Whether the unfortunate audience had to sit all through this performance one does not know. One hopes, for their sake, that, like a Chinese play or a Bayreuth performance of Wagner's operas, the performance was extended over a number of days.
Joan is naturally the heroine throughout; she first appears as the bearer of the Divine mandate to drive the enemy from off the sacred soil of France. The play closes with her triumphant return to Orleans after the victory of Patay. As far as the mission is concerned the play is historically correct, and it is in this respect an improvement on Shakespeare and Schiller. There is a point of great interest concerning this piece which, so far as we know, has never been noticed—namely, the fact of one of its acts being almost identical with one in the First Part of King Henry VI. In the mystery play the scene of this act is laid before Orleans. The French are determined to defend their city to the last; the English are determined on taking it. We are in front of the besieged and the besiegers. Salisbury has entered the Tournelles, and he looks out over the city from a window in the tower. Glansdale ('Glassidas') stands beside him, and says to Salisbury, 'Look to your right, and to your left—it looks like a terrestrial paradise, all this country flowing with milk and honey; you will soon be its master.' Salisbury expresses his satisfaction at the sight of all the plunder at his feet, and gives vent to some very sanguinary sentiments about the French; he will slay every one in the place—all the men, 'et leurs femmes et leurs enfants. Personne je n'épargnerai.' But scarcely has he been able to give vent to this terrible threat when his head is carried off by a cannon ball fired from the town. The English cry out 'Ha! Hay! maudite journée!'
Earl Salisbury is carried out stiff and stark. Talbot and the other English officers now vow vengeance on the French in these words:—
'Ha, Sallebery, noble coraige!
Ta mort nous sera vendue chère,
Jamais un tel de ton paraige,
Ne se trouvera en frontière.'
If we turn to Scene 4 of the first act of Shakespeare's First Part of King Henry VI., we shall find almost the same scene enacted.
Enter on the turrets, Lord Salisbury, Talbot, etc. Salisbury, after welcoming Talbot, calls on Sir William Glansdale to look down into the town, and while conversing the shot is fired which kills Salisbury. After the death of Salisbury, Talbot vows vengeance on the French, and says he will
'Nero-like
Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn.'
There can be little doubt that whoever wrote the First Part of King Henry VI. had seen the mystery play of the Siege of Orleans acted in that town. This brings one to the much debated question, 'Who wrote the First Part of King Henry VI.?'
There can be no doubt that Shakespeare had studied both Hall's and Holinshed's chronicles. The former styled Joan of Arc 'a monstrous woman,' and also suggested that fine passage beginning 'Why ring not the bells throughout the town?' We are of those who would wish to believe that our greatest poet had but little hand in delineating the French heroine of all time as she is described in Hall and in Holinshed, and to believe that he left the play—originally written, we think, by Greene—very much as he found it. It is not indeed till the fifth act, when Joan is represented as a magician, and when the grotesqueness of the author passes even the limits of burlesque, that we fail to see a shred of the poet's skill. Nothing in Shakespeare is at once so unpoetical as well as so untrue to history as the last scene, in which Joan repudiates her father. If it is by Shakespeare—which we cannot believe—it must have been one of the very earliest of his historical plays; and, with Ben Jonson, we could wish that the passages referring to the Maid of Orleans had been freely blotted.
The era of the Renaissance brought with it in France no poets to sing of Joan of Arc, and we only find—besides the mystery play of the Siege of Orleans—one literary work relating to her at this period; that is a five-act tragedy written by a Jesuit priest named Fronton du Duc, a gloomy piece, which was acted in 1580 at Pont-à-Mousson. In the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared another tragedy by a Norman squire named Virey: it was titled Jeanne d'Arques, dite la Pucelle d'Orléans. This very mellifluous production was published at Rouen in the year 1600.