Murder in the Cathedral: The Plot of Diction

Murder in the Cathedral: The Plot of Diction LINDA WYMAN • IT IS PERHAPS not so much that we argue over the signification ofpoetic· drama as that we use the term rather indiscriminately. Ronald Peacock distinguishes "at least three major current meanings of 'poetic'" in regard to drama: "a text in verse," "the romantically poetic, and this refers rather to certain themes and attitudes irrespective of verse or prose forms," and "lyrical and musical style, primarily in verse, but also in prose."1 Denis Donoghue notes, moreover, that in poetic drama, verse drama, dramatic verse, and dramatic poetry "we have a generous supply of terms, yet we confuse our speech by blurring their outlines."2 Certainly it is not hard to agree with Robert B. Heilman that "a play written in poetic form is simply not the same kind of literary work as a play written in prose,"3 but it is less easy to find agreement on what "a play written in poetic form" is. T.S. Eliot points out that "a verse play is not a play done into verse, but a different kind of play."4 Having read Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral5 in an effort to discover what "kind of play" it is, I would describe it as a play in which the language is the chief imitator of the action , or (in R.S. Crane's phrase) the "distinctive synthesizing principle." In making this statement, I have in mind a comment from Crane on the Aristotelian terms plot, action, character, and thought: "The plot of any novel' or drama is the particular temporal synthesis effected by the writer of the elements of action, character, and thought that constitute the matter of his invention .... Plots will differ in structure according as one or another of the three causal ingredients is employed as the synthesizing principle. There are, thus, plots of action, plots of character, and plots of 135 136 LINDA WYMAN thought."6 I am thinking too, and most especially, of Aristotle's remark on diction, "the expression of thought through language." A study of the language of Murder in the Cathedral leads me to offer the following proposition : that, in addition to plots of action, character, and thought, as Crane describes them, there are plots of diction, in which, while we are shown a change in the situation of the protagonist (action), and a change in his moral character (character), and a change in his thought and feelings (thought), we are shown, in the total design of the language, a meaning more comprehensive than that encompassed by the protagonist alone, so that our final attention is directed to a complex of meanings, of which all that we have learned about the protagonist is a part. Murder in the Cathedral is a dramatization of an idea about martyrdom . The play pivots structurally and thematically on the Interlude, the Christmas sermon in which Thomas Becket says of the nature of Christian martyrdom, "A martyr, a saint, is always made by the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways." If one thinks of a "dramatic" statement as being one that "is continuously agile in miming the speaker's 'movements of the psyche,'''7 it is proper to describe these lines as the most "dramatic" in the play. This is to say that everything that has happened in Part One leads up to them, and everything that is to happen in Part Two follows from them. Thomas's coming to speak the words of the Christmas sermon is fully enacted by the language of the play. He arrives in England glorying in that he has overcome the world and failing to realize that he must allow himself to be overcome by it, for the glory of God. Thus, when he tells the Women of Canterbury that both the actor and the sufferer are "fixed" In an eternal action, an eternal patience To which all must consent that it may be willed And which all must suffer that they may will it, That the pattern may subsist, it is he, even more than the Women...