Murder in the Cathedral

Eliot's verse drama of Becket's last Christmas: temptation, witness, and martyrdom in Canterbury.

Specifications & Metrics

author

T. S. Eliot

type

Verse drama

era

Interwar (1935)

language

English

setting

Canterbury Cathedral, December 1170

source text

Edward Grim's eyewitness account of Becket's murder

acts

2 acts

Relative Scale in Plays

Core Principles & Analysis

• Commissioned for the 1935 Canterbury Festival.
• It stages Thomas Becket's 1170 murder and its four tempters' arguments.
• The choruses speak in the ritual cadences Eliot built from Greek tragedy.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Murder in the Cathedral