Patriotism could find no better words, and how can the dramatist represent the speaker as a ‘strumpet’ inspired by ‘fiends’? To her fiends when they desert her, the Pucelle of the play cries: ‘Cannot my body, nor blood sacrifice, Entreat you to your wonted furtherance? Then take my soul; my body, soul, and all, Before that England give the French the foil.’ She is willing to give body and soul for France, and this, in the eyes of the dramatist, appears to be her crime. For a French girl to bear a French heart is to stamp her as the tool of devils. It is an odd theology, and not in the spirit of Shakespeare. Indeed the Pucelle, while disowning her father and her maidenhood, again speaks to the English as Jeanne might have spoken: ‘I never had to do with wicked spirits: But you, that are polluted with your lusts, Stained with the guiltless blood of innocents, Corrupt and tainted with a thousand vices, Because you want the grace that others have, You judge it straight a thing impossible To compass wonders but by help of devils. No, misconceiv’d! Joan of Arc hath been A virgin from her tender infancy, Chaste and immaculate in very thought; Whose maiden blood, thus rigorously effus’d, Will cry for vengeance at the gates of heaven.’ The vengeance was not long delayed. ‘The French and my countrymen,’ writes Patrick Abercromby, ‘drove the English from province to province, and from town to town’ of France, while on England fell the Wars of the Roses. But how can the dramatist make the dealer with fiends speak as the Maid, in effect, did speak at her trial? He adds the most ribald of insults; the Pucelle exclaiming: ‘It was Alencon that enjoyed my love!’ The author of the play thus speaks with two voices: in one Jeanne acts and talks as she might have done (had she been given to oratory); in the other she is the termagant of Anglo-Burgundian legend or myth.