SOURCE: Gribben, John L. “Shaw's Saint Joan: A Tragic Heroine.” Thought: A Review of Culture and Idea 40, no. 159 (winter 1965): 549-66.

In the following essay, Gribben discusses the character of Joan in Saint Joan as a genuine tragic figure.

When George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan was presented for the first time, at the Garrick Theatre in New York on December 28, 1923, it was acclaimed by critics of all shades of competence, from Hugh Walpole and Heywood Broun to Lord Beaverbrook, as one of the finest plays the world had seen, the finest play written in the English language of our day.¹ The playbill described it as “a chronicle play.” This was an audacious misrepresentation since the play was, in fact, a thesis, and the Anglo-American intelligentsia of the Twenties, with its limited knowledge of Joan of Arc could no more recognize its chronicle character than they could distinguish genuine Haig...