The Becket Plays: Eliot, Fry, and Anouilh

THE BECKET PLAYS: ELIOT, FRY, AND ANOUILH WITHIN THE LAST THREE DECADES' the martyrdom of Thomas Becket has furnished dramatic material for notable plays of T. S. Eliott Christopher Fry, and Jean Anouilh.1 Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and all of Fry's work including Curtmantle (19,61) stem directly from Eliot's determination to have a poetic drama. Although Anouilh's play Becket2 or the Honor of God (1961) owes little or nothing to Eliot or a theory of poetic drama, all three writers have dissociated themselves from modern realism. As Francis Fergusson has said in another context, they use the stage, the characters, and the story to demonstrate an idea which they take to be the undiscussible truth.:! Eliot takes dramatic root in classical Greek and medieval morality plays, the Elizabethans and metaphysicals. Fry is distinctly Shavian, and Anouilh has singled out a performance of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author for its seminal impact on his work. Just as significant is the fact that although both Murder and Curtmantle are the culminations of a long and publicly debated process of theory and experimentation, they are apparently both dead-ends. Eliot never again used either a martyrdom or such a dazzling array of verse so prominently. Fry's play-which appeared after a "crisis of confidence" lasting nine years-may have ended his playwriting career. Anouilh's Becket~ on the other hand, is still another illustration of human alienation from a sterile universe but one presenting a more mature, positive hero than had his earlier plays. It could be said that Eliot's construction is focused and ritualistic,. Fry's is panoramic and historical, and Anouilh's is musical and choreographic. This convenient scheme, which is useful if not applied too arbitrarily, would place Murder in a "theater of ideas," Curtmantle in a "theater of characters," and Becket in a "theater of situations." However, Eliot and Fry are both Christian. In agreeing to accept a being prior to existence, they seem less existentialist than Anouilh, Sartre, and their French contemporaries. Like Becket, Anouilh's protagonists refuse to accept any standards other than 1 Texts cited in this study include Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral," The Complete Poems and Plays: I909-I950 (New York, 19'58), 173-221, Fry's Curtmantle (New York, 1961), and Anouilh's Becket, trans. Lucienne Hill (New York, 1964). 2 "Three Allegorists: Brecht, Wilder and Eliot," The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (Garden City, 1957), p. 41. 268 1965 THE BECKET PLAYS 269 those they adopt for themselves. "I was a man without honor," Anouilh's Becket tells Henry. "And suddenly I found it . . . the honor of God. A frail, incomprehensible honor." (114) But when Becket says in Curtmantle, "What a man is precedes experience" (40), he speaks for Fry who has attacked Sartre's existentialism in a recent letter: "In the main I find that kind as full of holes as a cullinder."3 Even those of Fry's characters who have no insight into mystery are true children of life, differing from his heroes only in their lack of perception, O. Mandel points out.4 Not nature but human nature is chaotic, splitting the reason away from the emotions. As Dynamene says in A Phoenix Too Frequent, "When the thoughts are alert for life, the instincts rage for destruction."5 Man is responsible for accepting life, not for imposing his moral standards on it. On the other hand Fry rejects Eliot's contention that human nature shares in the evil which befell all nature after the Fall, an idea stressed in Murder by the chorus: We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to supernatural vermin It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled, But the world that is wholly foul. (214) Fry sees evil as a consequence of man's consciousness that he must die and love for life the supreme good. "Dear Christ," Henry muses, "the day that any man would dread / Is when life goes separate from the man." (73) Thus he necessarily emphasizes vices and shortcomings rather than active evil...