This paper attempts to investigate possible implications of the terrors, staged or unstaged, in three plays about Joan of Arc written by Schiller, Shaw and Anouilh. Since terrors are quite often something uncanny, homely and unhomely at one and the same time in Freudian terms, encounters with them may llow us a glimpse of the unconscious or the Real in a Lacanian sense. Yet in none of the three plays under discussion is Joan’s terrible death on the stake brought onto the stage. Instead, Schiller’s The
Maid of Orleans totally removes the burning scene and endows Joan with a heroic death in the battlefield; Joan’s terrible encounter with the Black Knight reveals her potential desire and her denial of it bears out her search for the soul at the expense of desire. The Epilogue to Shaw’s Saint Joan, in the form of Charles’s dream, presents canonized Joan’s wish for resurrection as extreme horror and hence casts its ironic critique on the Church and the whole world. Anouilh’s The Lark, in its metatheatrical style, lays bare not only the devices of theatre as politics but also those of politics as theatre, while its mistake” in the performing sequence, together with the missing of the burning scene and the connotations of the image of lark, well justifies itself as a Freudian slip which both conceals and reveals the terror behind the scene. Whether it is staged or not, terror always haunts these three plays.