Eliot and His Age by Russell Kirk

Author:Russell Kirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497635739
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

The Witness of Blood

Early in 1935, Eliot was invited to write a play for the Canterbury Festival, to be performed that June; E. Martin Browne would direct it. The success of The Rock had brought about this invitation, and (being given a freer hand for the Canterbury Festival than he had been given by the Forty-Five Churches Fund) Eliot accepted. At first he meant to call his drama about Saint Thomas à Becket “Fear in the Way”; he even thought (having been an occasional reviewer of thrillers) of “The Archbishop Murder Case”; but Mrs. Browne suggested Murder in the Cathedral.

In the medieval chapter house of Canterbury cathedral, the play was presented for a few afternoons, with Robert Speaight in the role of Becket; then Ashley Dukes carried off the drama to London, where (beginning November 1, 1935) it ran for a year at the Mercury Theatre, and for several months thereafter at the Duchess. In the United States, the Federal Theater of the Works Progress Administration took Murder on tour; the Dukes production later made its way to Boston and New York.

Murder in the Cathedral has been produced many times since then, in several countries, with especial success in ecclesiastical buildings. It would be made into a film sixteen years later, with some changes in the script, the first contemporary verse-drama adapted to the screen.10 The various English and American editions and printings of the play, between 1935 and 1965, ran to a total of nearly seventy-five thousand copies.

The first performance of this drama, in the chapter house with its door opening upon Canterbury’s cloisters, occurred within a few yards of that spot in the north transept where the masterful Archbishop had fallen beneath the swords of Henry’s knights, in the year 1170; and hard by the violated site of Becket’s shrine in Trinity Chapel, erected in 1220 and destroyed by Henry VIII in 1538. To Canterbury, Chaucer’s pilgrims, and Piers Plowman’s and countless others, had made their progress for centuries, “the holy blisful martir for to seke,” multitudes along the Old Road from Winchester, the Pilgrims’ Way that had existed before history was written. Thomas à Becket, the “Cheapside brat,” the towering martyr, spoke through Eliot to the twentieth century.

In the quarrel “between the Soul and the State: that is, between things eternal, personal, inward, and things civic, communal …” as Hilaire Belloc had written of the murder of Becket, “violence, our modern method, attempted to cut the knot. At once, and as it always must, fool violence produced the opposite of what it had desired. All the West suddenly began to stream to Canterbury, and à Becket’s tomb became, after Rome, the chief shrine of Christendom.”11

Eliot’s drama has to do with things personal—the triumph of Becket over temptation; and with things communal—the resistance of the Church against political absolutism. Eliot’s Archbishop is the primate of Daniel-Rops’ description: “a man of culture, high intelligence, and subtle pride, a minister experienced in business and of unlimited devotion to duty …” who “underwent a psychological transformation by the promptings of divine grace.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.