Murder in the Cathedral

Murder in the Cathedral by TS Eliot, 88 pages

Murder in the Cathedral is TS Eliot's dramatic retelling of the return of St Thomas Becket to Canterbury and his subsequent murder at the behest of King Henry II.  In examining its protagonist and his struggles with enemies both physical and spiritual, Eliot questions the relationship between Church and state, but also and more importantly, between God and 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."

Murder in the Cathedral is perhaps the best example of a modern play in the classical style, which is to say a play which uses some of the elements and techniques of classical drama without attempting to be a classical drama.  This only heightens the effect when the knights break the fourth wall to appeal to, and implicate, the audience.  This is, in turn, no postmodern gimmick, but the consummation of the play as liturgical drama, existing in a no-time which is neither present nor past.

     We do not know very much of the future

     Except that from generation to generation

     The same things happen again and again.

Eliot powerfully makes the audience (or reader) and St Thomas into contemporaries - or reveals that we already were.  His struggles are our struggles, his temptations our temptations, and his fate our fate, even if we are sometimes lulled by superficialities and distracted by the illusion of the merely visible.

     You shall forget these things, toiling in the household,

     You shall remember them, droning by the fire,

     When age and forgetfulness sweeten memory

     Only like a dream that has often been told

     And often been changed in the telling.  They will seem unreal.

     Human kind cannot bear very much reality.