CHAPTER VII THE PLAYS The purpose of this chapter is limited obviously because by the time Eliot's active dramatic career began, the knight stage of his development was long past and as such the saintly preoccupations of his later poetry dominate his plays. Secondly, like his criticism, Eliot's dramatic work springs from his poetry; it is an offshooot of the strong dramatic element in his poetry. In fact in "The Three Voices of Poetry", he regards dramatic poetry as the third voice. Basically, Eliot's interest in drama is that of a poet. His poetry and plays do not exist in separate compartments; the plays grow directly out of his poetic preoccupations. A piece of external evidence is that, as has been mentioned in the earlier chapter, one of the sources of "Burnt Norton" was the discarded fragment of Murder in the Cathedral. As Eliot himself pointed out in an interview, when he turned to the theatre, the experience of "writing plays ... made a difference to the writing of the Four Quartets".^' Thus admittedly there is some interaction between Eliot's poetry and plays. And this interaction was not on the level of style and presentation only. One can see how the themes of the middle and late poetry, which 383 themselves are modifications of his early themes, overflow into the plays. Thus, the chapter would like to stress that Eliot's dramatic career starts actively when the knight- stage of his development was long over; the knight had transformed himself into the saint and that its main pur­ pose is to show how the themes, that preoccupied Eliot in his poetry throughout, spill over into his plays. As in his early poetry, in his plays also Eliot followed the "mythical method", about which he had spoken in his review of Joyce's Ulysses. The chief advantage of this method was seen to be that "it makes modern world possible for art". Perhaps the attempt here is to give the saint­ ly explorations of modern life an archetypal significance. Thus whether in a hisotrical setting of Murder in the Cathe­ dral or in the contemporary setting of the other plays, there is an underlying mythic pattern. Murder in the Cathe­ dral is based on the Agamemnon myth, whereas Th^e Family / Reunion is a modern adaptation of the myth of Orestes. The Cocktail Party looks back to Euripides'a Alcestis. In The Confidential Clerk Eliot again goes back to Eunpides's play Ion, while The Elder Statesman is in a way a re-enactment of Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonnus. Myth and allusion, thus, s; form the substructure of his dramatic text. While the knowledge of the sources of the plays does enable the reader 384 to see how they operate on multiple planes of meaning and reality, it is not a pre-condition to grasp them at the superficial, literal level of action. In fact this mythical substructure is so unobstrusive that the source of The Cocktail Party was not found out till Eliot disclosed it. Thus when Eliot switched from the private realm of poetry to the public medium of drama, he took care to dilute the presence of myth and allusion in his work. As pointed out in the chapters dealing with his poetry, Eliot shows the predicament of a sensitive spirit, nurtured on Rubaiyat and the usual adolescent course of Romantic and pre-Raphaelite poetry, in the squalid modern world, which is termed as the 'irammense panorama of futili­ ty and anarchy' in his review of Joyce's Ulysses. Now in his plays also he is primarily interested in the condition of people with spiritual awareness and their encounter with those who are impervilis to any transcendental dimension of life. In her discussion of Sweeney Aqonistes Carol Smith points out, "He(Eliot) expresses in this fragmentary piece the theme which ... was to be his throughout virtually all of his dramatic work ; the dilemma of the spiritually aware individuals forced to exist in a world unav/are of spiritual 385 reality".^^^ Eliot had spoken of such spiritually unaware people in various contexts earlier. For instance he had character­ ized them as the people undone by death in The Waste Land, later on they became the hollow men. In essay "Baudldire", Eliot again spoke about them as those who are dehumanized by their moral neutrality. It is in the company of these waste-landers that a sensitive soul is forced to exist. Eliot fits here in the tradition of poets like Blake and Arnold. Blake's entier poetry for instance is a revolt against the ubiquitous Newtonian mechanistic conceptio of the universe. Similarly, Arnold in Empedocles on Etna and poems like "The Scholar-Gipsy" rages against the Philistin­ ism and the loss of the capacity for any faith in people. In his poetry upto The Waste Land, one of the complaints of Eliot against the modern world is the urban squalor and automatism of the metropolitan civilization, which has gone spiritually opaque. In the plays, the encounter between the aware and the unaware is dramatized. This theme is most prominent in Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion. In the fragment Sweeney Agoniates the stress is on the horror and pain of spiritual recognition and the difficul­ ties of a newly awakened soul to communicate his experience and awareness to others. In Murdar in the Cathedral, the 3 8r spiritually unregenerate people are represented by the Chorus, consisting of the Women of Canterbury. As they express their fears and expectations before Thomas's arriv­ al, they also describe themselves. 1) We have suffered various oppression^ But mostly we are left to our own devices And we are content if we are left alone CW) 2 We do not wish anything to happen Seven years we lived quietly Succeeded in avoiding notice Living and partly living. (115") They naturally fear the return of the Archibishop, for it will disturb the even tenor of their life. Thomas is a man who is on a different spiritual plane, altogether , a man who is not afraid to take moral stances and act accord­ ingly. Now I fear the disturbance of the quiet seasons Winter shall come bringing death from the sea These Women of Canterbury want Thomas to return to France, for with his entry into Canterbury they will be forced to shed their moral non-alignment. 38? O Thomas, return, Archbishop; return, return to France Return. Quickly. Quietly. Leave us to perish in quiet. CK) In The Family Reunion, Harry enters the stage with y vision of the supernatural. He is the one who sees tho Furies, while his mother, aunts, and uncles, with the ho­ nourable exception of Agatha, fail to see them. Look there 1 Can't you see them? YOu don't see them, but I see them And they see me. (C'~\) They do not understand what Harry is talking about. And naturally enough. For Charles, Gerald and Ivy have gone through life as a series of disconnected events, without realising their significance. For them Time is neatly divided into the past, present and future. As Harry tells them. You are people To whom nothing has happened, at most a continual impact Of external events. you have gone through life in 388 sleep. Never woken to nightmare. I tell you life would be unendurable If you are wide awake • • • Of the past you can only see what is past Not what is always present. (CC-C^) In the words of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Harry's spiritually blind uncles and aunts lack "the histor­ ical sense". It is not as if all the characters except the protag­ onist are spiritually impervious. Connected with the clash between the awares and the unawares is the figure of the spiritual guide, whom one saw before in Ash-Wednesday in the form of the Lady in a white gown. In Murder in the Cathedral Thomas, after struggling like St. Paul, with the spectres of his own mind emerges from the battle triumphant and attains to sainthood. But Harry needs Agatha to guide him on to his path of salvation. His sense of guilt goes away only after she tells him how she loved his father and how he wanted to kill Amy, who was at the time expecting Harry. This is how Harry comes to >now the aetiology of his delusion of having killed his wife. Armed with this knowl- 389 edge, Harry now can face the Eumenides; they no longer frighten him. They are not now instruments of torture but the agents of his purification and salvation. Seen in this aspect, the Eumenides perform the same function as the threo white leopards do in Ash-Wednesday. In The Cocktail Party, Edward, Lavinia and Celia ari helped by the "guardians' in the form of Sir Henry Reilly, Tulia and Alex. Sir Reilly reconciles Edward and Lavinia and sends Celia to his "sanatorium" where she wins her martyrdom. Eggerson, in The Confidential Clerk, shows Colby that the rose-garden cannot be used for escapist reasons but has to be integrated to life and thus, he becomes the real father to Colby. Sir Claude despite his desire, turns out to be cherishing the illusion of Colby's fatherhood. Ho cannot be colby'a father in the sense that he himself is as much deluded in his life as is his wife. In The Elder Statesman, Lord Claverton is able to die in peace and serenity as much by his own efforts of coming to terms with the ghosts of his past as by Monica's Antigone like filial affection• These guides help the protagonists to attain salva­ tion, which invariably takes the form of redeeming time.