Voices in the Cathedral: The Chorus in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral

Voices in the Cathedral: The Chorus in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral WILLIAM J . McGILL In staging T.S. Eliot's poetic drama Murder in the Cathedral, one of the principal technical and artistic-interpretive problems involves the presentation of the choral speeches. Textually they appear as odes with no specific instructions to indicate differentiation of voices. But the first staging ofthe play set the precedent for assigning parts within the choral odes to individual voices or varying ensembles. r The decision is in part a musical one, involving an assessment of the voices available and an orchestration of those voices to produce a pattern of sound that enhances the aural effect of the language. Obviously, however, the arrangement of voices must also relate to the thematic development of the odes as well. We cannot separate sound and meaning. Thus, while the individual director has some freedom in designating parts of the choral speeches, the poetry itself places strictures on that freedom. What I seek to do here is to provide a reading of the choral odes which identifies the principal thematic and dramatic voices in them. The choral ode which opens the play serves as prelude not only to the drama which follows, but also to the varying functions of the chorus and to the different voices which articulate aspects of those functions. The initial stanza (II. 1- 8) is a full-voiced statement of the entire chorus speaking as "the poor women of Canterbury" and outlining their roles as harbingers of some danger which they cannot comprehend and which they can neither impede nor hasten, and as reluctant witnesses to whatever consequences that danger may bring. "Some presage of an act / Which our eyes are compelled to witness, has forced our feet / Towards the cathedral. We are forced to bear witness.'" The second stanza (II . 9-17) takes up the theme of helpless waiting in a somber, yet strong, mellifluous voice (hereafter the first voice). The decline of "golden October" into winter, but not yet the wondrous winter of fresh snow and crystalline frost, rather the dead season of stubbled, muddy fields, sets the image of time suspended while" ... The New Year waits, destiny waits for the coming." In the chill of that mordant time the poor laborer from the fields seeks The Chorus: Murder in the Cathedral 295 spring?" [1. 10]). Hopefulness rapidly gives way to despair as, in response to each question, the resonant first voice consistently replies in gloomy tones, invoking the sense of destiny. This exchange concludes with a long rhetorical question that reaches the level of pain that tormented the last choral speech of the first part. This dialogue then is a reprise of the chorus's developing consciousness. Having set the tone for part two, the chorus withdraws into the role of silent witness to the first encounter between Thomas and the four knights. When the knights depart with the threat to return armed, the dark and despairing third voice takes up the burden of the chorus in a long and gruesome ode. The shift from psychic to physical portents which characterized that voice earlier culminates here in orgiastic horror. The "savour of putrid flesh ... ", "Smooth creatures still living ... ", "Corruption in the dish ... " are no longer signs beheld but immediate experiences, horrors not merely seen but ingested. The "deathbringers " are here. Thomas's refusal to heed the cathedral priests' harried pleas to escape brings death itself into full view: " ... The white flat face of Death, God's silent servant, I And behind the face ofdeath the Judgement I And behind the Judgement the Void, more horrid than active shapes of hell; I Emptiness, absence, separation from God .. . "(11. 12- IS). And so death comes to Thomas. As the knights murder him, the full chorus screams in agony, "Clear the air! Clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them!" In frenzied succession the three distinct voices declare the maturation of their motifs. The first voice declares the desecration of England, of life itself, in blood: "Can I look again at the day and its common things, and see them all smeared with blood, through a curtain of...