Abstract
In striking contrast to the minor playwrights dealt with in the previous chapter, who waver unconsciously on the edge of two traditions, the Romantic and the Shavian, we see in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, the forging ahead of an independent spirit. Acutely conscious of traditions, old and new, Eliot draws inspiration from these, but merges them into his own style. He breaks right away from the naturalist theatre of his time, as is evident from the stylization and formal design of the piece. Moving into a much more direct, physical form of theatre, he presents us in 1935 with a charged emotive ritual which in many ways prefigures future trends.
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Notes
Quoted in Brian Mitchell, ‘W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood: The “German Influence”’, Oxford German Studies, 1 (1966) p. 166.
See John Willet, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects (London: Eyre Methuen, 1959) pp. 220–1.
Quoted in J. Isaacs, An Assessment of Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951) p. 155.
Quoted in Joseph Warren Beach, The Making of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, [1957]) p. 148.
Stephen Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden: a Tribute (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, [1974]) p. 113.
See Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: a Biography (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981) p. 114.
Monroe K. Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden: the Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963) pp. 92–3.
See Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981) pp. 271–4.
Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood: a Critical Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1979) pp. 107–8.
See Hubert Witt (ed.), Brecht: as They Knew Him (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974) p. 226.
Quoted in Keith A. Dickson, Towards Utopia: a Study of Brecht (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) p. 63.
See T. S. Matthews, Great Tom: Notes towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974) pp. 67, 70.
In Donald Adamson (ed.), T. S. Eliot: a Memoir, (London: Garnstone Press, [1971]) p. 138.
‘Eliot and the Living Theatre’ in Graham Martin (ed.), Eliot in Perspective: a Symposium (London: Macmillan, 1970) p. 156.
‘With Becket in Murder in the Cathedral’ in Allan Tate (ed.), T. S. Eliot: the Man and his Work (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967) p. 189.
E. H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: a Study in Psychoanalysis and History (London: Faber & Faber, 1959) p. 99.
Katharine Worth. ‘A New View of Murder in the Cathedral’, The London Review, 9 (Winter 1976/77) p. 37.
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© 1988 Niloufer Harben
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Harben, N. (1988). T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral. In: Twentieth-Century English History Plays. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09007-5_4
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