For the next five years, he pursued a scorched-earth campaign, finally taking Paris in 1420. King Henry V had won a surprising victory in 1415 at Agincourt, then ruthlessly murdered all the French prisoners. Saint Joan opens in 1429, the 92 nd year of the Hundred Years War.

It was adapted seven years after Shaw’s death into the Lerner and Lowe Tony Award-winning play, My Fair Lady in 1957, and the movie version of it won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1964. He wrote his most famous play, Pygmalion, in 1917. Somewhat improbably, his next 42 plays were produced, and most of them were hits. His first 13 works, five novels and eight plays, had been failures. He also skewers British rigidity and pomposity, sometimes with a witty line and sometimes with witless but wealthy characters. Why didn’t work benefit the worker? And what did nobles contribute? Why should a country have an empire? These views, sometimes masked, appear repeatedly in Shaw’s plays. Shaw became an ardent socialist and remained one. The industrial revolution had devalued skilled labor and worsened working conditions. Shaw grew up in poverty in Dublin, then found a very unequal society when he migrated to London. Shaw (1856-1950) had been the most popular living playwright for about 30 years, but for his comedies, which some valued less highly. This play apparently convinced the Nobel committee to confer the Nobel Prize for Literature on him.

On February 5, 2021, the RVA (Richmond) Classics Book Club met via Zoom to discuss Shaw’s, Saint Joan.

St joan bernard shaw