Murder in the Ancient Cathedral, Living (and Partly Living) in the Contemporary Classroom

ABSTRACT: Reading T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral occupies the last sessions of my British Modernism course at a Christian liberal arts university in Canada. This play, in which Eliot recapitulates techniques from Greek drama and medieval liturgical drama, invokes ritual in order to reenact out-of-time the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket. Thomas is a type of Christ, and the audience is Christ’s audience through all time and outside of it. What Eliot proposed about the relationship between literature and history in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is embodied eighteen years later in Murder in the Cathedral, where the new work expresses that historical sense by which the medieval saint’s play is brought to a modern audience who become actors in the timeless divine drama of suffering, death, and resurrection.

Deborah Bowen is professor emerita of English Literature at Redeemer University in S.W. Ontario. She has written articles on contemporary Canadian poetry, environmental literature, and teaching as a Christian. She has published two books: The Strategic Smorgasbord of Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic (ed., 2007) and Stories of the Middle Space: Reading the Ethics of Postmodern Realisms (2010), and has just compiled an anthology entitled Poetry in Place: Poetry and Environmental Hope in a Southern Ontario Bioregion (forthcoming 2025).