SAINT JOAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Saint Joan: a Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue. By Bernard Shaw. [Illustration: a tragedy mask] BRENTANO’S - New York MCMXXVI ------------------------------------------------------------------------ COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW --- All rights reserved First Printing, June, 1924 Second Printing, October, 1924 Third Printing, November, 1924 Fourth Printing, February, 1925 Fifth Printing, April, 1926 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PREFACE TO SAINT JOAN Joan the Original and Presumptuous. Joan of Arc, a village girl from the Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908; and finally canonized in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and, like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of the Chevalier D’Eon and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to accept the specific woman’s lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did.