Eng426 20th century english literature

UNIT 4: T.S Eliot’s Murder in The Cathedral

Content

1.0 Introduction
2.0 Objectives

0. 
   Main Content
   
1. 
   T.S. Eliot
   
2. 
   Murder in the Cathedral
   
3. 
   Themes in Murder in the Cathedral
   
4. 
   Characterisation in Murder in the Cathedral
   

4.0 Conclusion
5.0 Summary
6.0 Tutor-marked Assignment
7.0 References/ Further Reading

1.0 INTRODUCTION

T. S Eliot is not only a renowned poet, but also a well-known playwright of the 20th Century. He explores how the political ambitions of man in the modern world could interfere with their spirituality in his play Murder in The Cathedral. In this Unit the life of T.S Eliot will be discussed briefly in addition to an analysis of some of the major themes in the play.

0. OBJECTIVES

At the end of this unit you should be able to:

• 
  Discuss T.S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral as a twentieth century English play
  
• 
  Discuss the themes and techniques in the play
  

0. MAIN CONTENT

0. 
   T. S Eliot
   

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri to Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Stearns in 1888. He was the youngest of seven children. He attended Milton Academy and Harvard University. He worked as a banker for a while before he joined a publishing firm. He married Vivienne Haigh – Wood in 1915 and after she died, he married Valerie Fletcher in 1957. He was a poet, playwright, critic and editor. His works include The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Murder in the Cathedral among others. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He was a chronic smoker and had health problems. He died in 1965.
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s life was full of contradictions. Although he was an American from St Louis, he moved to England and took British citizenship. Although his life-long dream was to be a poet, Thomas Stearns Eliot went to Harvard to study philosophy. Although his poetry is full of Eastern philosophy, T. S. Eliot converted to Anglicanism. Even though he was one of the great intellectuals in the world, Eliot read detective fiction and wrote limericks about cats in his spare time. He revolutionalised poetry in his time, but now post-structuralist critics see him as a crypto-fascist. These contradictions marked his writing and reflected in his works.

His love for literature grew from his early days. His health condition prevented him from participating in sporting activities in his growing up days. He instead started developing a love for literature finding particularly interesting the tales depicting savages, the Wild West, or Mark Twain’s thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer. Apart from his health condition, his love for literature was also fuelled by his birth environment in St Louis. He loved his neighbourhood and credited it with the inspiration for his love for literature. He was particularly inspired by the big river in St Louis. He attended Smith Academy where he studied Latin, Ancient Greek, French and German.

He started writing at age fourteen and although his earliest writings were poetry, he would later start writing plays after he published his renowned poem, The Waste Land. Although he published bits and pieces of his trial at play writing but his first major drama piece was Murder in the Cathedral (1935) written about the death of Thomas Beckett. He also wrote The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953), The Elder Statesmen (1958) all as commercial plays.

T.S. Eliot’s plays stood out for their incursion of both the drama and poetry genres. The conversations between the characters are often in poetic form. His works made use of the tool of contradiction effectively. This tool of contradiction can be seen in his casts doing a thing and claiming to be doing the very opposite. This tool, according to several scholars, is very evident in his Murder in the Cathedral where Thomas Beckett refused the advice of the fourth Tempter to release himself to be killed in order to attain the status of a martyr but ended up doing the very same thing. This sets him apart in the literary world and peaked after he published The Four Quartets. His works were central to the canonisation of the English literature.

0.