Story
Murder in the Cathedral was written for the Canterbury Festival of 1935, and is one of the great plays of the 20th century.
It concerns the struggle between Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and King Henry II.
Although Becket’s conduct had won him few friends, his murder put Henry in the wrong. Just over two years later Becket was canonised, and his shrine in Canterbury became a popular place of pilgrimage, as witness Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written two centuries later.
Murder in the Cathedral focuses on the character of Thomas, torn by different desires and allegiances. Eliot portrays him as a proud, tormented man, eager for recognition but still more eager for the honour of his church and his God. In his dilemmas, ambitions and fears, Thomas stands for us all: a fitting if ambiguous figure for the start of the new millennium.
The play is written in elegant, vivid verse. The action is flanked and illuminated by the chorus of the women of Canterbury, whose pithy comments, sometimes tart, sometimes anguished, serve to earth the calculated blandishments of the tempters and the truculence of the knights.
This often studied and often criticized, but not too often performed play by the Nobel Prize winning poet T.S. Eliot is focused around the chronicled last days of St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1170 A.D. Thomas Becket returned to his Cathedral in England for what was to be the last time. King Henry II was none too pleased with Becket’s priestly attitude towards the throne and his steadfast decision not to join the office of Chancellorship with that of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the highest position in the Catholic Church in England at the time. King Henry had intended to join the two positions into one in order to create a “perfect” unity of church and state power. Four Knights believing that they were following King Henry’s wishes murdered Becket in his cathedral on December 29th.
Eliot’s story of the final days is told from various points of view, almost like hearing a court case with various witnesses: the women of Canterbury, the priests of Canterbury Cathedral, the four knights that murdered Becket, and Thomas Becket himself. Eliot’s frequently non-traditional style of storytelling is a compelling attribute of the text. According to the playwright, it is not a question of “what is going to happen?” The end of the play is foreseen, and it is considered destiny, inevitable, fate, something that must happen in order for the world to be cleansed of evil and wrong (much like the story of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ). Instead, Eliot presents us with those who are most affected by the man Thomas Becket, those who ask, “how can we allow this to happen and go on with our lives?” Once Becket has consented to his fate, the story of the play focuses on everyone else’s journey to acceptance of that fate, a journey that many of us have taken before.