St Joan Evaluation

ST. JOAN

The play itself was fairly good, but getting there was what I was unhappy with. I normally would not read the preface and for a lot of it I still just tuned it out. Fifty-five pages on someone else's opinions, theories, praises, and off-topic discussion is really not appealing to me. Such as on page 21, Joan is said to be a historical and human phenomenon. She may have been made a saint and been a great leader, but she is certainly not the only saint, and is among hundreds of great leaders. I'd say she's still just a normal person with her own personality who makes a good story. With the preface and everything at the end, 96 of the 208 pages were not even story. Basically half of the book was, well at least to me, boring, unnecessary and taking up space.

Now to the actual play. Since it's history I can't really argue with the story, and I don't plan to. The play though I have a few problems with, and just a few things I noticed. It's fairly well written, and detailed enough, except for one or two places where it will suddenly jump. Such as switching between scenes four and five. They leave us, Joan and her army about to attack Orleans, and pick up, at an English camp after Joan has attacked Orleans and four other places. Perhaps in an actual play it would seem better, and even as I think about it now it seems better. I read it not watched it though, and reading it as I went through the book it just didn't work for me.

Suddenly I realized at a few places (one being page 134) that Joan used "eh". Joan's French! I didn't even know the French had a word for eh, nor did my dictionary. Just two other things; they used good English except that instead of show they used shew? Then also, just for one line on page 92, they used French. It's the only place in the entire book, it just didn't make too much sense. Finally, I need to make a comment on the epilogue. It was completely unnecessary and really I found it poorly written. There's all these ghosts that just appear, and what they talk about doesn't even rap that much up. Also, the language is so different from the rest of the play that it seems like it was written by a different person, which of course is not all that appealing. Leave out the preface, the epilogue, and everything after that, and the story's quite good.

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