Word: beckets
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Harwood used as his passage "After Munich", from Neville Chamberlain's September speech, while Blackwell delivered excerpts from Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body." "Patterns of Survival" by John H. Bradley was Whittier's passage and Thomas a Becket's Christmas Sermon as rendered by T. S. Eliot '10 in his "Murder in the Cathedral" was chosen by Bernard Rivin...
...Cathedral contains a number of absurdities, which I will point out seriatim. Imprimis, you call him dandiacal in appearance is so symbolically presented (in accordance with T. S. Eliot's own wishes) by the English players is to throw the emphasis on the spiritual struggle. You state that Becket is not inwardly lacerated, whereas the whole play is about his inward laceration; it is because the play is so introspective that it is hard to follow. As for your "Eliot gets in a brutal and final punch," I must say, that even if (as I presume) your dramatic editor...
Playwright Eliot's subject is the slaying of Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170.* In Anglo-Catholic Eliot's hands, Becket (Robert Speaight) stands forth as a tremendous spiritual figure who, before the play begins, has made his choice between Heaven and Earth...
Tempters only arouse his scorn. Assassins only increase his submission. Out of such an attitude comes the play's blazing religious exaltation, its lack of psychological drama. The great heroes of tragedy are inwardly lacerated; Becket is not. Hence the first half of the play is mainly declamatory. But in the second half Poet Eliot's richly cumulative rhetoric takes fire, makes antiphonal voices of his despairing chorus of women, his truculent band of murderers, his central, uplifted archbishop...
...Once before this subject succeeded, in verse form, on the stage. Tennyson's Becket, with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, had a good run in the 1890s...