Saint Joan: Presence of Villia

In the award winning play, “Saint Joan”, Bernard Shaw presents to his audience characters that act in contradictory ways, but can still justify their actions. This forces the audience to judge the morality of the actions in the play for themselves, and draws them to decide which characters are villains and which characters are heroes. This is the reason why Bernard Shaw wrote the words ‘There are no villains in the piece…. It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us’ in his preface. His intention was not to create a visible borderline between heroes and villains in the play. Instead, he wanted to show the audience that all his characters were doing what they thought was the right thing to do, or the necessary thing to do. The characterization of villains are people who are a ‘deliberate scoundrel or criminal’; a ‘wicked or evil person’. This is why readers of the play will find that none of the characters in this play are evil at all and Bernard Shaw was right. To be evil you must be needlessly cruel, put your own well being above

‘No court of law can be so cruel as the common people are to those whom they suspect of heresy. The heretic in the hands of the Holy Office is safe from violence, is assured of a fair trial, and cannot suffer death, even when guilty, if repentance follows sin. Innumerable lives of heretics have been saved because the Holy Office has taken them out of the hands of the people’.

So consequently, by taking Joan out of the hands of the people, the church is assuring her a trial and life, if repentance follows her sin of heresy. The church offers her this even if the people want her burned for her heresy. Even if the English have ‘eight hundred men-at-arms at the gates’, the church promises to protect her. The Inquisitor also shows kindness when he reduces the number of charges against Joan from sixty-four counts to twelve, against the outrage of Courcelles and Stogumber. It is the issue of heresy that he wanted to address because it ‘begins with people who are to all appearance better than their neighbors’; it begins with kind and decent folk who are not ‘one of those whose hard features are the sign of hard hearts, and whose brazen looks and lewd demeanor condemn them before they are accused’. He addresses that heretics are not bad people because ‘they believe honestly and sincerely that their diabolical inspiration is divine’. The Inquisitor sympathizes with the heretics and wants to show them as little cruelty as possible because he feels that they are good people at heart. Warwick does not go out of his way to be cruel to Joan but persists that no matter what the courts decide, Joan must be burned because she interferes with the aims of the English and the aristocracy. His aims are purely political. He is not doing this for the revenge of English defeats, or hated towards the French; he only wants Joan dead because she is interfering with the order of things. This is why he does not go any further than burning her at the stake. Joan also displays a lack of cruelty towards the defeated English soldiers. She first reveals this when she tells Robert that she helped heal the wounded ‘goddams’ left behind at Domremy. She helps to heal the wounded English soldiers, despite the fact that they were the enemy, because she feels it is not their fault that they act the way they do. She believes that when they return to their country, they will be good children of god again because Joan believes that no person, including herself, should be a conqueror. When they do, the devil enters into them and forces them to commit atrocities that they would never do otherwise. She also shows a nurturing side in the cathedral of Rheims. Even though she rejects womanhood, Joan wants to nature children and believes that ‘Soldiers always nurse children when they get a chance’. For these reasons, Joan is nurturing and kind, which are two of the many opposites of cruel. The last example of Joan’s kindness being shown is when she is burned at the stake. Rather than have her prosecutor, Lavendu, burned when he held up the cross for her, she warned him to save himself by moving away from the first. This is a great example of Joan’s kindness. Lavendu could have been seen as one of Joan’s enemies because he was the prosecutor at the trial, and Joan could have gotten revenge by letting Lavendu be burned, but she warned him to leave instead.

Cruelty is the infliction of pain and suffering. In Saint Joan, none of the characters showed any unnecessary cruelty to anyone. Rather, these characters showed kindness to others. When Joan is captured by the Burgundians, and sent to the holy of

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