Murder in the Cathedral

The subtractive test mostly fails to find slack. Remove the Tempters and Thomas’s last choice has nothing to be chosen against; remove the sermon and the play never says what a martyr is before it shows one; remove the Knights’ prose and the play ends in liturgy with no world left to accuse. The fourfold design is exact: three Tempters Thomas has foreseen, then a fourth he has not, who offers him martyrdom for its glory. What holds the axis is the choral writing of Part I and the opening of Part II, where the women’s dread is restated in catalogues of season and smell longer than the action asks, and the Priests, who are scarcely told apart and could be two.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Two things come into the open. The first is the problem of a pure will: the wish to be a saint is itself a temptation, the right act can be made wrong by the self that wants it, and the only escape is to cease to will. This holds outside Christianity. The second is sharper and more modern: the Knights turn to the audience in the prose of a committee room, argue that the murder was disinterested and served the reconciliation of Church and State, and ask for a verdict on Thomas of “Suicide while of Unsound Mind”. The audience hears its own reasonableness as the murderer’s alibi. Held below the gate because the first disclosure is partly doctrine stated by the sermon, and Thomas’s inner turn is announced rather than shown.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The play rises often, and nearly always through the Chorus. The opening, “Here let us stand, close by the cathedral. Here let us wait”, sets a dread that the women’s long lines carry to real terror before the murder, in the passages of the smell of death and the animal world; after it, “Clean the air! clean the sky!” is one of the strongest choral cries in English drama. Thomas’s “Unbar the doors! throw open the doors!” and the closing Te Deum lift the action to its end, and the sermon is elevated in a quieter key. Held at its figure because Thomas himself rarely rises, by design, the Priests’ scenes are flat, and the height, though frequent, is carried by one voice.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The structure of the play is the structure of a Passion: a return to the city, temptation in four forms, a sermon at the Nativity on the joy of martyrdom, a death by the altar at Christmastide, the community changed by the blood. The three Introits that open Part II set the murder among the feasts of the first martyr, the beloved disciple and the slaughtered children, so that the calendar itself is the frame. The archetype is load-bearing: the play’s argument, that the martyr is made by God and not by himself, needs a pattern Thomas enters rather than one he writes. It stays particular through the women: “Living and partly living”. Held at the gate because the archetype is borrowed whole from the liturgy and the history.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The departure was real and was a wager. In 1935 the English stage had no living tradition of serious verse drama, and Eliot reached past it to the morality play, the Greek chorus and the liturgy, writing for a cathedral rather than a theatre. The rhymed stress lines of the Tempters, taken from Everyman, and the choral writing were new on the modern English stage. The bravest stroke is the Knights’ turn to prose and to the audience, an anachronism that breaks the frame of the medieval play to put the twentieth century in the dock; it could have been a gimmick and is not. Held below the gate because the forms it revived were inherited, and the swerve is a return as much as a departure.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the play loses what it knows. It is cast as a liturgy, and its knowledge is that an act can be a rite rather than a choice: Thomas’s death is shaped as the women’s worship, not as a drama of suspense, so the action that would be climax in a history play is an offering. The two passages of prose are the formal argument. The sermon is prose because it is the one moment Thomas speaks to the congregation as their priest; the Knights speak prose because their reason is the reason of the secular world, which has no verse. The Fourth Tempter turns Thomas’s own words on acting and suffering back on him: form doing the work of meaning. Held at its figure because the static centre also limits what the play can know about its hero.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Ninety years of reading and performance, with returns real but bounded. The Fourth Tempter and the Knights’ apology yield on every return: the first because the question of motive cannot be closed, since the play does not say whether the final Thomas is free of the wish he renounced; the second because each audience hears its own political language in it. The Chorus repays the ear. Much of the rest is spent on a first reading: the first three Tempters are allegory to the bone, the Priests are functions, and Thomas’s interior is given as a resolution, not a mystery. Criticism has returned to the play mostly to place it in Eliot’s turn toward the theatre and toward the Four Quartets, which is evidence of its position more than of its depth.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The field is English drama and poetry of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is the reopening of a possibility thought closed: a modern poet could write serious verse drama that held an audience, and the chorus could speak again in English. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the play began the revival of English verse drama, in Eliot’s own later plays, in Christopher Fry and in Ronald Duncan, and a long tradition of drama in churches and of festival commissions; and one of its lines passed into Burnt Norton (1936). But the revival did not last past the 1950s, the theatre that followed went another way, and the play is admired more than it is followed. Its pressure is real, and local.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Ninety-one years, from 1935 to 2026. Form: the text is whole, settled by its author and continuously in print. Presence: performed without a break since 1935 in cathedrals, churches, schools and theatres, set for examination for generations, filmed by George Hoellering (1951) and made an opera by Ildebrando Pizzetti, Assassinio nella cattedrale (1958). Fabric: the surface is not fixed to its moment; the medieval matter dates nothing, and the Knights’ modern prose, topical in 1935, has stayed legible because the reasoning it parodies has not gone away. It stands at the foot of what its span usually shows rather than above, because its presence is now narrower than it was, more school and church than general stage.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Eliot’s English, with no translation between. The command of verse for the voice is high and varied. Eliot writes at least four instruments and keeps them distinct: the Chorus’s long, accumulating lines, built for many voices; the Tempters’ clipped, rhymed stress lines; Thomas’s plain accentual line; and two kinds of prose, the sermon’s measured periods and the Knights’ committee English, which is exact pastiche. The hinge couplet on the right deed and the wrong reason is made to be remembered. A text for performance, and it plays. Held below 9 because the Priests’ verse is flat, some choral catalogues slacken into inventory, and Thomas’s speeches sometimes state where they should enact: the craft is a poet’s more than a dramatist’s.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the women’s first chorus, dreading any event, and the Fourth Knight’s brisk prose asking for a verdict of suicide. They obey one law. The play is governed by the distinction between the timeless pattern and the temporal will, and every register is placed by its distance from it: the women who wish nothing to happen, the Tempters who offer the will its objects, Thomas who gives up his will, the Knights who have only will and reasons. The anachronism of the Knights is not a breach of that law but its sharpest application. Held at its figure because the range, though real, is narrow, one action in one week in one place, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Weighed at the play’s own scale, it holds more than its length suggests: the sacred; the state, in the struggle of Church and Crown; the poor and their labour and seasons, in the women’s world of harvest, weather and hearth; history and its afterlife, in the Knights’ modern apology; and one consciousness under trial. These are integrated, not listed: the women’s lives are the ground the martyrdom is for. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the form: a single action, Priests and Knights who are types, the family absent, and every order held at the scale of a rite. The figure describes the form; it is not a charge against the play’s size.

Score: 7.6 / 10