fate.
- Joan draws readily on proverbial wisdom, such as ‘If ifs and ans were pots and pans there’d be no need of tinkers’ (pg 108). This is the orally transmitted wisdom of a rural culture, using unsophisticated examples in readily remembered formulas. People of Joan’s class inhabited a world without books, although before long literacy would cease to be the Protestant spirit of the Reformation. Joan, despite her rustic manner, speaks for the future, not the past.
- In particular, she understands that war has been altered by the intention of gunpowder. The impact of continuing technological change had been felt profoundly during the recent First World War. In the Preface George Bernard Shaw suggests that Joan’s intuitive grasp of the nature of modern warfare foreshadowed the calculating strategies of Napoleon. In this scene, Bluebeard harks back to Caesar and Alexander for his skeptical comparisons. All were agents of significant historical change, but arguably Joan’s example of Protestant nationalism has produced the most far-reaching legacy.
- The archbishop attributes Joan’s voices to her ‘wilfulness’ (pg 110). He is suggesting that she is obstinate, but the will to act has been a concern throughout the play. In the initial scene, de Beaudicourt is seen to compensate for lack of will through bluster and bullying. The Dauphin’s weakness is attributable to still greater deficiency of will. For George Bernard Shaw, the Will was the motor of history, operating through certain individual, and what the archbishop takes to be mere stubbornness is actually a manifestation of the Life Force finding an effective outlet.
- Joan has reached a crucial turning point in her life. Isolated, her fortunes now enter a downward spiral. She remarks here that she has always been alone, and refers to her father’s threat to have her drowned if she failed to watch his sheep. George Bernard Shaw refers in the Preface to his blatant example of patriarchal oppression, an attempt to curb her attraction to soldiering, and to confine the young woman within the conventional limits allocated to her gender.
of Agincourt, of
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