Introduction

Abstract

It is one of the better paradoxes of literary history that the British, popularly labelled a phlegmatic and inhibited people, should have produced one of the world’s most dynamic and impressive dramatic literatures. It is one further irony of this achievement that a somewhat retiring and reticent American of English affiliations should have carried out some of the more durable experiments seen on the stage of his adopted country between 1930 and 1950. By training and temperament T. S. Eliot was one of the unlikeliest playwrights ever born, and his sustained interest in drama and the making of plays cannot be attributed to a need to mythologise a flamboyant personality as in the case of Oscar Wilde, to Bernard Shaw’s skill at verbalising social and moral dialectics, or to an innately theatrical method of conveying ironic perceptions as with J. M. Synge. Eliot appears to have come to the theatre by a predominantly cerebral route, working out the problems of drama coolly and rationally, an approach which has always laid his plays open to the charge that they are coldly conceived and frigidly executed. Few readers or playgoers find Eliot’s characters rich in human interest; the power of his presentations only rarely inspires that frisson achieved when dialogue and stage picture fuse to encapsulate a psychological truth apprehended not merely intellectually but through the senses.