take command of the Dauphin’s army. She tells them she has outgrown
a “God of Terrors” (bk. 3 , line 425 ) because she saw
The eternal energy pervade
The boundless range of nature.
(Bk. 3 , lines 427–28)When the priests tell her that Nature is sinful. Joan protests:
It is not Nature that doth lead to sin:
Nature is all benevolence, all love,
All beauty! [.. .]
[...]
Nature teach sin!
Oh blasphemy against the Holy One.
(Bk. 3 , lines 509–10)Like Southey’s epic, Schiller’s play Die Jungfrau von Orleansalso re-sponds to Shakespeare and Voltaire. Schiller reverses Shakespeare’s
scene in which Joan denies her father by having Joan’s father deny her.
As early as the prologue he fears she may be in league with the powers
of hell; he later denounces her as a witch before the crowd assembled
for Charles VII’s coronation. In contrast to Voltaire, whose work high-
lights sexual activity, Schiller focuses on sexual desire. Joan can be vic-
torious only as long as she remains above desire. Her one lapse, emo-
tional, not physical, leads to the loss of all her powers and to temporary
rejection by the French.^41
In each of these works Joan serves as a vehicle for the author’s po-litical/literary views, as evidenced in the denouement of each. At the
end of Shakespeare’s pro-English play Joan is led away to a rightful ex-
ecution. In Voltaire’s risqué mock epic Joan, after almost losing her vir-
ginity to a seductive donkey possessed by evil spirits, celebrates her
victory over the English by bestowing it on her faithful captain,
Dunois. Southey’s anti-English, pro-France epic concludes with the
coronation of Charles VII. Schiller ends his play (which he subtitled
“Eine romantische Tragödie” [A romantic tragedy]) by defying both the
natural world and the historical record. The English capture Joan and
put her in chains, but once Joan conquers her weakness for the English
Lionel, the bonds that hold her miraculously burst. She runs to the
battlefield, where she dies gloriously in the arms of Charles VII. Inter-
estingly, all the writers who followed Shakespeare avoided dealing
with Joan’s death at the stake, although the scene in Southey’s epic in
Karolina Pavlova 151