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Murder in the Cathedral (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

Eliot's best-known and most performed play, Murder in the Cathedral dramatizes the assassination of Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170 at the hands of four knights and at the bidding of King Henry II. In this play, written for production at the Canterbury Festival, June, 1935, Eliot put into practice his long-held desire to reestablish verse drama as a viable form of theater, a wish shared by the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, whose work preceded Eliot's. Both sought to return poetry to the stage for historical and aesthetic reasons, as they...

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