Reality in the Unreal: A Different View of Richard III, Saint Joan, and Galileo

Many critics have argued again and again that Shakepeare's Richard III, Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, and later Bertolt Brecht's Galileo are plays that, because of the ways they are written, are considered "bad" history plays. However, I don't think those critics are being as fair to Shaw (and Brecht) as they could be. If a playwright is going to take on writing a history play, that playwright should model more of the ways that Shaw uses to make Saint Joan more accessible (and the paths Brecht takes), rather than what Shakespeare was attempting to do when he wrote Richard III.

Effective history seems to beg that it have within it the ability to be readily understood by as many people as possible. That said, Shaw seems to realize this because he has made the choice to write Saint Joan in a form that is mostly novelistic but that still maintains the script-like conventions of earlier plays like Shakespeare's Richard III. Shaw said, "art should try to change the world." This was the main idea behind his propagandistic nature when it came to writing his plays and speaking out in his public life. I think that his decision to write Saint Joan more as a novel, rather than a conventional-looking play, speaks toward his 'change the world' declaration, because since the time Saint Joan was written, the genre of history plays was never quite the same; certainly not reverting back to the conventions that Shakespeare communicated in Richard III.

In plays later than Shakespeare's Richard III, the "rules" set forth by Aristotle in his Poetics concerning the Unities definitely create problems (from today's point of view) when we attempt to apply those rules to these later plays, and when we try to think of those rules in terms of how we see history being written about today. The conventions of having explicit acts and/or scenes with which to divide up the action of the play seem to become less and less important as plays have progressed. True, there are divisions in later plays like Saint Joan and Brecht's Galileo, but when read in the novelistic style that both of those plays convey, readers don't tend to stop and realize that they are switching acts or scenes, thus they continue reading at a pace similar to that of a novel, hardly noticing the action break, if it is even there at all. In terms of historical accounts, I think we have come to expect moments in history to behave like they have on Shakespeare's stage, but in reality, that just cannot happen. The only frame of reference we have when considering historical moments today is often just a date, and the moment seems to center around that only. Something interesting happens with that notion of time when we switch from watching a play (yes, more often than not we know we're watching a production) to reading a play.

When we read a play, what happens in our mind is much like what happens when we see the action on stage. Someone mentions a date to us in the audience (or perhaps we read it from a companion "script" while we watch), and that essence of time passing, either before the moment in which the action on stage occurred historically or during, almost vanishes as we experience the story, either in watching it on stage, or reading the play itself written for us in script form.

For example, one of the final moments within a final scene in Saint Joan is when Joan is put to death. In that scene, Warwick and the Archbishop Cauchon are discussing the death sentence of Joan, as it is supposedly happening outside the castle walls. However, in the true history of Joan's actual death, that idea of the two gentlemen talking about Joan's death-by-burning while it is happening isn't accurate, since the two moments happened within a much longer time frame than the few moments in which Shaw has put both.

"I meant no harm. I did not know what it would be like," (Shaw 146) says the Chaplain after he rushes in toward the Warwick and Cauchon; and Warwick replies "Oh, you saw it then?" (Shaw 146). As I said, in terms of the real history, this moment didn't happen like Shaw has written it. But, I still think that for Shaw to put these moments together (thus implicitly removing that "lag time" in our minds) as he has done, the play flows much better than it would if Shaw had to write something like "...and then 6 months after Joan's sentencing Warwick and Cauchon talk about her burning at the stake, and the Chaplain comes in." That method just doesn't work in this case. This is the climax of Shaw's play, so he doesn't waste time dealing with the facts, and instead creates a much more interesting version of history, and one that is much easier to follow in its novelistic sense. People argue that this isn't good history. But Shaw didn't intend for it to be "good" history. Shaw was writing a play for entertainment, but also for other reasons. I think that those who fall into the "good" history argument are perhaps too accustomed to the non-narrative styles in which history is written, and thus expect a "history" play to act like those other styles, and it simply does not need to, nor should it.

Furthermore, the narrative style in Saint Joan helps readers become more involved with the characters, despite Bertolt Brecht's adamant notion that no emotional connection should be made at all when watching a play. It is true that a novelistic approach, as Shaw has created, is ineffective for an actor, perhaps because the actor won't fully convey the exact feeling that Shaw proposed in his script. But, I think that we must allow for the idea that these plays no longer exist in moments by themselves, and are continually merging with different generations of people that inherently expect different things out of plays. Otherwise, if that were not true, every play written since Shakespeare would have remained in that same style, and Shaw's Saint Joan would read much differently than it does today. That path of cultures has gone from one in which these plays existed mainly in the moments in which they were acted out, to one in which people are reading these plays and experiencing them both on the stage and on the page.

As a result of this new assimilation, a novelistic approach seems to be a logical path to take, and I think it blends what we get from seeing a play on stage and what we retain from reading it effectively. Plays like Richard III that lack much of the novelistic approach seem much harder to grasp, unless of course one knows the history. Plays like Saint Joan meld both history and narrative together more effectively, and create a style of play that has much more potential in remaining popular. Yes, Shaw toys with the ideas we have about the real history of Joan, but automatically we consider those different ways in which he constructs the history as being ineffective, or "bad," as we often say. We have stuck with the notion that if we don't convey history "correctly" in a play, that somehow people will get the misrepresented version stuck in their heads. I argue that this is not true. The people that are reading Saint Joan today are those whom know the reality behind the play, but don't want to spend a hundred pages reading a version that they could easily read about in five pages of a history book. People want variety. That's why they go see a play in the first place. In terms of novelistic approaches, too, that's why "alternative history" stories are so popular.

In relation to prose, I think that a history play ought to mirror the conventions that the basic idea of "history" has behind it: a story. Shakespeare seems to counter this notion by keeping his writing in his usual iambic pentameter, which to me isn't as effective because I don't know anyone who speaks the way that Shakespeare wrote his plays, except if someone is on stage doing his plays. Shaw, on the other hand, writes his plays in common Irish (translated to better fit our English style of today), which makes the reader much more apt to understand the action of the play. Furthermore, many are aware of Shakepeare's tendency to end an act with a heroic couplet, which is fine to do on stage, but when the play is transformed into a piece that people also read in today's society, the style jockeys for position in our brains which are tuned to a different, more conversational and narrative style. This narrative style is also used in Brecht's Galileo, although Brecht more implicitly uses it within the actual storyline than Shaw, who decided to keep most of his narrative elements more closely infused outside the storyline, being instead contained within the conventional stage directions at the top of the page. In a sense, Shaw draws our minds back toward the conventions that Shakespeare used, which perhaps serves to keep those conventions continuing in the present, rather than leaving them to the past.

One of the other main differences between early history plays like Shakespeare's Richard III and later plays like Shaw's Saint Joan, and Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, follow the notion that history plays, at least the most effective ones (as I think of the aforementioned two), are not plays merely depicting historical events, but are those which depict an event in history, but at the same time speak toward a larger, more prevalent point within the context of the current day, or that of the author.

In contrast to the later trio, Richard III doesn't seem to me to be nearly as strong in that regard as Saint Joan, or Galileo. Granted, Shakespeare was "writing about his day," and in that sense his different perspective on the Tudor history is what he strived to speak upon. But, I argue that much of the influence the play supposedly has upon our time as it relates to Shakespeare's time really isn't there. I believe that what we as readers and viewers have in this day (as no doubt Shakespeare transcends over time) with Richard III in particular, is a play that does its job as a slanted production commenting upon the Tudor history (which certainly was influential to its audience of the Queen and the upper class); but in today's age, I think that that's its main purpose as a play that we read and see on stage now.

Shakespeare most likely was well aware that his purpose as a playwright then was to simply write plays, and leave it at that. Brecht later purported the idea of the "theater of alienation," (the idea that a play should be constructed in such a way that its audience knows it's a play-an idea Shakespeare was practicing, no doubt.) I cannot refute that idea, nor can I argue that audiences get so involved in a play that Brecht's views don't matter, because people simply don't forget their watching a play. Brecht said, "whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to induce sordid intoxication, or creates fog, has got to be given up" (Willett 848). But most audiences would disagree, saying that this need not even be a consideration of Brecht's.

My argument, however, goes a step further and asks why a play only be looked at in that way-as just a production that means little more to us as viewers as entertainment. Perhaps the issue people have with later plays like Saint Joan and Galileo is the theme of "propaganda," which comes off to many as one that allows for too much opinion, and to have an opinion about something has often been looked at as a negative. I argue that effective history plays are written by people living within, not outside of, their respective time periods. Therefore, those individuals are inherently going to be influenced in some way, shape or form by events in those time periods. I think that it is human nature for us, because of how events in our histories affect us, to desire to find a different way to interact with the thoughts and feelings those events in history create within us, and the form of the play (at least for Shaw and Brecht) is just another form, and unfortunately a loaded word like propaganda has influenced our theories about the container of the play itself.

People argue and argue that plays like these are "bad" history plays, and I think that they say so simply because they aren't looking at the bigger picture. True, Shakespeare's Richard III purports a different point of view about the Tudor history; one that is so different from what really happened. I think that's why many feel that it is a "bad" history play. But, I think it's much deeper than that.

I argue that Richard III is an ineffective history play (compared to Saint Joan or Galileo) not because it is inaccurate with its facts about the Tudor history, but because it doesn't seem to speak toward a larger idea in society. Shakespeare's namesake may, in this case, transcend time, but his conventions of an effective history play don't. Plays like Shaw's and Brecht's do seem to me to be much more effective history plays because each of them does offer a viewpoint (albeit creative, which I have argued makes a difference) about a much larger issue in each of the playwright's societies at their time.

In the case of Shaw's Saint Joan, he was not commenting upon the life of Joan of Arc. Rather, he was using the real-life character of Joan and her subsequent death via burning-at-the-stake as a catalyst to offer a different look at a very large issue of his time: religious persecution; specifically as it pertains to going against the beliefs of the Catholic Church. But what really makes Saint Joan effective is the fact that religious persecution, in all its forms, is not something limited to Shaw's time. It is precisely the fact that because we in today's society have so many issues with each other's belief systems that Shaw's plays speaks so resonantly with us.

The same is true of Brecht's piece. Brecht was not just telling the story of 16th century Galileo. He was using the creative nature of the onstage play to simultaneously tell a largely-fictional tale rooted in history, which he realized would be more influential on audiences, but was also following his own advice on writing plays in which he made the point that art ought to have a message. His message in this case was to make a statement about the conflict between the doctrines of religion and science-a battle which more importantly still rages today, hence the influence upon us as readers and viewers because we can relate to Galileo's frustration with the Church.

I'll even go a step further into time, and say the same about Arthur Miller when he wrote The Crucible. Arthur Miller, as many are undoubtedly aware, wasn't writing about the Salem witch trials, but rather about the Communist scare in the United States in the 1950s, and the explicit reaction of the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) to Miller's play. But, I would even take it a step further than that, and argue that his commentary speaks very well toward this idea, but could shed light on an even bigger issue (one that exists in every corner of society today), and that is discrimination. If looked at Miller's play that way, all sorts of ideas come forth, from racism to the discrimination of the handicapped. What each realm of discrimination has within it is the same driving force: a fear of difference, based on an untouchable "norm."

In each of these later plays written after Shakespeare's Richard III, it is the implicit, rather than the explicit conventions that each author uses in their pieces. Shaw, Brecht and even Miller each recognize that the meld between the conventions of narrative and the ideas they already had about how history works in their own times, as well as the real potential that constructing a play with both narrative elements and conventional ideas about history (larger issues remaining on the forefront of our minds over time), would ultimately have more influence than plays like Shakespeare's Richard III, which doesn't have the same influence upon a historically-savvy audience such as us who read their plays today.

Works Cited

Shaw, Bernard. Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Penguin Books, 1924.

Willett, John, trans. Brecht on Theatre. By Bertolt Brecht. Frankfurt: Hill and Wang, Inc, 1957.