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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1930
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1994-02-27
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<text>
<title>
(1930s) Murder In The Cathedral
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Theater
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
Murder In The Cathedral
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(February 28, 1938)
</p>
<p> In Murder in the Cathedral, Playwright T.S. Eliot's subject
is the slaying of Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in
1170. In Anglo-Catholic Elliot's hands, Becket (Robert Speaight)
stands forth as a tremendous spiritual figure who, before the
play begins, has made his choice between Heaven and Earth.
Tempters only arouse his scorn. Assassins only increase his
submission. Out of such an attitude comes the play's blazing
religious exaltation, its lack of psychological drama. The great
heroes of tragedy are inwardly lacerated; Becket is not. Hence
the first half of the play is mainly declamatory. But in the
second half Poet Eliot's richly cumulative rhetoric takes fire,
makes antiphonal voices of his despairing chorus of women, his
truculent band of murderers, his central, uplifted archbishop.
Then, at a stroke, the murder. Then, with a counterstroke, the
murderers, using mealy-mouthed journalese, try to justify their
crime. In this sudden contrast of shoddy human self-seeking with
rapt spiritual self-abnegation. Eliot gets in a brutal and final
punch.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>