Christian Historical Drama: The Exemplariness of Murder in the Cathedral

Christian Historical Drama: The Exemplariness of Murder in the Cathedral KURT TETZELI VON ROSADOR Whatever may be deemed necessary to define it, the inclusion of historically documented characters or events, the authenticity of its subject-matter, the presentation, as Coleridge demanded, of the audience's own past,' or what have you, historical drama will embody and convey a concept of history. This seems inevitably so. Since aU drama exists in time, it will, explicitly or implicitly, make statements about the nature of time, its progression and direction, and thus about history. Yet to call all drama historical because ofthat were to use a comprehensive and therefore meaningless label. Further restrictions are needed, if "historical drama" is to he usefuUy employed as a generic term in literary criticism. Two such restrictions suggest themselves: the first, that the play's concept of history must be presented through historical matter either known or established as such; the second, that this concept is to be communicated through theatrical and rhetorical means shaped by it and therefore expressive of its very essence. Ifthese limiting conditions are adhered to, subject-matter and audience expectation, literary form and the fiction of historicity, can be seen as interdependent, and the history play emerges as a dramatic sub-genre with its very own formal and thematic properties.2 It is with the drama's concept of history and its formal , rhetorical means that this paper is concerned. Itdeals with T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral as its particular piece for demonstration of the thesis, and that for miscellaneous reasons. For one, the revival of Christian (historical) drama in the thirties, sponsored by George BeU, Dean of Canterbury and Bishop of Chichester, written by T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers and a host of minor writers, and more often than not staged by E. Martin Browne, deserves more critical attention than it has been accorded.3 For another, the Christian concept of history meets the literary critic's need almost ideally: in it, as will be seen Christian Historical Drama presently, theological doctrine and aesthetic principle cohere. The choice of Murder in the Cathedral is, of course, not due to critical neglect, although the brilliance of T.S. Eliot's fame, if the number of monographs and articles written or the frequency of his plays staged is any indication, has rapidly become tarnished over the past decade. It is because, compared to the often intense but much more limited typological or allegorical dramatization of history in the works of Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers, Murder ill the Cathedral embodies Christian concepts of history most consistently and fully. The conflict, structure, and unity, the relations and development of the dramatis personae, the imagery, on both the linguistic and the theatrical level, are all functions of the play's concept ofhistory and can be described, and must be evaluated, in terms of Christian historicity. II To understand the nature of Christian history one has, as a first prerequisite, to dismiss all historicist thinking' Historicism, which has monopolized historical thought over the past two centuries, insists on the particularity, on the singUlarity, of each historical event which consequently is to be analyzed, understood, and judged in its own right.5 Christian history, on the contrary, has its existence and life first and foremost sub specie aeterllitatis6 and must be unfolded on several interdependent levels. On one level, Christian history can be described as the providentially oriented history of salvation. It commences with the Creation and the Fall and moves in linear progression towards the Day of Judgment. Because of this eschatological dimension the meaning of salvation history is only then to be fully revealed. Yet it is also latent in any moment oftime. It is in Christ's Incarnation and Passion that this eschatological revelation of history's meaning has manifested itself in historical time. In Christ the eternal enters the temporal, and divine meaning is vertically imposed on the linear progression of time, where it exists disguisedly. This entry of the infinite into the finite, of the eternal into the temporal, creates, as Kierkegaard well knew, the paradox of time fulfilled without being eschatologically completed.7 Hence all experience...