Book excerpt: Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of Shaw’s powerful historical drama about Joan of Arc, which led him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature—part of the official Bernard Shaw Library A Penguin Classic With Saint Joan, which distills many of the ideas Shaw had been exploring in earlier works on politics, religion, feminism, and creative evolution, he reached the height of his fame as a dramatist. Fascinated by the story of Joan of Arc, but unhappy with the way she had traditionally been depicted, Shaw wanted to remove “the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition.” He presents a realistic Joan: proud, intolerant, naïve, foolhardy, and brave—a rebel and a woman for Shaw’s time and our own. This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume includes Shaw’s Preface of 1924; the cast list of the first production of Saint Joan; a chronology; and the essay “On Playing Joan” by Imogen Stubbs.