Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (First Illustrated Edition)

A$750 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

SHAW, George Bernard (illus. stage settings Charles Ricketts). Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue. London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1924. Large Folio (395 × 281 mm). Quarter cloth and illustrated boards. Paper title labels to spine and front cover. Top edge gilt; others uncut. [ii], v, [1], 182, [1] pp. 16 plates tipped-in throughout, each with a caption page preceding it: 12 in full colour; 4 in black and white (stage settings). Illustrated pictorial dust wrapper with Ricketts's design in blue. Printed on Batchelor's handmade paper by R R Clark, Edinburgh. First illustrated edition. One of 750 unnumbered copies. First illustrated edition of any work by George Bernard Shaw. Published 2 October 1924. Saint Joan was Shaw's most sustained engagement with history and, in the view of many critics, his greatest work. The play tells the story of Joan of Arc as a practical genius of military and political organisation, born too early into a world that lacks the categories for what she is. She is a proto-Protestant in a Catholic world, a nationalist in a feudal world, and a person of individual conscience in a world governed by institutional authority. The London premiere of Saint Joan was given on 26 March 1924 at the New Theatre, with Sybil Thorndike — for whom Shaw had written the role — creating Joan in a performance that established the play's canonical status before the illustrated edition reached its readers in October. The following year, the Nobel Commi

• Binding: Hardcover

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