Saint Joan

In France during the Hundred Years' War, a peasant girl from Domrémy who hears the voices of saints persuades a doubtful squire to give her a horse and armour, convinces the weak Dauphin Charles to let her lead his army, raises the siege of Orléans and sees him crowned at Reims. Then, captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English, she is tried for heresy by a church court in Rouen and burned at the stake in 1431. In an epilogue twenty-five years later, her spirit visits those who knew her.

Bernard Shaw wrote the play in 1923, three years after the Catholic Church declared Joan a saint, and soon afterwards he received the Nobel Prize for 1925. Shaw shows her judges not as villains but as sincere men defending order against an individual conscience, which makes the tragedy deeper. The play entered the public domain in the United States in 2020. It pairs well with Pygmalion.