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    Murder in the Cathedral
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    Murder in the Cathedral
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    Murder in the Cathedral
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    Murder in the Cathedral

    By T. S. Eliot

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The verse dramatization of the medieval murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. 
     
    The Archbishop Thomas Becket speaks fatal words before he is martyred in T. S. Eliot’s best-known drama, based on the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170. Praised for its poetically masterful handling of issues of faith, politics, and the common good, T. S. Eliot’s play bolstered his reputation as the most significant poet of his time. It has been performed on stage, film, and television since 1935 and was the basis for the opera Assassinio nella Cattedrale by the Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 25, 2014
    ISBN9780547542607
    Unavailable
    Murder in the Cathedral
    Author

    T. S. Eliot

    THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.

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    Reviews for Murder in the Cathedral

    4/5

    16 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Servant of God has chance of greater sinAnd sorrow, than the man who serves a king.For those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them,Still doing right: and striving with political menMay make that cause political, not by what they doBut by what they are.The drama opens with the return of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket from exile in December 1170. He is welcomed by the people of Canterbury and three priests, then visited by four tempters. He predicts his imminent martyrdom in his Christmas sermon. A few days later, four knights find and kill Thomas in Canterbury Cathedral.After the murder, the four knights draw the audience into the event through a direct appeal. They present their justification for the murder as if addressing a jury before dismissing the audience. However, the knights don't have the last word. The priests speak, and the chorus concludes with a corporate confession and plea for mercy.I listened to an audio production (the Old Vic Company with Robert Donat) while reading the text. It was a moving experience, akin to the best of Shakespeare. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Angevin history or church history.
    • 5/5
      The greatest work of verse by the great American/English poet T.S. Eliot was not in a poem (though some readers of The Waste Land might disagree). It is surely Murder in the Cathedral. In a short play, Eliot shows his mastery of the British form of Church and State. In so doing, he sends a message that those who do not practice justice shall some day receive vengeance.

      The story of the 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Becket is well-known. He spoke out against a tyrannical King. The King of the English would not relent, so he killed Thomas in his cathedral. Thomas’ blood, however, spoke volumes about King Henry. His story later called to mind when another King Henry beheaded another Thomas (More) over the expedient English separation from Rome. This type of story is a reminder through the ages that ultimately, integrity trumps power. No one knows much of Henry II, but Thomas Becket’s story still speaks to English school-children.

      Eliot was born in St. Louis but settled in England. He worshipped English culture with his whole heart. As an adult, he converted to Anglo-Catholicism and thereafter practiced his devotion until his death. While teaching at Harvard for a year, he came into contact with the idea that theater was the new venue of poetry. Out of these currents, he put together this play, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The story is short; the tale is epic; the writing is clear; and the topic is masterful. Works like this simply make life more worthwhile.
    • 3/5
      Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

      The structure of this play is gripping. The use of the chorus was very effective, whereas the depiction of a conflicted Becket in dialogue with his temptations could’ve been explored further. The absence of Henry II makes matters more human and inchoate. The state is thus shorn of personality. The debate of ideas and sacrifice reminded me of the debate surrounding Edward Snowden. Unfortunately I began to ponder and compare the fixed points of liberty and security and my attention drifted.
    • 5/5
      Amazing poetry and performances. On the nature of ambition and opposition to authority. A perfect story for our times. I have access to six recordings of the performance (1938, 1953, 1968, 1976, 1983, 2003) and the version from 1953 with Robert Donat is the best IMO and critically acclaimed. I dipped into the others and they don't have the same gravity or are over-produced, though a wide variety of interpretive performances. The text is quite rich and the play rewards.
    • 3/5
      As poetry it's wonderful, though I'm still not quite certain of it as drama. Particularly, though I know that Eliot felt he had accomplished his task, I'm not sold on the Fourth Tempter. To be precise, I'm not certain that he ever really addressed/countered those arguments to a degree necessary to come to the conclusions that Eliot wished the viewer to come to.The notes in my edition, however, are more than a little slavish in their devotion to the author. I really could have done without the appendix that could be boiled down to a long essay explaining just how Tennyson's attempt at a Beckett play was poor art, for instance.
    • 3/5
      A very interesting and short play, it may seem like plain history at first, but after a little research you will learn about its deep connection to the world in which T.S. Eliot lived.
    • 4/5
      The Basics

      An historical play written in verse that tells of the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170.

      My Thoughts

      Talk about going outside of your comfort zone. I don't read a lot of poetry. I don't read a lot of plays. And I don't read a lot of historical fiction. That title, though. I couldn't resist that title. Also, T.S. Eliot is a famous poet, and I've read some of his more famous works, enough to make me intrigued when I see his name. In the end, what can I say? I enjoyed it.

      There are some stories that, while the plot may be vaguely intriguing and you could cite only having somewhat of an interest in what goes on, the language makes it. The style and the poetry and the language are what makes this sing. Particularly the passages for the female chorus. I'm not saying the story isn't interesting, because it is. But it's also very basic. The Archbishop is in a bad position politically, he won't do what he's told by the higher-ups, so he dies. There are no surprises here, but the way Eliot chooses to tell the story, everything from word choices to the style of the play, makes up for a lot.

      The one thing that felt like a completely bizarre choice on Eliot's part was a portion of the play when the knights step forward to tell their tale. It seemed humorous to me, and I can't honestly tell if it was supposed to be funny. That's maybe its weakest spot, but it's a nitpick when really I was reading this play to experience some great poetry, and I received that.

      Final Rating

      4/5
    • 4/5
      At only 72 pages, this is a relatively short play, shorter than most of Shakespeare's, and was easily read in one sitting. The title refers to the historical murder of Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Beckett, who most of us will remember from our school history lessons. An interesting point occurs when Thomas is temptated to accept his future martyrdom in his own self interest in future glory in heaven - doing the right thing for the wrong reason. It is not clear whether he overcomes this at the end. The way the chorus was used made this much more like a Greek tragedy than a Shakespearian one, specifically how they warn of the forthcoming doom, and lament. I suspect this was intentional, but does give this play a feeling that is unusual for an English work.The writing itself varied between quite good and average. There were some lines that had a real poetry about them and stood out, but other sections that seemed more mundane. I haven't read any of his other plays so I don't know if it is one of the better ones or not. There was far less depth here than in a typical Shakespeare play, and none of the comedy that is even found in several of the tradgedies, it was much more serious.
    • 3/5
      As usual with Eliot, I don't feel like I'm getting it all, but all of a sudden up pops an absolutely beautiful, lucid passage about time or love or death that is more than worth the price of admission. He's a fascinating figure (as is Thomas Becket, who is the subject of this play.)
    • 5/5
      Not quite Eliot's initial foray into verse drama - "Sweeney Agonistes" has that status - and perhaps his most memorable one. Technically, it was unrepeatable, or at least, nobody, including Eliot, has tried to do so (its successors at Canterbury, by Sayers, Williams, Fry, et al. were far more conventional, as were Eliot's later plays). Eliot uses a chorus taken straight out of Greek drama, and marries it to a structure based tightly on that of the Western mass (down to an actual sermon at the sermon and a martyrdom at the point of the Eucharistic Sacrifice), followed by a Brechtian breaking of the fourth wall. The chorus lets Eliot use a more heightened poetic language than he could have gotten away with in its absence.And it works. It continues to be performed, and works well in performance (one could say "the theatre", but it tends to be performed in churches). On the page, it is as effective as any drama is outside of performance.A tour de force which, while it will never be part of the world's greatest drama, is easily a major work at he second rank. Considering that the first rank is Shakespeare, Sophocles, Racine, and so forth, this is still a major achievement.
    • 5/5
      Very satisfying. Easy to hear the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber as you read this. Some very profound thoughts about life and purpose in this. I liked it a lot.
    • 2/5
      I’d heard the story of the troublesome Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, from a variety of sources. My first introduction to it was from a guide while visiting the Canterbury cathedral, where Becket was murdered. Later I read a slightly fictionalized version of the event in Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. So, before I picked up Eliot’s play version I had a good idea of how it would unfold and was already interested in the material. The Archbishop was embroiled in a disagreement with the king of England, Henry II, and was assassinated in 1170. That infamous line, “Will no one rid of me this turbulent priest?” was supposedly said by Henry II in reference to Becket. Four knights interpreted that as a command and traveled to Canterbury to kill him. Sounds pretty thrilling right? A priest standing up against a king, that king (inadvertently or not) having him killed, then the priest is canonized. That’s a lot of action, yet somehow Eliot turns it into one of the most boring plays I’ve ever read. In the play Becket is tempted to abandon his stance in a similar way to Christ’s temptation in the Bible. He gives sermons and pontificates and I completely lost interest. I read the whole play, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Maybe this is one that needs to be seen and not read.
    • 5/5
      To be honest, I only began reading this for summer reading. Being generally not fond of plays, I'm surprised I even liked Murder in the Cathedral. It's brilliant written.Generally I'm not fond of books with a heavy, depressing tone—I stopped reading Oliver Twist for this reason. But Eliot reduced the depressing tone through the play's evocative language, such as this:To-day, what is to-day? For the day is half gone.To-day, what is to-day? But another day, the dusk of the year.To-day, what is to-day? Another night, and another dawn.Put in an eloquent way, the mood was nonetheless depressing but prevented my loathing and created fondness instead.I also particularly liked the Chorus' use of "Living and partly living" to describe their difficult lives after Becket left for France—I could relate to that. I thought it a poignant way to describe their hardship.Compared to the only other play I've read—Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream—Murder in the Cathedral was much more engaging and easy to understand. It surprised me that I enjoyed myself reading a play.
    • 1/5
      I do much better when I can see a play rather than read it, and Murder in the Cathedral is one I definitely needed to see. In fact, Murder in the Cathedral was one of the harder plays for me to read, and I think it would have helped if I had at least listened to it on tape because then I could hear the different voices.As is it, Murder in the Cathedral was hard to visualize, and I spent most of my time being lost in the language rather than the plot. I finished it and immediately asked, “okay…what happened?”I guess it’s just another play I need to see rather than read.