SOURCE: Roy, Emil. “The Becket Plays: Eliot, Fry, and Anouilh.” Modern Drama 8, no. 3 (December 1965): 268-76.

[In the following essay, Roy underscores the differences between T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Christopher Fry's Curtmantle, and Anouilh's Becket.]

Within the last three decades the martyrdom of Thomas Becket has furnished dramatic material for notable plays of T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Jean Anouilh.¹Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and all of Fry's work including Curtmantle (1961) stem directly from Eliot's determination to have a poetic drama. Although Anouilh's play Becket, or the Honor of God (1961) owes little or nothing to Eliot or a theory of poetic drama, all three writers have dissociated themselves from modern realism. As Francis Fergusson has said in another context, they use the stage, the characters, and the story to demonstrate an idea which they take to be the undiscussible truth.² Eliot takes dramatic root in classical Greek and medieval morality plays, the Elizabethans and metaphysicals. Fry is distinctly Shavian, and Anouilh has singled out a performance of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author for its seminal impact on his work. Just as significant is the fact that although both Murder and Curtmantle are the culminations of a long and publicly debated process of theory and experimentation, they are apparently both dead-ends. Eliot never again used either a martyrdom or such a dazzling array of verse so prominently. Fry's play—which appeared after a “crisis of confidence” lasting nine years—may have ended his playwriting career. Anouilh's Becket, on the other hand, is still another illustration of human alienation from a sterile universe but one presenting a more mature, positive hero than had his earlier plays.

It could be said that Eliot's construction is focused and ritualistic, Fry's is panoramic and historical, and Anouilh's is musical and choreographic. This convenient scheme, which is useful if not applied too arbitrarily, would place Murder in a “theater of ideas,” Curtmantle in a “theater of characters,” and Becket in a “theater of situations.” However, Eliot and Fry are both Christian. In agreeing to accept a being prior to existence, they seem less existentialist than Anouilh, Sartre, and their French contemporaries. Like Becket, Anouilh's protagonists refuse to accept any standards other than those they adopt for themselves. “I was a man without honor,” Anouilh's Becket tells Henry. “And suddenly I found it … the honor of God. A frail, incomprehensible honor.” (114) But when Becket says in Curtmantle, “What a man is precedes experience” (40), he speaks for Fry who has attacked Sartre's existentialism in a recent letter: “In the main I find that kind as full of holes as a cullinder.”³ Even those of Fry's characters who have no insight into mystery are true children of life, differing from his heroes only in their lack of perception, O. Mandel points out.⁴ Not nature but human nature is chaotic, splitting the reason away from the emotions. As Dynamene says in A Phoenix Too Frequent, “When the thoughts are alert for life, the instincts rage for destruction.”⁵ Man is responsible for accepting life, not for imposing his moral standards on it.

On the other hand Fry rejects Eliot's contention that human nature shares in the evil which befell all nature after the Fall, an idea stressed in Murder by the chorus:

We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to
          supernatural vermin
It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that
          is defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.

(214)

Fry sees evil as a consequence of man's consciousness that he must die and love for life the supreme good. “Dear Christ,” Henry muses, “the day that any man would dread / Is when life goes separate from the man.” (73) Thus he necessarily emphasizes vices and shortcomings rather than active evil in his protagonists. Eliot has made his position clear in his 1930 essay on Baudelaire. Striking out at the “Life-Forcers” for their failure to show much concern for the letter, he insists that the spirit is not enough. “A Christian martyrdom is no accident. … A martyr, a saint, is always made by the design of God” (199), Thomas preaches. Only a formal religion can provide a necessary moral and ethical order (although Eliot's orthodoxy mellowed later).

Their thematic differences also extend into character. In Fry's Henry the flaw is not a lack of heroism but too much of it, the king “not content to be one man, and not the human race.” (13) A childish fascination with power obsesses Anouilh's Henry, balanced by the obsession with honor which dominates Becket. Although different from Eliot's, as J. Dierickx says, Anouilh's theater elevates characters “whose isolation is the result of some mysterious election, some disturbing vocation—for purity if not for sainthood.”⁶ The French existentialists usually set their heroes far above the inferior spiritual position of the placid, self-satisfied bourgeois. This pattern resembles the opposition of Understanding Hero-Blind Chorus which Dierickx sees as a familiar theme in Eliot's work. But in Eliot an implacable, nearly immobile fixation on the eternal is embodied in his saint who “no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom.” (199-200) While the title character in Anouilh's Becket (as in nearly all his plays) rejects the compromises of life in favor of an aesthetic ideal of purity, Fry's antagonists become embodiments of a historical dialectic. Eleanor tells Henry and Thomas,

Together, we might have made a world of progress
Between us, by our three variants of human nature,
You and Becket and me, we could have been
The complete reaching forward.

(47)

Eliot's Becket, however, moves and does not move—through a spiritual dialectic which resembles but is not part of the changes in the human soul, earthly governments, and the seasons.

If Eliot's play ends in the exaltation which the Chorus shares by its recognition and acceptance of the meaning of Becket's death and beatification, Curtmantle climaxes in the terror of the destruction of Henry's realm and family, pity for his tortured and defiled body, and tragic enlightenment. His retainer Marshal terms him “a man / Who had gone through life saving up all passion / To spend at last on his own downfall.” (70) Anouilh's Becket, rather, ends with the ironic compromise, the final union of the king's and God's honor which renders both meaningless and worthless. “The honor of God,” Henry cynically observes, “is a very good thing, and taken all in all, one gains by having it on one's side.” (128) Unlike Anouilh, neither Fry nor Eliot is very interested in rationalizing Thomas's motives for resisting Henry. Near the beginnings of Murder and Curtmantle, both of them clarify the issues, though Eliot's concept of varieties of sin in conflict with good is replaced in Fry with a superhuman contest involving “the interplay of different laws” (ix), political and spiritual. Anouilh's Becket, however, carries on an incessant game of aspiration: “We must only do—absurdly—what we have been given to do—right to the end.” (114) He frankly rejects any conception of an orderly spiritual structure within the universe and insists on an almost romantic testing of his consciousness on his pulses.

Turning to the plays in question, an idea or more precisely, an intuition prior to perception, dominates Eliot's play. Murder yokes the metaphysical concreteness of verse to an idealized Christian theology, setting forth the martyrdom of a saint for the spiritual refreshment of a saving remnant. With the deliberateness of ritual and the elegance of dance, Thomas Becket fulfills his destiny in terms of divine, human, and natural phases. The precise approaches of the four Tempters, each of them going a step beyond his predecessor, are formally duplicated by the frenzied, drunken accusations, murder and self-defence of the four knights. Every speech reflects by intonation the kind of idea, class, level of intelligence, progress of the action and mounting danger to Thomas. Yet the play has more of the logically ordered Symposium in its movement than the Bacchae or any morality play. The very paucity of its literal, recognizable, concrete detail lifts the mind forcefully into interpretation while its insistence on reason above reason casts the mind back upon dumb faith: “They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.” (182)

Anouilh's Becket is a study of good and bad faith, in which each of the situations demonstrates the acceptance or rejection of essences in favor of freedom to choose. Becket in turn is confidant, chancellor, archbishop, enemy, and victim of the King, but he never surrenders his drive for order in the name of honor. Although he comes to identify himself with a heroic desire for an impossible absolute, he clearly doubts the existence of any moral order shaping the universe. What looks like morality in him is only aesthetics, says Henry. Becket longs for an ethical code with the self-contained purity and completeness of an art object and finds his ideal only in death.

All the other characters sharpen the cutting edge of Becket's quest, for the situations rather than his character evolve. The comically inept Pope and his retainers graphically illustrate the corruption of wit by sterile function. If Becket's heroism is measured against the petty craftiness and intrigues of his peers, Henry is a caricature of Carlyle's great man: “I am prepared to forget a lot of things, but not that I am king.” (112) He is a childish worshiper of power, a mean, despicable, and impulsive character. Henry is just wise enough to appreciate Becket's enormous abilities, and cunning enough to seek to make of him a servant. Only his self-pitying weaknesses, his passionate need for Beckett's love and his occasional frankness grant him a measure of sympathy. Gwendolyn's suicide supports the view that a perfect love between either men or man and woman cannot be maintained in this life, that death is preferable to compromise. Like his one-time mistress, Thomas chooses to die when all freedom to choose another course has been taken from him.

In Curmantle Becket has chosen to identify his life so completely with the Church that he is little more than an instrument, its “tongue” to be “used in argument” (21) between the State and the Church. Aside from minor idiosyncrasies, he closely resembles Eliot's figure. Fry's Henry, unlike Thomas is far more three dimensional. We become aware of his self-aggrandizement, his deep sense of family and personal loyalties, his furious temper, his passion for order, and his identification with simple absolutes. Dierickx notes that the Eliotic hero develops “towards renunciation, submission, acceptance, instead of violence and struggle; while Fry presents a man who is suddenly seized in a whirlwind of passion, after having however doubted his own capacities.”⁷ Fry is more interested in the man Henry than in the situations which inspire Anouilh or in Eliot's theological scheme, although his progression does have a certain abstract aptness.

From his first confrontation with Becket, Henry envisions a utopian embodiment for his personal dreams, a form of worldly immortality. By assuming godlike prerogatives he justifies his overconfident manipulations of wife, family, church, and kingdom. But Thomas prefers the more intellectualized perspective of innumerable alternatives to Henry's perfect conformity. The significance for him of choice or free will lies in the testing of character, not in any final resolution. Man's attempt to complete the victory of good over evil in this world would only cut off “the deep roots of disputation / Which dug in the dust, and formed Adam's body.” (21)

Once Henry has committed his initial act of pride—naming Becket to fill the posts both of Chancellor and Archbishop, Becket is effectively deprived of meaningful choice. Henry finds himself trapped by the life-force no less than Thomas had. His ideal of English common law takes on a vitality of its own which bends Henry rather than stemming from him as he had wished.

Both Fry and Eliot fail to convincingly dramatize Becket's inner struggle between pride and acquiescence. But by stressing the theme of Law, Fry has found a useful equivalent for the “wheel” of fate which seems so abstract in Murder. For whether or not Becket “willed” his death, his martyrdom removed the church's opposition to the political supremacy of the secular government and affirmed the subordination of human to divine justice. Fry's denouement involves moral values but does not depend upon any final resolution of their conflicting claims. Thomas's spiritual ideal is ironically embodied in Henry's social instrument.

Poetic drama, as David E. Jones suggests in his book on Eliot, aims at organic unity, the crystallization of meaning in imagery, and a capacity for lifting the action onto a plane of universal significance.⁸ Since only Eliot and Fry write in English verse often dense with imagery, only their plays could be compared fairly in this regard. Three years after Murder was produced in 1935, Fry used the same three-level scheme of character presentation in the short, primitivist The Boy with a Cart. His choral “People of South England” speak image-clogged blank verse while, like Eliot's murderers, minor characters often speak racier prose. The themes of martyrdom and church-building as in Eliot's earlier The Rock are used, and the sun-image becomes Fry's equivalent for the wheel Louis Martz has singled out as Eliot's presiding image.⁹ But Curtmantle is separated both from Murder and Fry's own derivative early experiment by six mature plays. And in his final effort we find some of the spareness of verse toward which Eliot's own later plays moved. Both writers, it seems, have found it impossible either to be satisfied with a coterie audience or to use the whole range of lyric verse in a bourgeois theater of prose realism. Eliot has never been expansive. On the other hand, Fry's looseness has always plagued him with structural problems: after Curtmantle's première he commented wryly to an interviewer from Time: “There are several plays here.”¹⁰ Despite Fry's early indebtedness to Eliot and his continued admiration of Murder, important differences emerge in their uses of poetry.

Recurrent images in the plays are similar: the Waste Land, seasons, beasts and birds, everyday tasks and the blood of redemption, an “under-pattern” Jones has traced through Murder in some detail. Fry had long since abandoned Eliot's stair-stepped characters on three levels of perception: the order of nature (represented by the chorus), the order of the mind (the priests, tempters and murderers) and finally the order of charity (Thomas). Yet both writers have conservative world-views. They assume that the universe has a Ptolemaic form and pressure. The bodies of man, the world and the cosmos are symbolically fitted within one another like concentric bowls or hoops. Their magnitudes may seem vastly different, it is true, but only to the unaided eye. To the awakened imagination, each is a microor macrocosm of the other. Many examples could be drawn from both Fry and Eliot:

What is woven on the loom of fate,
What is woven in the councils of princes
Is woven also in our veins, our brains

(208)

say Eliot's chorus. When the witty uses of irony are added to this vast stock of comparisons, the possibilities for richness of texture and illumination are multiplied.

But while Fry's poetry confirms Henry's motivations as the action amplifies or distorts them, Eliot's is peculiarly abstract in reference; it often stands for the unseen or even the unknowable. Curtmantle's imagery is man-in-society centered. Eliot's figures revolve about the theological paradoxes of acting and suffering. As Martz says, Becket's death is the still point of the world that turns within the play.¹¹

Nearly all the images in Murder are literally circular or cyclical in a larger rhythmic sense. The unity of action and suffering within a single concept of God as Unmoved Mover are contained in the phrase, “the wheel may turn and still / Be forever still.” (182) In Thomas's mind the wheel implies theological patterns of rise and fall: into grace from life, into heavenly glory from wordly disgrace, into divine vindication from earthly injustice. The alternating rise and fall of the seasons, empires and individual destinies are assimilated by Becket's wheel, visually formed at the end by the knights' swords with Thomas as the still point.

With few exceptions Thomas's images are banal, even embarrassingly flat: “the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree” (196) is unusual. Only for the priests, tempters and murderers who understand in terms of the reason does Thomas have the central position granted Henry by nearly all Fry's language. The priests see him as steersman, anvil to Henry's hammer, the firm rock in a sea of political strife. His stability at the wheel's center contrasts with the sinful waverings of mankind. In the minds of the tempters, however, Thomas fits into the cycle of hunter and hunted, eater and the eaten (with sacrificial and sacramental overtones reflecting Eliot's Dionysian and Christian sources). He is a cooked goose, an old stag circled by hounds, a morsel thrown to a thousand hungry appetites, or the unwary prey of hooks and traps. For the knights, in their sordid lust and anger, he has crept upon Henry's shirt like a blood-swollen louse.

Only in the language of the completely uncomprehending Women of Canterbury are the full potentialities of the similar, but discontinuous realms of body, earth and cosmos developed. Balanced opposites such as light and dark, cold and heat, high and low are complemented with progressions such as approach and withdrawal, ecstasy and indifference, pain and lassitude. Kenner rightly suspects that the incredible richness and allusiveness of the choral speeches must certainly be wasted on an audience as they tumble over and interact with one another.¹² One of the choral themes is fear of God's love more than of the violence of man. Balanced metaphors of emergence-from-withinness and impingement-from-withoutness suggest, respectively, their fears of inner demons and of outer violations. Innerness involves the heaving of a sick, laboring earth, cold in the groin, unskinning of onion-like brains, and bestial forms taking shape from thick air. From outside come the poking wind and tapping rain, corruption in the dish and incense in the latrine, root and shoot consuming eyes and ears: all death-bringers. Another overlapping theme is feeling in nullity: of eating and being eaten, of dissolving, of taking meaningless journeys. The chorus's perceptions are almost wholly kinetic, sensuous and visceral. So much of their imagery suggests both the unreality of what is perceived, along with the over-intensity of sensation and intuition. Becoming is the only reality to the chorus, while being is rarely glimpsed and then miraculously, “in a shaft of sunlight.” (176)

What is incidental for Eliot becomes central for Fry. In Curtmantle the King focuses and complicates most of Fry's imagery. Henry figuratively appears as both steersman for the ship of state and as the ice, storms, and rocks which endanger it. He is both physician and disease for the body politic, blacksmith and metal for the country's disused framework, harrowing Christ and infernal labyrinth through which Englishmen wander. He is rationalist and priest, unifier and divider. The ironic complexity of his metonyms confirms the enormous gulf between his idealized goals and his ruthless methods, between his failure to provide an orderly transfer of power and the viability of the legal system he bequeaths his country. Thus Henry is England's sun and its darkness, its water and wasteland, both traveler and roadway.

While Eliot's still-turning wheel is dominant, in Curtmantle the cutting and revolving circle recurs compulsively at moments of crisis. Crowns, nests, rings, skulls and blood, a bull-fight arena and the Eliotic circle of swordsmen occur at various moments when Henry's security and authority are threatened. And the destructive splitting-apart of values, friends, and realm emerges in images of double and half-ness: double vision and two-ness of kingdoms, images and worlds. The effect is summed up wryly as “redemption by divine arithmetic.” (19) Despite the orderliness and often striking relevance of Fry's imagery, it sometimes lacks the solidity and palpability so characteristic of Eliot, whose language penetrates to a core of archetype and ritual.

Given the dedicated, Christian commitment of his audience and the suspension of Murder's time-scheme between 1170 and 1935, Eliot could make rigorous demands on both his auditors and his medium. His occasionally slashing attacks on tyranny are stated in often dense, ironic imagery within a pageant-like form close to litany. Its particular angle of perception rests upon revealed truth, a truth which in Fergusson's terms is at once reasoned and beyond reason.¹³ If common sense and observation conflict with the lessons of martyrdom, that is one of Eliot's points. Fry's shift of emphasis from Thomas to Henry results from his attempt to dovetail the King's historical character with the more abstract theme of conflicting legal systems, civil, religious, moral, and divine. This entails a richer sweep of panoramic detail, more psychological depth and a looser kind of prosaic dialogue than either of his contemporaries use. Though willing to meet the demands of an easily-bored, unsophisticated audience, Fry has linked his brilliant, witty imagery to the whole play as carefully and artfully as Eliot has done. Anouilh is more secular, more radical and more existentialist than either of his English contemporaries. He has adopted a sparer, more theatricalist form to focus on a simpler loyalty-revenge relationship in a chaotic, impinging universe. Neither Fry nor Eliot are willing to find their worlds as disorderly and shapeless nor the conventions of their theater as acceptable as Anouilh. For the allusive, ironic resources of their—and perhaps most—verse depend rather heavily, it seems, upon the poet's acceptance of an ordered cosmos. Within this diverse design, allusive and ironic poetry can extend man's minutest perceptions at the same time it mirrors his incredible variety, as it has in Murder in the Cathedral and Curtmantle.

Notes

1. Texts cited in this study include Eliot's “Murder in the Cathedral,” The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (New York, 1958), 173-221, Fry's Curtmantle (New York, 1961), and Anouilh's Becket, trans. Lucienne Hill (New York, 1964).

2. “Three Allegorists: Brecht, Wilder and Eliot,” The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (Garden City, 1957), p. 41.

3. Letter of April 1, 1964.

4. “Theme in the Drama of Christopher Fry,” Etudes Anglaises, X (October-December 1957), 337.

5. (London, 1946), p. 18.

6. “King and Archbishop: Henry II and Becket from Tennyson to Fry,” Revue des Langues Vivantes, XXVIII (1961-62), p. 428.

7. P. 430.

8. The Plays of T. S. Eliot (London, 1960), p. 17.

9. “The Wheel and the Point: Aspects of Imagery and Theme in Eliot's Later Poetry,” Sewanee Review, LV (Winter 1947), 126-147.

10. “Theatre Abroad: Return of the Phoenix,” Vol. 77, no. 11 (March 11, 1961), p. 68.

11. P. 129.

12. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (Rahway, N. J., 1959), p. 284.

13. The Idea of a Theatre (Princeton, 1949), p. 220.