Rewriting Joan: Schiller's Johanna

Abstract

The article analyses Friedrich Schiller’s play, The Maid from Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans [1801]) as a response to Voltaire’s ribald satire, La Pucelle d’Orleans (1762). Schiller rejected Voltaire’s satire as celebrating reason at the expense of the heart. Using Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1, as well as a variety of other sources (the Bible, his own translation of Macbeth, his notion of romanticism, etc.), Schiller attempted to rewrite St Joan to clarify his aesthetics. Rewriting is thus enacted by Schiller on several levels: he ‘corrects’ Voltaire and the Enlightenment; he rewrites Shakespeare’s version of Joan (and of Macbeth) for the German stage; he rewrites fifteenth-century France into the German states of 1800; he completely changes Joan’s story to fit his own notion of tragedy; and he rewrites the notion of religion by eliding it with what he sees as the high aims of fiction. For Schiller, Joan of Arc is the embodiment of beauty and the sublime, precisely because of her contradictions (fier...