Word: beckets
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Probably no man of the 12th century has had more meaning for intellectuals of the 20th than Thomas Becket. Hum bly born in London's Cheapside, Becket rose high in the world to become Chancellor of England under his fast friend and boon companion, King Henry II. Becket served his king by curbing the power of the lawless barons, and Henry then had him appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in order to curb the power of the clergy. Instead, Becket switched allegiance from King to God. His relevance for moderns is in his martyrdom and its unanswered questions: Where does...
Saxon Rebel. Poets from Tennyson to T. S. Eliot have struggled with the problem of Becket. In Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot maintained that "Christian martyrdom is no accident" but an act prearranged either by God or the doomed man. France's Jean Anouilh built his play Becket more on the love-hate relationship of the king and archbishop, but also claimed that Becket was a Saxon rebel against England's Norman overlords. To Poet Christopher Fry, in Curtmantle, King Henry was the tragic hero and focus of the play; Becket vanishes from sight after his murder...
Undaunted by the list of her great predecessors, Author Shelley Mydans, wife of Photographer Carl Mydans, again tells the story in this new book, subtitled "a novel of the life, passion and miracles of Becket." It is still a rousing tale, filled with pomp and circumstance, tumultuous with the hacking blades of knights in battle, and silken with conspiracies that range from London to Rome...
...studio and producer in Hollywood. If they catch him, it will cost them a minimum of $5,000 a week, for Anhalt is one of the highest-paid scriptwriters in the business (1965 estimated income: $225,000) and, as the burst of applause that greeted his Oscar award for Becket last week proved, in the judgment of his fellow craftsmen one of the best...
...even think of improving lean Anouilh's Becket, whose Broadway production starred Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, strikes theatrical circles as outrageous hubris, but it failed to faze Anhalt. "The main problem was to stop it from being a play," he explains, "to stop it from being theatrical, and to make it real. Becket on the stage was a series of stylized tapestries. Anouilh had to refer to things that happened offstage, the excommunication scene, or the scene in which Becket is accused by the King's prosecutor, for instance. I had to make the two men into...