The Divine Tragedy: Biblical Imagery and Quotations in T.S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (original) (raw)
Related papers
T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: Divine vs. Human?
Religions
This article discusses the relationship between the divine and the human, as it appears in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, written for and performed at the Cathedral of Canterbury in 1935. On the one hand, and most obviously, this play about the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket in the Cathedral on 29 December 1170 owes much to a medieval Catholic as well as Anglo-Catholic tradition. On the other hand, the unbridgeable distance between the divine and the human, pronounced by Thomas Becket in all his utterances in the play, resembles the contemporary theology of the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, whose theology Eliot had been aware of since 1934. Recent scholarship has discussed the influence of Barth’s theology on Eliot’s poetry, especially the Four Quartets (1936–1940). Contemporary sources, on the other hand, show Eliot’s ambivalence towards what he understood to be Barth’s theology. However, the article does not aim at a biographical understanding; it concerns Eli...
T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: A Reconsideration
T. S. Eliot composed Murder in the Cathedral, for the Canterbury celebration and recounts the story of the murder of clergyman, Thomas Beckett (1118-70) by Henry II's associates. It is mostly an expanded expressive thought of the correct home of worldly and profound power, of the commitments of religious adherents to the summons of the State, and of the likelihood that devotion can be egotistical unto sin. It is this sort of interaction and the encounter amongst Church and State which educated society at its most advantageous. It was men like Beckett and the Knights, offering to die in releasing their individual obligations, who made the colossal Western establishments. Insofar as there were men similar to Beckett for the State to figure with, to remain as good illustrations and human reprimands to the force of the State, there existed a genuine balance to the most noticeably bad abundances of that power. In fact, such was the heaviness of Christian aversion against this murder Henry needed to scourge himself openly to make amends for it. This article endeavours to look at T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral particularly as far as the traditional picture of the turning wheel and still point. Keywords: Modern Verse Play, T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, the Turning Wheel, the Still Point.
Epiphany: Vol. 6, No. 2, 2013
The aim of the present study is to re-establish the status of Archbishop Becket as a standard tragic hero of a religious play written by T. S. Eliot. Various critics have denounced the characterization of Archbishop Becket as a proper tragic hero, claiming that the entire process of the plot is devoid of "dramatic action", which is considered the backbone of any drama. In this paper the author has tried to illuminate on a renewed definition of "dramatic action" and consequently prove that the performance and actions of Archbishop Becket are, in fact, a process of mental action which nevertheless arrive the character to the definitive destination of all other dramatic heroes, i.e. a tragic death.
Church Radio: The Sermon and the CBS Broadcast of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
Journal of Modern Literature , 2019
When T. S. Eliot adapted Murder in the Cathedral for a radio broadcast by CBS’s Columbia Workshop Series in 1937 he cut out Thomas Becket’s prose sermon. In so doing, Eliot was inexplicably doing away with the heart of the play, in what was a reluctant incursion into radio drama. By the time of writing Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot had paid precise critical attention to the Anglican sermon as a popular prose genre capable of poetic heights; for Eliot the prose sermon at its best is “applied poetry,” which he may have aimed to emulate as he trained himself as a radio broadcaster for the BBC. If Eliot had misgivings about the aural blindness of the radio, as he had for the blind Puritan poet John Milton’s auditory imagination, the sermon came to his aid. It illustrated the poetic power of “the sound of the sense of the word” in dealing with visual impairment. Thus, the sermon anticipates acousmatic radiophonic experience (of disembodied voices), as it had originally capitalized on the reverberating architectural acoustics of churches and cathedrals. However, that Eliot’s faith in the radiophonic powers of the sermon faltered in the CBS production of Murder in the Cathedral goes to show that, tragically for his dramatic poetry, Eliot could not trust radio prose to do the poetic job he assigned to verse on the stage. If Murder in the Cathedral dramatizes the poetic allegiances of prose and verse, the absence of the prose sermon in the CBS adaptation of the play reverses the poetic victory of Becket’s martyrdom in the stage play, leaving the chorus’ lyricism at the mercy of the knights’ vernacular. Eliot found refugee, henceforth, in a verse drama for the stage which he could not be sure had any poetry in it.
T.S.Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.
This paper aims at exploring the mystery elements in T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral that have a significant meaning in context which can be either religious or serious. By suggesting a parallel between the parents of crime and detection on the one hand, and sin and expiation on the other, Eliot uses the same symbolic method that Edmund Wilson admires in Dickens. The two patterns suggest two analogous levels of meaning meant for two different levels of perception. In this way Eliot imparts a serious significance to ordinary elements of a detective thriller and also manages to say the serious things through the most popular form.
Violence and the Sacred: MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
English Review, 1995
Is it possible that, with Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Eliot achieves the impossible: a perfectly coherent religious play for the twentieth century? Laurence Coupe expresses doubts about the coherence, but still finds the play compelling.
The Employment of History in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral
Res Militiries
One of the most trustworthy historical sources is our written history, which has been documenting the many social, religious, and political events that have occurred throughout the ages. This analysis took a look at two different aspects of Eliot's work: his choice of subject matter and the use of historical context in Murder in the Cathedral. The first side demonstrated T.S. Eliot's evolution from poet to playwright, most notably with the completion of his lengthy religious-themed drama. In 1929, Georg Bell, the Bishop of Chickester and the person responsible for establishing the Christian Drama Society, commissioned this performance. This research focused on Thomas a Becket, the Cathedral's most prominent representative during his seven years in exile in France. This research demonstrated how the spiritual downfall of modern man is attributable to a confluence of factors, including the Second World War, excessive industrialism, Darwinism, and Marxism.
Intent and Action in T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023
Based on T.S. Eliot's verse drama Murder in the Cathedral, this work aims at demonstrating whether intent means action. In fact, the answer to the question, "did king Henry II really want Thomas Becket dead?" has been the subject of diverse interpretations. Some advance that Becket was his own cause of death regarding his spiritual pride or desire of martyrdom for false reasons. Others support that the king's four knights were to blame no direct and clear order was given to them by the sovereign to slay the man of God, to mention only these ones. But, in the light of the different interpretations of the king Henry's exclamation, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent prelate?", we strongly believe that the sovereign not only intended to have the Canterbury archbishop murdered, but paved the way for the occurrence of that awful assassination of Becket as the result of their ongoing conflicts about the Constitutions of Clarendon (16 articles issues in January 1164 by king Henry II defining Church-State relations in England.) and the coronation of prince Henry as the successor to the English throne. To do this, recourse to Biographical criticism is needed, especially in the common interest it shares with New Historicism in the fact that all literary works are situated in specific historical and biographical contexts from which they are generated.
Nepal Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 2021
Mythology began as a way to answer questions about life, explain tradition, build culture and enlighten people. It tries to clarify the role of gods in human life. Mythology has multidisciplinary role as it amuses, connects history and conveys man’s relationship to god and the universe. In literature, heroes are vital and the most convincing characters as they are the icons who leave a valuable lesson to the humanity. It was Homer who first established the hero and journey archetypes approximately 800 B.C. and different authors follow the trend of using them in their work of art. Heroes set an example for entire humanity and teach the readers that there are more important things in life than personal benefits as Northrop Frye mentions in his “Myth and Metaphor”, “hero goes out to accomplish something” (213). Hero simply does not go out for adventurous journey but is on a quest, to explore the meaning of human situation and the universal values of good and evil. The main purpose of h...
American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research (AJHSSR), 2020
This study is an investigative method on Thomas Stearns Eliot's multipart theatrical development and progress in the use of a very ancient dramatic technique. It is the implementation of the chorus in his dramas. The paper is an attempt to shed light on the way Eliot employs the technique of the chorus into his plays. The study tries to track the procedure of Eliot in applying the chorus in his plays, tracing the development he reached with particular reference to The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral as Case in Point and as an imitation of the ancient Greek style and device. It equally, sheds light on the traditional Greek dramas from which Eliot hunted his themes. The study-analytically and critically-starts with an introduction on Eliot and his theory on the chorus. Then the task moves ahead to deal with the usage of the chorus in The Rock. After that, the work shifts to the second point that investigates the play Murder in the Cathedral and to be followed by the conclusion.