Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London has announced that it will portray famed French woman warrior and Catholic saint, Joan of Arc, as a gender-neutral character with “they/them” pronouns in an upcoming play.
Joan of Arc, a 15th-century peasant girl who became one of the most famous women in history after leading a French army to victory as a teenager over the English at the besieged city of Orléans in 1429, claiming to have been divinely inspired after seeing a vision of the Archangel Michael, will now be cast as a non-binary character in the Globe Theatre’s new play, I, Joan.
The woke theatre, which stands upon the grounds where William Shakespeare’s original theatre once was, said that the production will see Joan of Arc use the “they/them pronouns” which have become fashionable amid the transgender mania sweeping the Western world.
While the Globe admitted that the play is not intended to be historically accurate, a press release tried to justify the use of the pronouns by claiming that the use of “they” to refer to a single person had been in use in the English language prior to the birth of Joan of Arc.
“History has provided countless and wonderful examples of Joan portrayed as a woman. This production is simply offering the possibility of another point of view. That is the role of theatre: to simply ask the question ‘imagine if?’” the playhouse said.
“We are not the first to present Joan in this way, and we will not be the last,” the Globe added.
Indeed, earlier this year the streaming service Discovery+ also cast the Catholic saint as “non-binary” in its historically questionable LGBTQ+ docuseries The Book of Queer.
Though Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake at the age of 19 after being captured by the English for, among other things, committing blasphemy by donning male clothes, there has never been any historical evidence to suggest that she considered herself as anything other than a woman.
For her heroics, including fighting on in the battle for Orléans after sustaining injuries from archers, she has become a national hero of France, and one of the nation’s patron saints after being canonised in 1920.
Aside from her prominence as a religious figure, St Joan has for centuries been an inspiration for women, given her role as one of the few females to serve prominently in battle in history.
Criticising the woke move to strip St Joan of her femininity, former Reuters journalist Sophie Walker commented: “When I was a little girl, Joan of Arc presented thrilling possibilities about what one young girl could do against massed ranks of men. Rewriting her as not female and presenting it as progress is a massive disappointment.”
Author Joan Williams added: “As a little girl (child human female) I identified with Joan because there were so few historical women (adult human female) who fought in battles. Stop erasing her achievements. Little girls, like I was, need strong female role models more than ever.”
It is not the first instance of The Globe taking literary licence with historical accuracy to conform to modern progressive standards. The playhouse, which recently embarked upon a project of “decolonising the plays of Shakespeare,” also cast a black actress to play the role of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which was also slapped with a “trigger warning” for supposedly offensive content, for example.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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