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Murder in the Cathedral is fundamentally a drama of Christian theology, almost an act of worship in which the audience participates. A sermon is preached by Becket not only to the Chorus but also to the audience of the play. The four Knights, who take the audience in their confidence provide a further bond of intimacy between the two parts of the theatre. Murder in the Cathedral belongs to the special religious occasion which it commemorated. "To get the most out of it, one must approach it (the play) with a religious frame of mind." says Frazer.
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| Murder in The Cathedral |
Eliot's Views on the Role of Religion in Theatre. It is necessary that Murder in the Cathedral is viewed in the light of what T.S. Eliot himself said regarding religious drama. He asserted that a religious play, to be good, must not be purely religious. "If it is, it is simply doing something that the liturgy does better : and the religious play is not a substitute for liturgical observance and ceremonies, but something different". He considers a good religious play to be one which combines the religious with ordinary dramatic interest. Thus, even when the play used ritual, as in the procession of priests at the beginning of Part II, it employs it for a dramatic purpose. In this case it is to mark the passage of time and lead up to the entry of the Knights, in a way which will point out the significance of Thomas's observation in his sermon: "Is it an accident, do you think that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ ? By no means!"
Eliot's concern is not just with the Church, the body of believers; it is with the whole of society, in which he finds the sickness of the wasteland. He felt that the "creation of a religious drama in our time is not to be conceived as a problem entirely isolated from that of secular theatre". It was his opinion that the Christian faith did not need drama (for its evangelising' possibilities) as much as the drama needed the Christian faith. It would be wrong to develop and maintain a religious drama as something having nothing to do with the ordinary stage. "If we became strict Puritans", he said. "and abstained from attending anything but religious drama, we should be wrongly cutting ourselves off from the life of the world; if we determine merely to preserve in ourselves two attitudes, one for cathedral drama and the other for the West End, we should be dividing our own minds unjustifiably and with bad results. We need to strive towards a kind of re-integration of both kinds of drama, just as we need to strive towards a re-integration of life". Becket becomes, in Eliot's play, the type of religious believer who is ardent and passionate and powerful through a strong and regulated intellect. He unites the knowledge of worldliness with the passion of asceticism', fusing the two into one. He becomes a symbol to be recommended to "those who have the mind to conceive and the sensibility to feel, the disorder, the futility, the meaninglessness, the mystery of life and suffering, and who can only find peace through a satisfaction of the whole being".
Eliot opposed "the compartmentalization of life in general....the sharp division between our religious and our ordinary life....Merely to conduct our own life among ourselves as we think right, and to abandon the task of evangelisation would be abnegation of an essential duty". In Murder in the Cathedral the re-integration mentioned by Eliot does take place. The play constitutes a returning to the origin of English drama within the Church as an extension of the liturgy and a means of religious instruction, and fulfils both the pristine functions of the drama. It instructs us in the meaning of martyrdom and is an extension of the liturgy, in that it invites us to celebrate, the act of martyrdom as a sign of God's grace relevant to all sorts and conditions of men.
Eliot Returns to Christian Ritual in order to provide significance to the dramatic convention which he employs. Choric speech echoing an iteration of phrases in order to build up a mood and an atmosphere, recitation by different characters in a carefully ordered sequence, the set prose delivered by hero to provide a moral focus to the play - these are difficult devices to employ with conviction in modern drama, as David Daiches points out. But Eliot is successful with them because the ecclesiastical setting and the liturgical context enable him to subsumed them in an extended and symbolic version of a Christian service. In the circumstances, the chanting seems natural and appropriate and the hero's central speech takes its place without force as a sermon in the Cathedral. The colloquial elements in the Speeches of characters are skilfully manipulated to convey the emotional rhythm that runs right through the play, and to suggest the various kinds of conflict between the sacramental and the casual aspects of a Christian's life.
Christian Mysticism. Eliot's play is obviously concerned with the nature of sainthood. It is the saint whose death "shall frucity the lives of others", although he must refrain from thought of "the fruit of the action". By confining the action of play to the closing days of Becket's life, Eliot deepens the religious significance of the play. The religious theme occurs in three forms in Eliot's play according to Nicholson: "first, the need for the purgation of the will; secondly, the need for the soul of divest itself of love of created beings; thirdly, the aim to arrive at the experience of the Divine by rejection of images". It was the way of the Christian mystics - the way of arriving at experience of the godhead by the rejection of even the will to attain that experience and this is the way of Eliot's Becket, hero of Murder in the Cathedral.
A Christian Play Using Greek Dramatic Devices. The theme of martyrdom is prominent in the play. In Thomas's struggle for self-purification and in the effect of this on those around him lies the interest of the play. There is also, besides its obvious overtones of amorality, a sense of fate as in Greek drama; a feeling that each of us most fulfill his position; "he cannnot escape it, and must not exceed it."
Murder in the Cathedral is specifically a Christian play. But it used certain conventions of ancient. Greek drama. The play's superficial resemblance to Greek drama is strengthened by the presence of the Chorus participating in the action, and by the fact that the Greek too were little interested in individual character. In Eliot's play the priests are nameless, and the women of the Chorus are not individualised. We witness the gradual integration of all with the "eternal design", made possible by Thomas's sacrifice.
A play written for performance in a Cathedral, which explicitly invites the collaboration of its audience in the celebration of the martyrdom of an archbishop, assumes the inheritance of Christian ritual so easily that one is likely to overlook the actual process of the convention as R. Williams remark. The best dramatic conventions are usually those which the audience do not recognise as conventions; which they accept and assume so completely that their participation is immediate. The Chorus, for instance, is one of the most difficult conventions to establish in modern drama. Eliot uses the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral according to Greek practices, as an expository device:
Seven years and the summer is overSeven years since the Archbishop left us,He who was always kind to his people.
If Eliot had to depend, on this function it is doubtful whether he could have established any substantial degree of communication. But the function if merged in a larger method, in which the tradition still lives, the Chorus becomes a link between the ritual and the believers; Chorus is the choir, the articulate voice of the body of worshippers :
Forgive us Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,... ... ... ...We acknowledge our trespass, our weakness, our fault;' we acknowledge.
The dramatic possibilities of this function of the Chorus may have been suggested to Eliot by Greek drama, but the dramatic realization is in terms of the Christian ritual, the accepted, and familiar relationships of priests, choir, and the congregation." Moreover, it embodies one of the principal dramatic movements, from the early -
For us the poor there is no action,But only to wait and to witnessthrough the middle -In our veins, our bowels, our skull as well,to the final -....the blood of the martyrs and the agony of the saintsIs upon our heads.
It is a movement from passivity to surrender to participation. It is an element of the ritual tradition. The ritual tradition is to be seen all through the play. Part II has something of the quality of a liturgical celebration. It is not a plain representation of the historical fact, but a ritual presentation of the act of martyrdom in its timeless significance, having a relationship with the historical fact which is like that of the Holy Communion to the Last Supper. And the audience is invited to participate in spirit and through the act of watching and hearing strengthen its link with the Saints.
The ritual elements are powerfully reinforced by the use of verse rhythms based on Christian hymns as in the Dies Irae
The agents of Hell disappear, the human theyshrink and dissolveInto the dust on wind, forgotten, unmemorable,Only is hereThe white flat face of death, God's silent servant.
The formal language is acceptable because of its context and its familiar rhythms. The dialogue between Thomas and the Second Priest is based on the ritual of responses:
Second Priest : Your Lordship will find your room in order as your left them.Thomas : And will try to leave them in order as I find them.
The sermon, a familiar and natural form of direct address, gives the dramatist a convention for solioquy, which in any other terms, might have been impossible.
The action of the play has a formal beauty of design but it is not a design imposed on the audience: it is a formal movement springing naturally from the fundamental relationship within the ritual. The audience is from the beginning within the formulation of the design. The design's correspondences are as clear as those of a morality play, and similarly acceptable, for both depend upon the same originating form within the church.
Conclusion. In Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, the idea of Thomas dying a "tragic" death in the conventional sense is not contemplated. The "murder" in the Cathedral is actually an act of redemption, as John Peter points out. Purgation and renewal are at the heart of Eliot's use of ritual as Nevill Coghill says. The structure of the plot and the advancement of the action follow a pattern of religious ritual, and the play is most moving when performed in a church, according to David R. Clark. Thomas's death becomes a ritual imitation or re-enactment of the crucifixion of Christ. The fusing of contemporary poetic idiom with echoes of the language of the mediaeval morality play. Everyman, sets forth the eternal and universal moral struggle in which any man, who is obliged by circumstances to choose between life and integrity participates. If Eliot uses the conventions of Greek drama, he brings them within the conventions of Christian ritual. If he uses the concentrated-action technique of Greek dramatists, he uses it in such a way as to suggest clarity of design, the close knit, shapely structure of a cathedral, as Patricia M. Adair suggests. The inevitability of the Fate is brought in to suggest the supreme inevitability of a Christian God's Will to which man must submit in action and in suffering.