There can be no doubt that Shakespeare had studied both Hall’s and Holinshed’s chronicles.  The former styled Joan of Arc ’a monstrous woman,’ and also suggested that fine passage beginning ’Why ring not the bells throughout the town?’ We are of those who would wish to believe that our greatest poet had but little hand in delineating the French heroine of all time as she is described in Hall and in Holinshed, and to believe that he left the play—­originally written, we think, by Greene—­very much as he found it.  It is not indeed till the fifth act, when Joan is represented as a magician, and when the grotesqueness of the author passes even the limits of burlesque, that we fail to see a shred of the poet’s skill.  Nothing in Shakespeare is at once so unpoetical as well as so untrue to history as the last scene, in which Joan repudiates her father.  If it is by Shakespeare—­which we cannot believe—­it must have been one of the very earliest of his historical plays; and, with Ben Jonson, we could wish that the passages referring to the Maid of Orleans had been freely blotted.

The era of the Renaissance brought with it in France no poets to sing of Joan of Arc, and we only find—­besides the mystery play of the Siege of Orleans—­one literary work relating to her at this period; that is a five-act tragedy written by a Jesuit priest named Fronton du Duc, a gloomy piece, which was acted in 1580 at Pont-a-Mousson.  In the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared another tragedy by a Norman squire named Virey:  it was titled Jeanne d’Arques, dite la Pucelle d’Orleans.  This very mellifluous production was published at Rouen in the year 1600.

Another tragedy on the same subject appeared in 1642, written by the Abbe d’Aubignac—­a very pedantic play.

Next appears an ‘heroic poem’ by Chapelain, published in 1656, entitled La Pucelle.  Great things had been expected of this poem, but it fell very flat after a long expectancy of thirty years when it at length saw the light.  Chapelain’s ridiculous poem gave the idea to Voltaire of his licentious one.

Even Voltaire was ashamed of his work, and long denied that he was its author.  As a very slight reparation for his deed, he writes of Joan of Arc in his Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des natives, that the heroine would have had altars built in the days when altars were erected by primitive men to their liberators.

Southey, referring to Voltaire’s infamous production, said, ’I never committed the crime of reading Voltaire’s Pucelle.’

After all, Voltaire did infinitely more harm to himself by writing his poem La Pucelle than he did to the memory of the Maid of Orleans, for it revealed to the world what an amount of depravity was mixed up within that wonderful shrewd mind, and how it weakened its genius.  The great Revolution which swept so many shams away with its terrible breath, venerated, to its honour be it said, both the spirit of humanity displayed by the poet-philosopher and the spirit of patriotism that possessed the virgin heroine and martyr.