murder in cathedral as a verse drama - write an essay on this tropic
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MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL - POETIC DRAMA
English poetic drama in the twentieth century arose as a reaction to the deteriorating naturalistic prose plays of Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy. Its photographic realism failed toconvey the tension and complexity of contemporary life. Stephen Phillips perhaps initiated the revival of poetic drama with Herod (1901), with great Irish writers like Yeats, Synge and O'Casey later reinforcing the movement. T.S. Eliot took to writing plays late while already enjoying colossal poetic fame. Also a mature critic, he was well acquainted with the nature of poetic drama, its failure in the nineteenth century, and the problems, technical or otherwise, that a verse dramatist might face in his time. Throughhis criticisms, he frequently advocated for the poetic drama and crossed themis conceptions about it. In Matthew Arnold's words, he created "a current of fresh ideas"to help it flourish."The craving for poetic drama is permanent in human nature", Eliot once remarked. Heknew that it was still possible in the twentieth century, only "it cannot be the work of onegeneration working together, but has to evolve by the small contributions of a number of people in succession, each contributing a little." He placed a high ideal of poetic plays before his age, beginning with Murder in the Cathedral, for which he did a lot of experimentation.First, he asserted, "no play should be written in verse for which prose is dramaticallyadequate." Clearly, the poetic drama needed to symbolize the emotional realities, incontrary to the socioeconomic issues that constituted the naturalistic plays. In Murder inthe Cathedral, he chose to retell the inner conflict of Becket to win over temptations and be a martyr by losing "his will in the will of God". The Family Reunion, on the other hand, deals with the guilt complex of the protagonist, while The Cocktail Party examines personal inadequacies of married life in the modern context. These plays demonstratereligion as the ultimate meaning of human existence, leading people "to think in Christiancategories." As David Jones puts it, Eliot was thus "contributing to the creation of thekind of wholeness of outlook without which the poetic drama cannot be accepted as thenormal mode of drama."Poetic drama still needed a suitable verse form, as the Elizabethan blank verse becamecliché in excessive use. Also a poetic drama written on the same theme, Tennyson'sBecket tried to be Shakespearean and met an even worse reception than its predecessors.Murder in the Cathedral marks the maturing stage of Eliot's experimentation with verseforms, culminating in The Family Reunion. Nevertheless, the author was not much pleased with his structural achievement in the first play: "it succeeded in avoiding whathad to be avoided, but it arrived at no positive novelty." The language of Murder in theCathedral combines the metre of Morality Plays like Everyman with Laforgue's 'VersLibre'; it is almost like a mantra, incantatory and biblical; harmonised perfectly with it's Christian theme.
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