29 T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral

Dr. Anjana Sankar

 

 Eliot’s Life andInfluences

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) renowned poet, critic and dramatist was born in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., in a strict Unitarian family. In 1906, he went to Harvard University where he studied Greek, Latin, Renaissance literature, French and German philosophy. There he was taught by George Santayana and Irving Babbitt. Babbitt profoundly influenced Eliot’s views regarding the dynamic relationship between the past and the present as well as his bias against Romanticism. At Harvard, Eliot was exposed to the works of Dante, Laforgue and the French symbolists. Eliot had completed two of his earliest poetic works “Portrait of a Lady” and “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”

 Influence of Philosophy: The next academic stint of Eliot was at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he studied philosophy and French literature, and attended the classes held by the French Philosopher Henri Bergson. He  went back to Harvard to prepare for his doctoral thesis on the English philosopher F.H. Bradley, but left without taking the degree. Later he went to Merton college, Oxford and finally took up permanent residence in England in 1915 by becoming a British citizen.

 Journalistic Career: During his early years in London, Eliot taught at Highgate school reviewed books for the Times Literary Supplement, and from 1917, worked for Lloyds Bank. He served a short stint as Assistant Editor of  The Egoist, and later became the editor of a newly founded quarterly review, The Criterion in 1922 where he continued till it ceased publication in 1939. In 1925, he became the director of the publishing house Faber and Faber, aiding many young poets in their fledgling careers.

 Influence of Religion: In 1927, Eliot became a member of the Church of England. The poems written, during this period include, ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘The Journey of the Magi’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’. The major achievement of his later career was Four Quartets – consisting of four long poems , namely, Burnt Norton (1933), East Coker (1940) The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942) – first published together in 1943. They are contemplative and religious poems, each concerned with one of the four elements namely air, earth, water and fire.

The change from agnosticism to Christianity emerged gradually in Eliot’s writing and was marked by the publication of a book of essays For Lancelot Andrews (1928). Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922) portrays the deeper desolation of a world declining into materialism.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?/I do not know whether a man or a woman – But who is that on the other side of you?” in The Wasteland recalls Christ walking with two of his disciples to Emmaus as he walked on his mystical journey the refrain of quotations from the Lord’s Prayer is echoed in The Hollow Men while Dante’s “In His will is our peace” is reflected in Ash Wednesday as ‘Our peace in His Will”.

J.L. Styan has commented that T.S. Eliot ‘came to the drama with an unlikely mission: to discover what made Elizabethan poetic stage workable and how to recreate in verse a moral or religious drama for a modern audience” (377).

II.  As a Verse Dramatist

Eliot is one of the leading exponents of poetic drama who contributed much to its revival in the early twentieth century. The earliest attempt was Sweeney Agonistes (1932) followed by the pageant play The Rock (1934). His most successful enterprise was Murder in the Cathedral (1935) which was commissioned for Canterbury Festival of June 1935. During the first two or  three years, there were eight hundred performances of the play, a landmark in  the history of modern English drama. Eliot’s later plays were The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (154) and The Elder Statesman (1959).

Many of Eliot’s poems resemble dramatic monologues, like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917), ‘Gerontion’ (1920) and others like ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (1917) and ‘Sweeney Agonists’ fragments (1926) embody dramatic situations.

The ThreeVoices

J.L. Styan has raised certain questions regarding Eliot’s discussions of poetic drama.

1)Regarding how complex thoughts and feelings of a poet can be conveyed through characters in action, Eliot has distinguished three distinct voices in a lecture The Three Voices of Poetry (1953).

• The first one is used by the poet when talking to himself the, second one is adopted by the poet talking to himself while the third voice communicates through dramatic characters and in each character, the poet must put “some bit of himself’ which ‘may be the germ from which the life of the character starts”.
• If poetry is a better vehicle than prose to guide and intensify the feelings, what kind of poetry, what idiom would be understood by a twentieth century audience. Or “how would people today speak if they could speak in poetry?”
• What dramatic conventions are to be used to free the stage and its drama from the grip of realism (iv) What changes of form and structure should be expected in the play on whole? (377)

II..2 Free Verse or Verse Liber

Eliot discarded the conventional iambic pentameter used by the Elizabethan dramatists. Free verse or verse liber, according to the French, has  no metre or line length but depends on natural speech rhythms and the counter- point of stressed and unstressed syllables. French symbolist Poet Laforgue had already initiated the verse liber movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century and Eliot adopted it to suit new styles and new uses of language. It contributed to the use of irony, the unexpected, the banal, the conversational as well as the slang in Eliot’s verse drama. The collapse of the values of the Western Civilization, the unhappiness alienation, the cultural confusion and spiritual desolation that Eliot saw around him could be recaptured in a language that was both pessimistic and ironic.

II.  3. Influence of GreekTheatre

Nevil Coghill, in his Introduction to Murder in the Cathedral has observed that jazz-rhythm and use of chorus were the first signs of Eliot’s effort to break up the sham-Shakespearean long-jam that had immobilised poetic drama for some three hundred years. There was a clutter of unacted and unactable  plays … in the pseudo-Shakespearean mould of episode and blank verse. Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats Lamb, Byron, Tennyson and even Hardy … had tried to re-enter and animate the gigantic corpse and make it write their plays for them, but with little success. It was Eliot who first saw clearly that other models must be sought if poetry was ever to regain the stage. His choice was to fall on Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Euripides and the unknown author of Every man; but first on Aristophanes. (14).

It is to be remembered that the two fragments called Sweeney Agonistes carried the subtitle, an Aristophanic melodrama which points not only to its farcical elements (combined with gruesomeness or terror) but also to its ritual character. Eliot reintroduced the ritual element into the theatre which was present in Aristophanes and the Greek drama. The ritual element plays a part in The Rock, The Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party. Purgation and renewal are also a part of Eliot’s use of the ritual. The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party have used elements of Greek tragedy to lend universality and timelessness to the plot. The Family Reunion deals with the curse on an ancient house, which is not a Christian concept, where life is seen through the eyes of a modern Orestes, the unhappy Harry, Lord Mochensey. The effect of chorus is also created in the play where Harry’s  family of aunts and uncles turn their faces to the audience and speak their lines in unison. Much more alarming to the audience was “another element from Aeschylus’s Oresteia that of the Furies of retribution. Before they could be propitiated, however, they had somehow to be accommodated in the family drawing-room and in his lecture Poetry and Drama (1951) Eliot admitted that sometimes they looked like uninvited guests from a fancy dress ball, or else appeared to be swarming across the stage like a football team (Styan 381)”.

The Cocktail Party was a great success and showed the influence of another Greek tragedy – Alcestis of Euripides, with Heracles as the equivalent of the ‘unidentified guest’, Sir Henry Harcourt Reilly. Thus it is quite obvious that, apart from the use of chorus, there are several aspects of the Greek theatre which have influenced Eliot’s verse drama.

III.. Murder in the Cathedral as a historical verse drama

Eliot accepted the commission to write a play for the Canterbury Festival of June 1935 at the behest of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and chose the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, the most famous of all English saints as his subject matter. Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury between 1162 and 1170 when he was brutally murdered on the 29th of December in his own Cathedral church by four knights, Reginald Fitz Urse, William de Traci, Hugh  de Morville and Richard Brito, who claimed to have done it fulfill King Henry II’s wishes.

III.1 Eliot’s treatment of History in the Play

Eliot based Becket’s story on the documentary evidence of eleven eye- accounts, written down immediately after the event by the monks of Canterbury, who were the supporters of Becket. Eliot treated their evidence faithfully but selectively and hence he has left out some of the most touching ones like the elderly monk, Edward Grim who raised his arm to protect the Archbishop’s head from the first sword-thrust of Reginald. Fitz Urse and it was sliced through.

Nevil Coghill has observed

This is not a Shakespearean chronicle play that tells an intricate, proliferating story full of incidents, but a sparer drama, more in the manner of Aeschylus, about a great cause in which incident and idiosyncrasy lose their importance. Unlike Shakespeare’s plays, all of which take and give delight in the excitements of narrative, Eliot’s plays are about situations, not stories, like Everyman before them, and Waiting for Godot after. Murder in the Cathedral is about a situation and a quality of life; the situation is perpetual and the quality is rare (10).

Hence unlike Tennyson’s play about Becket, Eliot does not mention the Constitutions of Clarendon or the disputed coronation ceremony which were the chief causes of dispute between the king and the Archbishop. Since he is writing about a conflict between the material and spiritual words, the historical situation is rapidly unravalled through the exposition given by the three priests, and by the herald who announces the return of the Archbishop to the chorus when the  action opens.

III.  2. Treatment of the theme of martyrdom in the play

Bernard Shaw wrote St. Joan (1923) dealing with the martyrdom of Joan of Arc. It is interesting to note the difference in the treatment of martyrdom by Shaw and Eliot. Shaw wrote a chronological play recording the chief events in the life of Joan and the other major characters associated with her. Though  Shaw claimed in his Preface that he had allowed the medieval atmosphere blow through his play freely, many writers have found fault with Shaw’s text for being full of spiritual anachronisms. These include Joan’s belief that God spoke through her imagination and the Shavian idea that she was an early Protestant. Joan’s trial scene (Scene 6), “depicting Joan herself as a Shavian individualist” presents her as “another New woman, almost another superman, as she resists the forces of religion and society arrayed against her. It is here that Shaw implants the anachronistic ideas of modern Protestantism and nationalism that have offended the Purists but captivated his audiences (Styan 357).”

The striking difference between Shaw’s play and Eliot’s, lies in the fact that while Shaw wrote a chronological play, Eliot attempted to spiritualise history. Shaw emphasises what happens to Joan whereas Eliot gives more importance to what happens through Becket. Eliot’s play is more of a  monologue as many of the major character like Henry II are not presented on stage. Shaw attempts to rationalise the supernatural while Eliot leaves it as a mystery. Creative process remains a mystery and hence the very attainment of martyrdom cannot be dramatised. Hence the critical theory that the play is a structural failure.

The speeches of the four knights in Eliot’s play can be compared to the epilogue in Shaw’s St. Joan. In both cases, the dramatist is trying to cross the barriers imposed by time. Eliot abandons history after the martyrdom and brings forward the murderer knights to speak their apologies whereas in history they stamped out of the Cathedral Church shouting that they were the king’s men.

Nevil Coghil observes:

They speak prose skipping out of their twelfth century skins to address a twentieth-century audience in the language of the political expediency of our own times. It is like a sudden series of slaps in the face and Eliot tells us it was intended to shock the audience out of their complacency (19)

Coghill comments that there is a Shavian touch about it but once again with the exit of the knights, the twelfth century resumes its hold with the lamentation of the First priest and the glory of the second. The play closes in a Te Deum which “sweeps both centuries together in an act of ritual worship and prayer – The root of poetry to this stage…. has been brought about not by going back to the flower of Shakespearean style but to the root of dramatic imagination – religion, ritual, purgation, renewal(19)”

Eliot’s play is evidently not narrative; it is about a situation and a quality of life. Incidents and idiosyncrasy have no place. Joan is overactive whereas Becket is passive. Shaw makes Joan an agent of life-force, through whom the theory of evolution works, thereby providing a rational explanation to martyrdom. However Eliot’s Becket is just a cataclysmic agent to bring about God’s will. Hence Shaw’s treatment of history is realistic whereas Eliot treats  his subject of martyrdom in a spiritualistic manneras in a miracle play.

III. 3The Wheel symbol and others images in the play

III.3.1 The Wheel Symbol:

The wheel seems to be the chief symbol in the play; Beckett employs it in three crucial passages.  The third priest and the fourth tempter also make use of it.  The wheel idea is also present in the description of the cycle of seasons which is one of the recurrent motifs employed by the chorus of the play.The idea of true martyr is central to Murder in the Cathedral and the true martyr is one who has, in the midst of this turning world found his still centre in god and is thus truly unchanging in this ever-changing cycle of Nature and life. It is interesting to note that there is a recurring imagein each of Eliot’s plays, the building in The Rock which signifies the necessity of religion in a materialistically oriented modern world and the dominant image of death in Sweeney Agonistes, which deals with the modern life devoid of all spiritual values and equated with mere lust and sensationalism, a veritable death- in -life. A true understanding of the wheel symbol is central to Eliot’s concept of martyrdom.

They know and do not knows, what it is to act or suffer.

They know and do not know, that action is suffering

And suffering action. Neither does the agent suffer

Nor the patient act. But both are fixed

In an eternal action, and eternal patience

To which all must consent that it may be willed

And which all must suffer that they may will

That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action

And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still

Be forever still. (Act I 208-17)

An eternal patience is the key phrase, for the word patience like the word passion is derived from the Latin Pati (to suffer) but is not the same as suffering. It is not just used in the sense of suffering (enduring) but the sense of “stillness and waitingness in patience” cannot be overlooked (Coghill 18). In the  perpetual struggle between Good and Evil, God suffers, remains still and waits to which Human beings are also committed who can only Lord peace in His Will (Divine Will). God is the still centre of the wheel, one must neither act nor suffer for one’s own advantage but rather surrender his will to the will of God.

The same idea is repeated in the sermon preached by Beckett which forms the interlude of the play.

A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the desire of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself not even the glory of being a martyr. (61-70)

These lines recall the immortal lines from Eliot’s favourite poet Dante in Divine Comedy Canto III, line 85, “And in His Will is our Peace”. Hence Coghill comments that Beckett must will himself to suffer a fore-ordained martyrdom . .

. . . not for the glory of becoming a saint, but for the sake of uniting his Will with the Will of the Love that moves the stars. And so, in the play, when he stands on the steps to meet his murder, the four swords of the murderers, in their ritual slaying are the four spokes of a wheel of which Becket is the centre – they at the circumference, acting, he at the still centre, patient, suffering, witnessing, willing. (18-19)

The wheel image which has strongly paradoxical content, is metaphysical in origin. Metaphysical imagery found in poets like Donne is characterized by  ingenious with where comparisons were often chosen from diverse sources such as banking and commerce, medicine, homely matters and similar fields.

III. 3. 2. Other Images found in the play: The imagery found in Eliot’s plays  is of composite nature (1) Undoubtedly a substantial body of images is drawn from modern life as all his plays, except Murder in the Cathedral, are set in the modern world (2) But all his plays being variations upon the theme of the quest for spiritual values in a materialistic society, many of his images are drawn from more or less archetypal symbols used by mystics and religious writers. Hence Christian imagery abounds in almost all the plays, especially in The Rock, Murder in the Cathedral and The Confidential Clerk which have strong  Christian motivation. Biblical images abound in these plays. (3) Eliot wrote, whether it be poetry or drama, with the whole tradition of Metaphysical poetry. Hence images reminiscent of that school form another group.

Eliot’s imagery is sometimes drawn from homely, everyday matters, one such striking instance is the cry of the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral – “our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion” (188). Eliot’s imagery, whatever kind it is, is functional and never decorative. However Eliot never uses images adapted to characters in his plays, for many of his favourite images are often used by various characters in the several plays, just as they are used by Eliot in his own poetry.

III. 3..3, The Images used by the Tempters. Whenever Eliot chooses to adapt his imagery closely to character, the results are striking. The imagery of the speeches of the Four Tempters in Murder in the Cathedral is eminently in character, though the tempters themselves are personified abstractions.

The First Tempter represents the temptation of worldly pleasures. The pictures of “fluting in the meadows, riots in the hall, laughter and apple-blossom floating on the water / singing at night fall, whispering ‘in chambers’ in his arguments are hence most appropriate… This is true also of his homely analogues of “the easy man lives to eat the best dinners” and “or your goose may be cooked and eaten to the bone”. The Second Tempter stands for worldly  power and the most striking images used by him are those from hunting – “the old stag circled with hounds” and hawking– “your sins soars sunward, covering king’s falcons”. The Third Tempter’s pose is of “a rough, straight forward Englishman.” His words are naturally bereft of all imagery, the best that he can do is the extremely trite “We are the backbone of the nation / we, not the plotting parasites / About the King.’ The subtlest of the whole group is the Fourth tempter whose privilege is to tempt Becket with his own desires. Hence  he  alone uses the wheel symbol employed by Becket himself. The images of angling and trapping which he employs – “hooks have been baited with morsels of the past” and “you would wait for the trap to snap” – are also suggestive of  his own efforts to entice Becket into doing “the right deed for the wrong reason.”

The door and garden are Biblical symbols that symbolize spiritual freedom.  It becomes clear if one remembers Christ’s “I am the door of the sheep”, the door “opened in heaven” in Revelation and similar passages. The opposite of  the door and garden which symbolize spiritual freedom is the trap which spells enslavement to a life without meaning, hope even negation of life. The Fourth Tempter vainly tries to threaten Becket with “You should wait for the trap to snap… broken and crushed”. Similarly the desert, symbolic of temptation, solitude, persecution or godlessness, appears in Murder in the Cathedral, where the chorus immediately after the murder of Becket wanders “in the land of dry stones.”

III. 3..4 The Role of the chorus in the play 

The poor, ignorant women of Canterbury form the chorus of the play.  The opening lines of the play spoken by the chorus bear witness to their ignorance and passivety. They are protected by their ignorance and are saved from the hands of Satan who tempts his victims with knowledge: Theirs is the instinctive knowledge and not the rational one. As the play progresses, the chorus grow in moral stature and as Nevil Coghill puts it”. The chorus in The Rock teaches, the chorus in Murderin the Cathedral learn” (16). They are “forced to bear witness” (8) for they are far away from the centre of action and form the passive, patient witnesses to the action. These lines bring to mind Milton’s words, “They also serve who only stand and wait” from his sonnet “On His Blindness” which impressed Eliot deeply.

In the later speech (144-195) the chorus expresses their visionary fears regarding the advent of death into the Cathedral, these repetition of “living and partly living” suggests two levels – the earthly, physical level where they have been living below they subsistence level because of their poverty, and the spiritual level where they have been leaderless due to the absence of the archbishop for the past seven years. As the play progresses, the dramatic chorus changes its moral stature, something unique in dramatic history. Nevil Coghill has pointed out that Eliot has treated this classic device in a revolutionary naturalistic  way  and  how  they  have  developed  from  a  cowardly   cringe    at the initial stage to the genuine humility of last chorus in part II (lines 688 onwards).

In spite of this unique aspect, Eliot’s chorus does all that is expected of the Greek model: interpret the past, intensify the present and anticipate the future. Moreover the chorus represents the secular world and the common people, keeping the play human in the awesome presence of a martyr and a saint.

III. 3.5 The significance of the Interlude

The Interlude is a unique aspect of this play and it links the two parts of the play, forming a bridge between the psychic and physical dramas. In the form of the last sermon preached by Becket on Christmas night, 1170 at the Cathedral the sermon is historically accurate. It is a full scale explication of Eliot’s idea of Christian martyrdom and the still point of the turning world of the play and answers to the thematic structure.

Apart from the historical verisimilitude, structurally and thematically, the interlude fulfils the function of a miracle play.The subject is a realistic one – martyrdom. It is the interlude found in morality plays. While Everyman ends with a sermon in Murder in the Cathedral it firms the interlude.

However the greatest drawback of the Murder in the Cathedral has been summed up thus by A.L. Styan.

The basic Aristotelian requirements of plot and character did not work so well, Martyrdom focused nearly all interest on a single character, encouraging the poet to speak in the first or second voice, and limiting dramatic values. Nor could this one character limitation be minimized by the four Morality Play Tempters who weaken Thomas’s resolution with temptations of pleasure, power and pride, nor by the four knights who kill Thomas solely out of duty to their king. The Tempters lacked individuality because their temptations were contrived and without hope of success, and the knights lacked depth because what they did was forgone conclusion. In fact, Eliot’s text had to face all the problems of dramatizing moral history without the possibility of surprise or tragedy (380).

It is indeed the mastery of T.S. Eliot, the verse dramatist, that despite all these limitations, he could create a poetic drama that became a landmark in English dramatic history.

Reference

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