[In the following essay, Gatlin traces the evolving meaning of the concept of honor in Becket.]

What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air. A trim reckoning! … Honor is a mere scutcheon.

Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I

Honor travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast.
                        ULYSSES in Troilus and Cressida

Jean Anouilh uses the phrase "The Honor of God" as the sub-title of his play Becket. In the English translation of the play by Lucienne Hill, the word "honor" appears more than twenty times, spoken by a variety of characters in a variety of situations. It is as if Anouilh were determined to explore the meaning of the word by a sort of comprehensive dramatic demonstration of what is really essential to this abstraction which so many characters in the play use so glibly.

The term is first used in the opening scene of the play as King Henry, kneeling before the tomb of Becket to accept the lash as public penance for his part in Becket's murder, evokes in his mind the presence of the murdered man:

King. … Don't you think we'd have done better to understand each other?

Becket. Understand each other? It wasn't possible.

King. I said, "In all save the honor of the realm." It was you who taught me that slogan, after all.

Becket. I answered you, "In all save the honor of God." We were like two deaf men talking.

Here at the very start of the opening scene in the play, Anouilh defines the conflict which is to be explored, a conflict between two men's concepts of honor.

After this opening scene the next reference to "honor" occurs in a conversation in which Becket and Henry discuss Becket's background. Becket reveals that his father, a Saxon, had amassed "a considerable fortune" by collab orating dutifully with the Norman conquerors. Prodded by Henry, Becket admits his own reasons for collaborating:

Becket. … I adore hunting and only the Normans and their proteges had the right to hunt. I adore luxury and luxury was Norman. I adore life and the Saxons' only birthright was slaughter. I'll add that I adore honor.

King. (With faint surprise) And was honor reconciled with collaboration too?

Becket. (Lightly) I had the right to draw my sword against the first Norman nobleman who tried to lay hands on my sister. I killed him in single combat. It's a detail, but it has its points.

Becket's "points" of honor here appear bluntly expedient, for he goes on to explain that, because of his honorable defense of her, his sister is now "respected" by the Norman barons. There is a hint here that she has perhaps been accepted as a mistress by one of the barons, rather than merely lusted after as an object of rape. Such are the wages of Becket's "honor" at this stage.

The next reference to honor occurs just after the drunken Henry needles Becket about his concept of morality. Henry has come to demand Becket's mistress, Gwendolyn, in return for having yielded to Becket a young Saxon peasant girl whom he, the King, had impulsively decided to bring to the palace as a concubine. Becket had intended to leave the girl with her family, but after foreclosing his bargain by taking Gwendolyn, the King produces the Saxon girl to fulfill his part of the agreement.

King. … What looks like morality in you is nothing more than esthetics. Is that true or isn't it?

Becket. (Meeting his eyes, says softly) It's true, my Lord.

King. I'm not cheating if I ask for her, am I? I said "favor for favor" and I asked you for your word of honor.

Becket. (Icily) And I gave it to you.

Here Becket's "word of honor" is used as a weapon against him by the King, and we see a brutal unfolding of the irony that Becket's "honor" is merely a "word of honor." As he bids farewell to Gwendolyn, before she leaves with Henry to commit suicide in his litter, she says to Becket,

You belong to a conquered race too. But through tasting too much of the honey of life, you've forgotten that even those who have been robbed of everything have one thing left to call their own.

Becket's reply leaves no doubt that he knows her meaning:

Yes, I daresay, I had forgotten. There is a gap in me where honor ought to be. Go now.

She goes—and kills herself.

Perhaps his "honor" had saved his sister from rape by the lustful barons, but here it betrays his devoted mistress and makes a mockery of his professed concern for the women of the conquered race. Gwendolyn's action here becomes, within the structure of the play, both a foreshadowing and a pattern for the definition of honor that Becket himself is finally to reach. The nature of her love for Becket, unreciprocated though it is, is echoed later in Becket's love for what he calls the honor of God—a love which also may be unreciprocated. The point is that both Gwendolyn and Becket make a total commitment to an ideal which ultimately they are forced not only to live for but to die for—and both of them live and die for it unhesitatingly. Appropriately enough, the next reference to honor comes as Becket soliloquizes over the sleeping Henry, who has returned in fear to spend the night with Becket after Gwendolyn's suicide has unnerved him:

… You can sleep peacefully though, my prince. So long as Becket is obliged to improvise his honor, he will serve you. And if one day, he meets it face to face. …

A short pause

But where is Becket's honor?

Here at the end of the first act we see that "honor," one of the "labels" Becket had referred to earlier as being necessary to give shape to the world in order that we can "know what we're doing," has become for him an enigmatic label indeed. No longer can he apply it indiscriminately to whatever act or notion it seems to identify; he is beginning to learn the truth that for him action plus its consequences, not merely impulsive action itself, are involved in the idea of honor.

In the second act of the play two brief references to "honor" serve to underscore the baffling multiplicity of meanings which the word can convey and to emphasize the degree to which, as Humpty Dumpty says in Alice in Wonderland, a word "means just what I want it to mean—neither more nor less." Becket is speaking to one of Henry's dunderheaded Norman barons:

1st Baron. And a soldier's honor, my Lord Chancellor, what of that?

Becket. (.Dryly) A soldier's honor, Baron, is to win victories.

Then, a little later in the conversation:

1st Baron. What about England's honor, then?

Becket. (Quietly) England's honor, Baron, in the final reckoning, has always been to succeed.

These words "England's honor … has always been to succeed," already echoed in Henry's reference to "the honor of the realm," are to echo again in the final line of the play, compounding the irony of Becket's murder and martyrdom and highlighting the truth that "honor," as Becket has existentially defined it, bears little real relation to "honor" as Henry continues to use it.

Becket's conversation with the barons shows that at this point he shares Henry's conception of "honor" as merely an expedient label for a public image. But in a confrontation of the two men a little later, their diverging interpretations become apparent. Grief stricken when Becket, whom he has now made Archbishop of Canterbury, returns to him the seal of the Lord Chancellor's post, Henry cries:

You've sent me back the Three Lions of England, like a little boy who doesn't want to play with me any more. You think you have God's honor to defend now! I would have gone to war with all England's might behind me, and against England's interests, to defend you, little Saxon. I would have given the honor of the Kingdom laughingly … for you. … Only I loved you and you didn't love me … that's the difference.

Here Henry sees and defines the crux of the conflict: Is honor a concept to be defined and defended at the sacrifice of personal feelings, or is it to be a "laughingly" yielded pawn in a game of image-making?

To emphasize the significance of Becket's newly developing concept, he confronts the corrupt Folliot, Bishop of London, with the reminder that "we are men of God and that we have an Honor [the capitalization is Anouilh's] to defend, which dates from all eternity," and then goes on to elaborate:

… The Kingdom of God must be defended like any other Kingdom. Do you think that Right has only to show its handsome face for everything to drop in its lap? Without Might, its old enemy, Right counts for nothing.

There is an echo here of Becket's statement to the barons that the honor of the soldier is to win victories and the honor of England is to succeed, but the cynicism of these earlier utterances is entirely absent. It becomes apparent that he is learning well that the word "honor" can be defined only as a result of commitments and the consequences of commitments. It is becoming for him more than a meaningless label.

There follows a series of scenes in which several confrontations—between King Louis of France and Bishop Folliot acting as Henry's ambassador, between the Pope and one of his Cardinals, and between King Louis and Becket himself—serve to reiterate the uses of "honor" as a merely expedient label and to demonstrate that in the world from which Becket is separating himself honor is still what it has always been: a public image to be sacrificed or salvaged as the occasion warrants. The sordid political maneuverings shown in these confrontations serve to remind us that Becket's soul-searching quest for the essence of honor is indeed a lonely one against overwhelming odds.

He is like a man groping blindfolded for a virgin within a brothel where all the whores are named Honor and all the customers keep shouting the name of the one they prefer. It is a world that Becket has known only too well—and that Henry lives in continuously.

After a period of enforced exile in France, Becket finally resolves to end his banishment, and he petitions King Louis to help him return to England. As he says.

I am a Primate of England. That is a rather showy label on my back. The honor of God and common sense, which for once coincide, dictate that instead of risking the knife thrust of some hired assassin, on the highway, I should go and have myself killed—if killed I must be—clad in my golden cope, with my miter on my head and my silver cross in my hand, among my flock in my own cathedral.

King Louis, after remarking that "the honor of God is a very cumbersome thing," agrees to help and arranges the final climactic confrontation of Becket with Henry on the windy plain at La Forté-Bernard. In that scene, the conflict comes to a head and is defined with lucid finality. The word "honor" tolls like a bell throughout the scene:

Becket. (Quietly) I'm waiting for the honor of God and the honor of the King to become one.

King. You'll wait a long time then!

Becket. … I was a man without honor. And suddenly I found it—one I never imagined would ever become mine—the honor of God. A frail, incomprehensible honor, vulnerable as a boy-King fleeing from danger.

(The allusion here recalls the scene when Henry had fled in terror to Becket's chamber after Gwendolyn's suicide in defense of her honor.)

Becket. I shall agree to the nine other articles in a spirit of peace, and because I know that you must remain King—in all save the honor of God.

A pause

King. (Coldly) Very well. I will help you defend your God, since that is your new vocation, in memory of the companion you once were to me—in all save the honor of the Realm.

King. (Suddenly) You never loved me, did you, Becket?

Becket. In so far as I was capable of love, yes, my prince, I did.

King. Did you start to love God?

He cries out:

You mule! Can't you ever answer a simple question?

Becket. (Quietly) I started to love the honor of God.

Note here the crucial qualification in Becket's reply. He loved not God, but the honor of God. This word, this scutcheon, this shaping label now is firmly defined within the heart of Thomas Becket, and it serves to show him the shape and the demands of the new world he has created for himself out of chaos.

Becket completes his definition of the word by his unresisting acceptance of death at the hands of Henry's barons. His last cry to God as he dies under their swords is, "Oh how difficult You make it all! And how heavy Your honor is to bear!"

The final scene completes the envelope within which the action of the play takes place. Henry absorbs his lashing and during it cries out, "Are you satisfied now, Becket? Does this settle our account? Has the honor of God been washed clean?" Then, the lashing completed, he addresses his barons "with a touch of hypocritical majesty beneath his slightly loutish manner":

The honor of God, gentlemen, is a very good thing, and taken all in all, one gains by having it on one's side.

He goes on to decree that Becket shall be "honored and prayed to in this Kingdom as a saint"; and after he appoints Becket's murderer to inquire into the murder, the play ends with his cynical statement that "no one will be in any doubt as to our Royal desire to defend the honor of God and the memory of our friend from this day forward." He walks out of the cathedral to the cheers of his Saxon subjects, whose services he needs to fight his wars and whose loyalty he has just cynically purchased at the cost of Becket's honor.

There is a disturbing ambiguity of effect at the end of the play. As he is portrayed, Becket has many of the attributes of a tragic hero: his noble death partakes of the tragic essence and evokes that sense of waste so prominent in our response to such deaths. Yet the framework scene that opens and closes the play is in the comic mode. Henry begins the play, and he ends it. He is still the successful king, so long as we accept his values as valid criteria for success. His use of Becket's honor—even of God's honor, and in the play the two are finally synonymous—for his own expedient advantage undercuts the tragedy of Becket and places the whole play in a context of irony.

But perhaps more pertinent to this discussion is the existential definition of the concept of honor. Looking back over the play, one sees that Anouilh has used the word as a dramatic demonstration of the existential notion that a man is the sum of his acts and that the essence of a concept must follow and not precede the acts themselves which define it. The word itself is, in truth, merely a label. To Becket the label comes to mean an ideal to serve, to live for, and ultimately to die for. But Becket's honor is achieved in solitude and defined in and by the actions to which he attaches the name; his definition is neither acceptable nor understandable to Henry nor to the world in which Henry has chosen to live. The label, however, is available to that world, and at the end of the play it is still as usefully expedient, as terrifyingly viable, as ironically impervious to abstract absolute definition as it has ever been. Anouilh hammers home the point that each man is effectively his own universe, condemned to strive, alone and unaided, wrestling his huge boulder up his chosen hill, and forced forever to find his justice and his reward not in the view from the hilltop nor in the satisfaction of reaching it, but in the lonely, never-ending task itself of labelling his burdens to suit his direst needs.