Joan of Arc on the Stage and Her Sisters in Sublime Sanctity

ISBN-13: 9783030278885 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 281 str.

John Pendergast

Spis treści

Chapter 1.  The Palimpsest of Euripides, Shakespeare, and Voltaire

Part I. Euripides and Iphigenia

Part II.  Shakespeare and Joan

Part III. Voltaire and Jeanne

Chapter 2.  Sublime Sanctity: Schiller’s New Tragic Joan

Chapter 3.  Lacuna and Enigma: Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco in Light of Schiller’s Play

Chapter 4.  Patriotic Elegy and Epic Illusion: Schiller’s Johanna in Russia 

Part I.  Zhukovsky’s Orleanskaya deva (“Maid of Orleans”)

Part II.  The Genesis of Tchaikovsky’s Orleanskaya deva

Chapter 5.  The Skeptic Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks: Shaw’s Saint Joan. Concluding Thoughts on Joan in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Appendices

Appendix 1. Table Comparing the Spelling of Names

Appendix 2. Translations of Johanna’s Speech and Joan’s Letter to Henry VI

Appendix 3. Translations of Texts Cited in Chapter 4

Bibliography

Abbreviations

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

End Notes

Chapter 1 Notes

Chapter 2 Notes

Chapter 3 Notes

Chapter 4 Notes

Chapter 5 Notes

Index

O autorze

John Pendergast is an Assistant Professor of Russian at West Point. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York, a master’s degree in Russian Language and Literature from the University of Arizona, and a bachelor’s degree in Music from Birmingham-Southern College. A graduate of the Russian program at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, his research focuses on music and letters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia and Germany.

Blurb

This book examines the figure of Joan of Arc as depicted in stage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those based on or related to Schiller’s 1801 romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans).  The author elucidates Schiller’s appropriation of themes from Euripides’s Iphigenia plays, chiefly the quality of “sublime sanctity,” which transforms Joan’s image from a victim of fate to a warrior-prophet who changes history through sheer force of will.  Finding the best-known works of his time about her – Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orléans and Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part I – utterly dissatisfying, Schiller set out to replace them. Die Jungfrau von Orleans was a smashing success and inspired various subsequent treatments, including Verdi’s opera Giovanna d’Arco and a translation by the father of Russian Romanticism, Vasily Zhukovsky, on which Tchaikovsky based his opera Orleanskaya deva (The Maid of Orleans).  In turn, the book’s final chapter examines Shaw’sSaint Joan and finds that the Irish playwright’s vociferous complaints about Schiller’s “romantic flapdoodle” belie a surprising affinity for Schiller’s approach.