Garner: Romantic Women Writers and the Arthurian Legend

Katie Garner, Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge. London: Palgrave, 2017. 

Reviewed by Lisa Plummer Crafton (lcrafton@westga.edu)

An unusual inscription appears in a surviving copy of Stansby’s 1634 edition of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, marking the book as property of “Elizabeth Purcell of Kirton in the year 1699 afor she was Married” (19).  The inscription is a rare record of ownership by a woman, one that marks a material connection with Arthuriana that would become even rarer throughout the eighteenth century and simultaneously invokes the issue of the repackaging of Arthurian material for the “fair sex,” especially as Purcell emphasizes she owned it “afor” her marriage.  Garner’s extensively researched and engagingly written book explores how British women writers between 1770-1850 accessed, read, reimagined, and manipulated Arthurian legend.  Based on the fact that the period in question saw both an antiquarian revival of British medieval romances and an unprecedented number of women writers in print, Garner aims to study how women writers’ responses to Arthurian legend are shaped by what she terms “gendered patterns of access” (2).  While her focus is Romantic women writers’ appropriation of Arthurian source materials, Garner, more broadly, reconstructs a history of reading and a study of the traces of the search for knowledge as seen in the patterns of those female-authored texts.

Broadly chronological, the book’s six chapters trace the development of women’s Arthurian writing with special attention to different genres as well as different publishing media. After an introductory first chapter that succinctly contextualizes the argument, chapter two sets up the context of Arthuriana in terms of gender politics and reception of romance.  As an actual reader of Malory’s text, Elizabeth Purcell inscribes a physical copy; ironically, many female “readers” of medieval romance were not real at all, but imagined readers, the kind Chaucer invokes in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale when he suggests that Lancelot is a book “That women holde in ful greet reverence.”  Garner credits and builds upon Lori Newcomb’s argument that these fictionalized female readers should be approached as ideological “scenes of consumption” (20). Consumption, in fact, serves as a focal point for this chapter as Garner surveys how Arthurian texts that women had access to were both bowdlerized and reframed to underscore their moral instruction.  Radagunda Roberts’ “The Female History,” published anonymously in 1775 in The Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, attempted to offer a virtuous Guinevere in keeping with the magazine’s purpose, but in so doing the queen becomes, in Garner’s words, “no more than an object passed between two men” (29). Garner also surveys the early scholarly projects of Susannah Dobson and Clara Reeve and the anonymous Ancient Ballads (written by “a Lady”), especially how those ballads distanced female readers/writers even more from actual Arthurian source texts. “Replacing” Percy’s Reliques with these substantially more muddled versions of Arthurian scenarios meant that female writers like Louise Stuart Costello ended up offering somewhat “compromised” versions of Arthurian legends, versions that dramatize “the female reader’s compromised proximity to medieval texts” (53).

Having established this narrative of gendered patterns of access and surveyed how female writers manipulated the resources they had, Garner then moves to consideration of genre, the subject of the next two chapters on Gothic and on travel narratives. The third chapter on Gothic works particularly well to illuminate how the interest in literary fragments of Britain’s medieval past intersected with the vogue for Gothic writing.  Beginning with a brief review of how Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho makes an important, though very limited, use of Arthurian references (the servant Ludovico’s reading of chivalric romances allows Radcliffe to argue for the power of the genre), Garner turns to women’s verse experiments in the Gothic mode, evoking Robert Miles’ and Michael Gamer’s expansive definitions of Gothic as “a discursive site crossing the genres” (74). While all five of the female poets surveyed exemplify increasingly bold developments of Arthurian material, Anne Bannerman and Anna Jane Vardill are particularly interesting. Scottish poet Anne Bannerman’s 1802 Tales of Superstition and Chivalry makes pervasive use of the female Gothic in creating an “original and proto-feminist version of Arthur’s death” (81).  Garner focuses on Bannerman’s final ballad “The Prophecy of Merlin,” reading Arthur as more of a heroine than a warrior/king, an interpretation that allows her to take issue with a standard reading of the Queen of Beauty (who greets Arthur on the Yellow Isle after his fatal wound by Modred). The Queen has been read as vampiric, but in casting Arthur in the role of gothic heroine, Garner interprets her as a lost, absent mother and suggests that a subversive Bannerman emphasizes “a new, benign, maternal figure connected to [Arthur’s] eventual rebirth” (85).  Vardill’s version of Coleridge’s Christabel, on the other hand, sanitizes the fragmented, ambiguous and subversive Coleridgean text by importing Merlin as a character who will exorcise Geraldine from the domestic order.

Another significant thread of the book’s argument concerns the role of Arthurian texts in nationalistic discourse, and, in the fourth chapter, Garner points out that the most sustained engagement with the Arthurian legend was, not surprisingly, in travel narratives set in Wales. Travel writers’ pursuit of Arthurian materials was a corollary of the many quests to “prove” the facts of an historical Arthur. As a genre, travel writing was flexible enough to allow for imaginative explorations of Arthuriana; just as the travel writers were geographically crossing borders, the genre allowed easy movement from physical description to imaginative inquiries about Welsh history. Women writers’ manipulation of Merlin is particularly interesting. Garner contrasts the Merlin invoked by Louisa Stuart Costello’s guidebook The Falls, Lakes, and Mountains of North Wales (a rebellious “Briton opposed to the Saxons” and potential voice for the working class) to Felicia Hemans’ celebration of Merlin (her “Merddin”) as a prophetic, bardic poet.

The final two chapters move from female-authored imaginative texts to the possibilities of and limitations to the role of female Arthurian scholar. Garner, in chapter five, credits the work of little-known writers like Costello in paving the way for Lady Charlotte Guest, whose pioneering translations of the romances in The Mabinogion signaled the arrival of female Arthurian scholarship. The continuing unease, however, about the role of women writers (imaginative and scholarly) led also to a more popular strain of Arthuriana suitable for decorative annuals and gift books, and as the subject of the final chapter, provides an apt culmination of the book’s larger consideration of gendered practices of reading. Often mocked as lightweight—Wordsworth called them “greedy receptacles of trash” (221)—these decorative books frequently bore titles that, as Garner says, “suggested that the past could be preserved through objects” (217), and, as such, are worthy of serious study. Poetic versions of the Astolat story (also known as Scalot or, via Tennyson, the Lady of Shalott) which appeared in the Forget Me Not annual provide fascinating perspectives on both women’s writing and reading. Garner argues that Costello’s “The Funeral Boat” is a “proto-feminist version” of the tale even though the dead woman is “painted” into the landscape at the end (223) and that Landon’s version is “appropriately sentimental” (231), but both had significant influence on Tennyson’s poem: “In a very straightforward sense, the origins of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ can be found in the pages of the annuals, and the original 1832 version of [his] poem might easily have been taken for an annual production” (247).

Engagingly written and painstakingly researched, this book provides an insightful and multi-faceted view of Romantic women writers’ relationship with Arthurian legend. Garner’s explorations of female-authored versions of Coleridge’s Christabel and Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott are, in fact, of stand-alone value regardless of the reader’s knowledge of Arthuriana. Demonstrably proving how Romantic women writers’ encounters with Arthurian source texts occurred in distinctly different contexts than those of the literary men associated with what Garner labels the “hypermasculine” medieval romance revival headed by Scott and others, the book deftly manages to be of interest to both serious Arthurian scholars, scholars of Romantic women writers, and theorists of reading practices and publication histories.

Lisa Plummer Crafton

University of West Georgia

The Last Sharknado

The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty (harty@lasalle.edu)

Medievally Speaking may not be the most obvious venue for a review of the sixth (and supposedly last) installment of the Syfy Channel’s Sharknado franchise, but this last Sharknado made-for-television film does include a wonderful segment set in Camelot.

Within the academy, we have of late been having any number of heady and heated discussions about the history, legacy, and current state of medievalism and Medieval Studies.  And such discussions are welcome and healthy, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the phenomenon we call medievalism is fueled by its continued ubiquity in popular culture.  Thus “the medieval” continues to pop up in commercials for beer, pizza, auto parts, cell phones, insurance, and financial planning, to name only a few products and services that have recently eagerly embraced some version of the Middle Ages in their advertising and marketing campaigns. 

Film and television continue to present their own version of “the medieval”—admittedly with mixed results—but we have recently had appearances of elements from the Arthuriad in a number of cinematic genres where we might not expect them, such as a spy film, a Mad Max film, a transformers film, and a film based on a video game.  Television too has given us a fairly riveting series on the Vikings and on Alfred the Great, and not so riveting series set on the Welsh borderlands under Edward II, and another about the Templars and their search for the Holy Grail in fourteenth-century France.

All of which brings me to the Syfy channel’s 2018 made-for-television film The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time. The franchise began in 2013 with a made-for-television film, Sharknado, on the Syfy channel that, to everyone’s surprise, became an instant cult hit.  The original film and its sequels (all directed by Anthony C. Ferrante) combine multiple genres—comedy, disaster, gore-fest, science fiction—and are worthy successors to the B-movies that were made in the 1950s and 1960s.  The films are puerile, jejune, gross, badly acted, cheaply made, and improbably plotted.  Depending upon a viewer’s tolerance for low culture, the films are either hysterically funny, or just plain stupid.

A sharknado is nothing less than a gigantic cyclone that has sucked up hordes of man-eating sharks which are then dumped on land where they threaten to devour the entire population of a city.  Thanks to Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws (from a 1974 novel by Peter Benchley), sharks as monsters have become part of our cultural fabric—the Sharknado franchise just stretches that fabric as far as it can. The hero of the franchise is a bar-owner and surfer named, appropriately, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering), who in the first film sets out to rescue his estranged wife, April (Tara Reid), and their teenage daughter before the sharknado that has hit Los Angeles reaches them. The sequels see Fin and April defending New York and Washington, DC, from subsequent sharknados, until a final sharknado in the fifth film, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017), triggers the end of the world. Each sequel introduces additional characters, and features guest appearances from an eclectic group of actors and celebrities, all of whom seem to have come along for the ride for the laughs.

In the final installment of the franchise, Fin, with help from April, who may or may not be dead, and their son, Gil, travel back in time to undo all the previous sharknados to prevent the apocalypse that ended the previous film.  They begin in the age of dinosaurs in a segment that pays homage to Jurassic Park—the Sharknado franchise is filled with references and nods to any number of film and television series.  Just when things look bleak and hopeless, April arrives astride a pterodactyl, Fin undoes the first sharknado, and he and his companions fast forward to what they anticipate being the present, only to find themselves in Camelot.

That April astride the pterodactyl is a clone of Daenerys Targaryen astride her dragon from A Game of Thrones is no accident, and indeed the inhabitants of Camelot mistake the pterodactyl for a dragon.  And like one of the dragon in Thrones, April’s pterodactyl is shot down by a giant arrow.  In Camelot, Fin and company first encounter a bewildered peasant, whom Fin repeatedly calls “Frodo”—pace Professor Tolkien.  And Camelot is already under siege by the evil Morgana played by a snarling, over-the-top Alaska Thunderfuck from RuPaul’s Drag Race, though any student of cinema Arthuriana will recognize her as simply the latest in a long series of snarling, over-the-top Morgana-like figures.  Morgana’s nemesis is Merlin, here played in one of the film’s best in jokes by the popular physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.  And thanks to Mark Twain, time travel and medievalism have long been connected to each other.

Morgana wants Excalibur and the throne of Camelot.  Merlin is intent upon preventing her, and upon helping Fin, whose son Gil was at one point Merlin’s tutor, return to the present.  Morgana’s plans are interrupted by the appearance of another sharknado, and an armor-clad Fin pulls Excalibur from the stone, though the sword’s blade turns into a chain saw, in a nod to Bruce Campbell’s Ash in another apocalyptic Arthurian movie, Army of Darkness. Fin defeats the sharknado using Excalibur and some catapults, and Morgana goes up in flames screaming “I’m melting,” just like the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz.  Sharknado is certainly catholic in its nods and references to other films and forms of popular culture.  When Fin and company catapult out of Camelot, they land in George Washington’s embattled camp where they encounter a surly Alexander Hamilton (played by popular television economist Ben Stein), who is the butt of any number of jokes referencing the highly successful Broadway musical that bears his name.

Neil deGrasse Tyson as Merlin

In Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco notes that we are always “messing up” the Middle Ages to meet a variety of agendas.  The Camelot segment in The Last Sharknado is a brilliant example of just that kind of “messing up.”  To a popular culture enthusiast, it is an authentic example of “the medieval.”  It has a castle, a dragon, a group of peasants, an evil Morgana, a wise Merlin, and a brave knight who wields a special, magical sword to save the day.  It even furthers its authenticity by referencing such other authentic examples of “the medieval” as A Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, with a nod to The Wizard of Oz thrown in for good measure.  And it casts as its Merlin and Morgana two “real” television celebrities, from admittedly opposite ends of the celebrity spectrum: the well-known physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is a ubiquitous television and radio talking head on any number of scientific topics, and the truly outrageous Alaska Thunderfuck, from a reality competition television show that has, for ten seasons, turned the outrageous into Emmy award winning high camp.

The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time, directed by Anthony J. Ferrante, written by Thunder Levin and Scotty Mullen, The Asylum and Syfy Films; first broadcast on the Syfy Channel on August 19, 2018.

Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University

Sydney Theatre Company: Shaw, Saint Joan

Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw (1923), adapted by director Imara Savage and Emme Hoy for the Sydney Theatre Company (2018).

Reviewed by Ellie Crookes (Macquarie University)

George Bernard Shaw’s Nobel Prize winning play Saint Joan, like most works of medievalism, ultimately functions as an exercise in reception: a theoretical approach devised by Wolfgang Iser (1971, 1978) and Hans Robert Jauss (1982), which argues that a text’s cultural value is not simply shaped by its context of production but also by its uptake, utilisation and adaption in later contexts. Indeed, though Saint Joan is ostensibly a play about wars and warriors of the fifteenth century it is imbued with concerns and preoccupations of Shaw’s own time. The Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Saint Joan acknowledges and builds upon this aspect of Shaw’s play. It does this by utilising artefacts of the past, in this case a medieval French story and an early-twentieth-century British play, to shine a light on political, social and cultural preoccupations of 2018 Australia.

Shaw goes some way to acknowledge the intersection of the medieval past and his twentieth-century present in a retrospective essay ‘Saint Joan: an Epilogue’, published in 1924. Here, Shaw discusses the seeming immutability of Joan’s story in regard to English imperialism, militarism, sectarianism, clericalism, and the ‘woman question.’ Shaw’s discussion on the nature of womanhood, particularly his treatise in support of rebellious women, is especially arresting, with Shaw celebrating Joan as an archetype of powerful subversive womanhood in regard to the clothes she wears (calling her a ‘pioneer of rational dressing[1] for women’ p.7), and the actions she takes (he venerates her military prowess and calls her the ‘first practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare’ p.7). Furthermore, Shaw locates Joan within a long history of maverick women, including those of his own era such as George Sand, Rosa Bonheur, and Sylvia Pankhurst.

Shaw’s characterisation of Joan as a model of progressive womanhood, in both his play and essay, is set against the backdrop of Joan’s persecution. This juxtaposition forms a tension that, as expertly delineated by Karma Waltonen in her article ‘Saint Joan: From Renaissance Witch to New Woman,’ aims to ‘showcase a picture of the modern woman caught in a patriarchal society—a woman labelled a witch because she violated the rules of an oppressive sex-gender system’ (2004, 196). Shaw’s ultimate aim seems to have been to position Joan as the personification of ‘modern’ womanhood and as a figure of progressivity within a comparatively antiquated world. This comparison was done, I contend, to align Joan’s ‘backwards’ medieval era with Shaw’s understanding of the regressive notions, especially in regard to womanhood, that were pervasive in his own time and which he openly denigrated.[2]

The Sydney Theatre Company’s 2018 adaptation of Shaw’s play takes up the mantle set down by Shaw of utilising art and stories of the past as a means to put forth progressive, contemporary commentary. The STC’s adaptation of the play, however, takes this focus on reception a step further by having the ‘medievalness’ of Shaw’s play take a back seat to its potential for universality. In respect to this, the STC erases almost all physical reference to the Middle Ages, a directorial decision that sits in direct contrast to Shaw’s original production, which sought to recreate the medieval past on stage through costume, scenery and props[3]. The only exception to this rule of underplaying ‘medievalness’ is the STC’s inclusion of a tableau of Joan (played by Sarah Snook) in silver armour at the beginning of the play, which serves as a nod to the medievalness of the action about to take place. The armour is then removed after the first Act and whisked off stage, which works as a powerful symbol of the play being stripped of its medieval context. From this point forward the play is set in a minimalist space of no discernable time or place. The actors wear vaguely ‘modern’ clothing, with Joan garbed throughout in the uniform of teenagers (a tee-shirt and shorts) and the stage is for the most part almost completely bare of props. One of the only props used is a petrol can, introduced in the final scene. The can is filled with iridescent silver paint that Joan pours over herself, mimicking a modern image of martyrdom, that of religious devotees performing self-immolation.

This scene, a potently visceral addition by the director and played with arresting fragility by Snook, adds a rather modern twist to the story of Joan’s sacrificial death – no longer is the Maid bound to a stake in the vein of distinctly medieval/early modern images of witch burnings, but instead she kneels, alone and armed with a petrol can, in the manner of political protests of twentieth-century martyrs.

The absence of the visually ‘medieval’ in the STC’s production is, I contend, thoughtful and deliberate and not just a product of the popularity of minimalist productions in modern Australian theatre. In the case of this production of Saint Joan the stark stage functions as a blank canvas, inviting connections to be made between what is happening in the play and what is occurring in the audience’s world. Furthermore, what is happening in 2018 is quite strikingly relevant to the concerns of Shaw’s twentieth-century play about a fifteenth-century woman.

Religiosity is one such issue. Religion is, of course, integral to the medieval story of Joan, and is also central to Shaw’s play, where it is positioned as inherently dichotomous, as something to be simultaneously revered and reviled. The religious piety and resoluteness of Joan is venerated by Shaw, while the hypocrisy and corruption of the Church that seeks to condemn her is criticised. Shaw was raised a Protestant, a fact that he directly references in his essay on Joan, and this most certainly had an impact on his version of Joan’s story. Indeed, Shaw paints a particularly scathing picture of the medieval Church, which ostensibly stands in for his modern Catholic Church.

Due to certain recent scandals within the Australian Catholic Church and other religious organisations, a level of mistrust for organised religion resonates particularly strongly with Australian audiences in 2018. The STC’s production acknowledges this relevance by leaning into the parts of Shaw’s dialogue that critique the deceptiveness and duplicity of Joan’s clerical accusers. Most noticeably, the ‘Bishops’ at times all but wink at the audience in complicit mockery of their spiteful and devious actions and arguments.

This undercurrent of religious critique within the STC’s Saint Joan came to a conspicuous head during a ‘question hour’ held with the actors after the production that I attended. At one point, an audience member asked the players about the reaction of the Australian Catholic Church[4] to such an unflattering depiction. Acclaimed Australian actor John Garden (playing the roles of Inquisitor and Archbishop) responded that the STC hadn’t received any kind of response from the Church, but that this wasn’t surprising considering that “they (the Church) are quite busy with other things.” This remark, which was met with snickers from the audience, was unquestionably in reference to the ongoing Royal Commission into child sex abuse and alleged cover-ups by members of the Australian Catholic Church and others, and this interaction drove home the relevance of Shaw’s play to such a potent atmosphere of religious scepticism and suspicion in Australia at this moment.

The issue of Nationalism, specifically Joan’s fight for French deliverance from English invasion, is also central to Shaw’s Saint Joan. This is so, even though the historical Joan of Arc lived before modern conceptions of nationhood, with her fight being over feudal lands not nation states. Shaw acknowledges this anachronism in his essay, but he clearly saw the potential for Joan’s story to work as a facsimile for modern Irish/British tensions, particularly the issue of Home Rule. Shaw, an Irishman himself, was sympathetic to the Irish plight and this empathy for a nation occupied by English/British sovereignty is ever-present in Saint Joan.

Saint Joan’s’ focus on nationalism is certainly relevant today, internationally with Brexit and Trump’s border wall, and in Australia where we have a policy of ‘turning back the boats’ of asylum seekers, and imprisoning refugees offshore for indiscriminate amounts of time. The way that the STC responds to this issue, however, is rather to hide from it instead of examining it, as it did religiosity.

Nationalistic politics are justifiably controversial and as such the STC, whose overall aim for the play is seemingly to present Joan as modern feminist role model (more on this later), needed to manipulate the nationalistic message of Shaw’s play. Thus, the STC production strives to make plain the difference between Joan’s nationalism as a reasonable reaction to invasion, and the less justifiable nationalistic impulse of isolationism. The 2018 production achieves this distinction through the alteration and sometimes complete exclusion of some of the more controversial nationalistic portions of Shaw’s original play, most notably the omission of the line:

JOAN: ‘He (God) gave them (England) their own country and their own language and it is not His will they should come into our country and try to speak our language’ (Act I).

By removing sections such as this, the STC dulls the edges of what in 2018 could rightfully be perceived as overt xenophobia. This directorial decision was undoubtedly made so as to make the play more palatable to modern Australian audiences, though of course Shaw’s original isolationist sentiment would certainly ring true of current Australian immigration policies. As such, perhaps a different production of the play could have combatted this issue of nationalism as it is presented by Shaw head on, instead of hiding from it. However, this would have made for a very different play.

It is easy to understand why the play moderates the nationalistic elements of Shaw’s rendering of Joan’s story, as this would have complicated the self-professed (by both the artistic director Kip Williams and the director Imara Savage) ‘main message’ of the production: to present a powerful female role model for modern Australian audiences. Obviously, overt xenophobia on the part of the heroine would have complicated matters. Savage, in her director’s notes, suggests that her desire to direct Saint Joan stemmed from the play’s relevance to recent feminist movements, particularly #metoo[5], and to the rise of powerful and passionate young female visionaries like Malala Yousafzai, Pussy Riot and Emma Gonzalez. The STC’s assertion, in their advertising materials and in their production program, seems to be that Shaw’s Saint Joan is an effective vehicle with which to speak to the struggles and triumphs of these young women and to show the universality of this type of womanhood in the present day.

This claim of female empowerment as a defining factor behind the STC’s choice to produce this play is commendable but it is, in both intention and execution, not fully realised. The STC’s goal of producing Shaw’s play as a means to celebrate Joan as a powerful and progressive role model is complicated by the fact that Joan, in Shaw’s original version of the play, has very little stage time. Savage, in her notes, acknowledges this and states that Shaw’s play feels like it shows Joan performing ‘a cameo in her own life story.’ Indeed, in the original three-hour version of the play Joan is only onstage for one quarter of the time, with most of the action occurring through descriptions by men, of Joan and her exploits. This absence of Joan from her own story is rectified somewhat by Savage’s restaging of the play, where Joan (and indeed all of the actors) are onstage throughout the production. Furthermore, and perhaps most effectively, is the inclusion of new dialogue in the form of soliloquies performed by Joan, which the director along with writer Emme Hoy fashioned from Joan’s historical Condemnation and Rehabilitation trial documents.[6] These changes centralise Joan within her own story through the very practical fact that she is given more lines, and the writer/director team cleverly include new sections which give more insight into the psyche and motivations of Joan. These new additions flesh out Joan’s character so that the play is less a retelling of Joan’s impact on the lives of kings and soldiers, and more of a story of personal angst and bravery. 

These changes are effective and commendable but Savage’s and the STC’s claim to have chosen the play in reaction to an international atmosphere of powerful women and the #metoo movement is still complicated by the fact that the it had to be so heavily edited that at times it bears little resemblance to the original.[7]

Furthermore, Saint Joan is still a play that calls for one female actor to be surrounded by a troupe of fourteen men.[8] On the one hand, the image of a woman enclosed by a circle of men, which is how the staging is set for most of STC’s production, is powerful in its representative potential for depictions of gendered inequality, and also for its illustration of Joan as a powerful, impressive figure in the face of this imbalance. However, the presence of only one woman onstage for the entire retelling of Joan’s story also plays into the rather pernicious idea, often associated with the valorisation of Joan of Arc, of female exceptionalism. Arianne Chernock (2013), Mary D. Sheriff (1996, 2003) and Jane Tolmie (2006) have all examined the matter of female exceptionality in detail, in both visual art and in written works, and assert that though idealised women are often used as inspirational models, they are also utilised (intentionally or inadvertently) as a means to make a mockery of the majority of women who do not transcend the limitations of their gender or their circumstances. The total absence of any other female character/actor onstage besides Joan feels like a validation, though undoubtedly unintentional, of this notion of female exceptionality, and this complicates the STC’s claims of progressive, feminist intent behind their production.

The biggest takeaway for me from the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Saint Joan is a fresh appreciation for just how malleable works of medievalism are, and how far they can be stretched from their original forms whilst still retaining the essence of their medievalist roots. This fact is a testament to the powerful impact of the Middle Ages on the modern world, and also to the inextricability of modern ideas and concerns from our renderings of the medieval past.

Works cited

Chernock, A. (2013). "Gender and the Politics of Exceptionalism in the Writing of British Women's Histories." Making Women's Histories. P. S. Nadell and K. Haulman. New York, NYU Press.

Iser, W. (1971). "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction." Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute. J. H. Miller. New York.

Iser, W. (1978). The Act of Reading: a theory of aesthetic response. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Jauss, H. R. and T. Bahti (1982). Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Shaw, G. B. (1962). Platform and Puplit. London, Rupert Hart-Davis.

Shaw, G. B. (1962). Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue. Middlesex, New York, London, Penguin Books.

Sheriff, M. D. (1996). The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Sheriff, M. D. (2003). "'So what are you working on?': Categorising the Exceptional Woman." Singular Women: Writing the Artists. K. Frederickson and S. E. Webb. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Tolmie, J. (2006). "Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine." Journal of Gender Studies 15(2): 145–158.

Waltonen, K. (2004). "Saint Joan: From Renaissance Witch to New Woman." SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24(1): 186-203.

Ellie Crookes

Macquarie University

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[1] Rational Dress, also known as ‘Victorian Dress Reform,’ was a movement of the late nineteenth century that called for ‘healthier’ and ‘safer’ styles of dress for women, in reaction to the corseted  and cushioned designs that were popular at the time.

[2] As demonstrated in his pro-feminist writings, such as his speeches: ‘The Menace of the Leisured

Woman’ (1927) and ‘Women-Man in Petticoats’ (1927).

[3] A number of photographs from early twentieth-century productions of the play can be found online, particularly of the actress Sybil Thorndike who performed in the role of Joan over 450 times. These images attest to the visually ‘medieval’ flavour of the original productions.

[4] It is quite telling that this audience member named the Catholic Church specifically, not Christianity or religious organisations more generally.

[5] It is interesting to note that one of the accused predators ousted by the #metoo movement was the

actor Geoffrey Rush, whose alleged misbehavior while performing in the STC’s production of King

Lear in the 2015-2016 season was the catalyst for his public reprobation. Thus, Savage’s reference to

the movement feels quite pointed.

[6] This directorial decision, according to Savage, was enabled by somewhat lax Australian copyright

laws, which allow Australian productions of plays to be hugely altered by modern writers and

directors.

[7] A fact that Shaw would have reviled, having in his essay on Saint Joan professed that critics (whom he calls ‘knights of the blue pencil’) that suggest that the script be shortened, never mind

substantially altered, are effectively ‘disemboweling’ his play.

[8] The STC’s production, however, has its actors play two and even three roles, bringing their number of male actors down to eight.