Paper 4, Module 28: Text

Paper 4, Module 28: Text Role Name Affiliation Principal Investigator Prof. Tutun Mukherjee University of Hyderabad Paper Coordinator Prof. Hariharan Institute of English, University of Balagovindan Kerala Content Writer/Author Dr. Anjana Sankar, Sree Sankara College, Kalady (CW) Content Reviewer Dr. Jameela Begum Former Head & Professor, Institute (CR) of English, University of Kerala Language Editor (LE) Prof. Hariharan Institute of English, University of Balagovindan Kerala 2 T.S. Eliot’s Verse Drama I Eliot’s Life and Influences Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) renowned poet, critic and dramatist was born in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., in a strict Unitarian family. In 1906, he went to Harvard University where he studied Greek, Latin, Renaissance literature, French and German philosophy. There he was taught by George Santayana and Irving Babbitt. Babbitt profoundly influenced Eliot’s views regarding the dynamic relationship between the past and the present as well as his bias against Romanticism. At Harvard, Eliot was exposed to the works of Dante, Laforgue and the French symbolists. Eliot had completed two of his earliest poetic works “Portrait of a Lady” and “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” I.1 Influence of Philosophy: The next academic stint of Eliot was at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he studied philosophy and French literature, and attended the classes held by the French Philosopher Henri Bergson. He went back to Harvard to prepare for his doctoral thesis on the English philosopher F.H. Bradley, but left without taking the degree. Later he went to Merton college, Oxford and finally took up permanent residence in England in 1915 by becoming a British citizen. 3 I.2 Journalistic Career: During his early years in London, Eliot taught at Highgate school reviewed books for the Times Literary Supplement, and from 1917, worked for Lloyds Bank. He served a short stint as Assistant Editor of The Egoist, and later became the editor of a newly founded quarterly review, The Criterion in 1922 where he continued till it ceased publication in 1939. In 1925, he became the director of the publishing house Faber and Faber, aiding many young poets in their fledgling careers. I.3 Influence of Religion: In 1927, Eliot became a member of the Church of England. The poems written, during this period include, ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘The Journey of the Magi’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’. The major achievement of his later career was Four Quartets – consisting of four long poems , namely, Burnt Norton (1933), East Coker (1940) The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942) – first published together in 1943. They are contemplative and religious poems, each concerned with one of the four elements namely air, earth, water and fire. The change from agnosticism to Christianity emerged gradually in Eliot’s writing and was marked by the publication of a book of essays For Lancelot Andrews (1928). Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922) portrays the deeper desolation of a world declining into materialism. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?/I do not know whether a man or a woman – But who is that on the other side of you?” in The Wasteland 4 recalls Christ walking with two of his disciples to Emmaus as he walked on his mystical journey the refrain of quotations from the Lord’s Prayer is echoed in The Hollow Men while Dante’s “In His will is our peace” is reflected in Ash Wednesday as ‘Our peace in His Will”. J.L. Styan has commented that T.S. Eliot ‘came to the drama with an unlikely mission: to discover what made Elizabethan poetic stage workable and how to recreate in verse a moral or religious drama for a modern audience” (377). II. As a Verse Dramatist Eliot is one of the leading exponents of poetic drama who contributed much to its revival in the early twentieth century. The earliest attempt was Sweeney Agonistes (1932) followed by the pageant play The Rock (1934). His most successful enterprise was Murder in the Cathedral (1935) which was commissioned for Canterbury Festival of June 1935. During the first two or three years, there were eight hundred performances of the play, a landmark in the history of modern English drama. Eliot’s later plays were The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (154) and The Elder Statesman (1959). Many of Eliot’s poems resemble dramatic monologues, like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917), ‘Gerontion’ (1920) and others like ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (1917) and ‘Sweeney Agonists’ fragments (1926) embody dramatic situations. 5 II.1 The Three Voices J.L. Styan has raised certain questions regarding Eliot’s discussions of poetic drama. 1) Regarding how complex thoughts and feelings of a poet can be conveyed through characters in action, Eliot has distinguished three distinct voices in a lecture The Three Voices of Poetry (1953). (i) The first one is used by the poet when talking to himself the, second one is adopted by the poet talking to himself while the third voice communicates through dramatic characters and in each character, the poet must put “some bit of himself’ which ‘may be the germ from which the life of the character starts”. (ii) If poetry is a better vehicle than prose to guide and intensify the feelings, what kind of poetry, what idiom would be understood by a twentieth century audience. Or “how would people today speak if they could speak in poetry?” (iii) What dramatic conventions are to be used to free the stage and its drama from the grip of realism (iv) What changes of form and structure should be expected in the play on whole? (377) II..2 Free Verse or Verse Liber Eliot discarded the conventional iambic pentameter used by the Elizabethan dramatists. Free verse or verse liber, according to the French, has no metre or line length but depends on natural speech rhythms and the counter- point of stressed and unstressed syllables. French symbolist Poet Laforgue had already initiated the verse liber movement in the latter half of the nineteenth 6 century and Eliot adopted it to suit new styles and new uses of language. It contributed to the use of irony, the unexpected, the banal, the conversational as well as the slang in Eliot’s verse drama. The collapse of the values of the Western Civilization, the unhappiness alienation, the cultural confusion and spiritual desolation that Eliot saw around him could be recaptured in a language that was both pessimistic and ironic. II. 3. Influence of Greek Theatre Nevil Coghill, in his Introduction to Murder in the Cathedral has observed that jazz-rhythm and use of chorus were the first signs of Eliot’s effort to break up the sham-Shakespearean long-jam that had immobilised poetic drama for some three hundred years. There was a clutter of unacted and unactable plays ... in the pseudo-Shakespearean mould of episode and blank verse. Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats Lamb, Byron, Tennyson and even Hardy ... had tried to re-enter and animate the gigantic corpse and make it write their plays for them, but with little success. It was Eliot who first saw clearly that other models must be sought if poetry was ever to regain the stage. His choice was to fall on Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Euripides and the unknown author of Every man; but first on Aristophanes. (14). It is to be remembered that the two fragments called Sweeney Agonistes carried the subtitle, an Aristophanic melodrama which points not only to its farcical elements (combined with gruesomeness or terror) but also to its ritual 7 character. Eliot reintroduced the ritual element into the theatre which was present in Aristophanes and the Greek drama. The ritual element plays a part in The Rock, The Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party. Purgation and renewal are also a part of Eliot’s use of the ritual. The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party have used elements of Greek tragedy to lend universality and timelessness to the plot. The Family Reunion deals with the curse on an ancient house, which is not a Christian concept, where life is seen through the eyes of a modern Orestes, the unhappy Harry, Lord Mochensey. The effect of chorus is also created in the play where Harry’s family of aunts and uncles turn their faces to the audience and speak their lines in unison. Much more alarming to the audience was “another element from Aeschylus’s Oresteia that of the Furies of retribution. Before they could be propitiated, however, they had somehow to be accommodated in the family drawing-room and in his lecture Poetry and Drama (1951) Eliot admitted that sometimes they looked like uninvited guests from a fancy dress ball, or else appeared to be swarming across the stage like a football team (Styan 381)”. The Cocktail Party was a great success and showed the influence of another Greek tragedy – Alcestis of Euripides, with Heracles as the equivalent of the ‘unidentified guest’, Sir Henry Harcourt Reilly. Thus it is quite obvious that, apart from the use of chorus, there are several aspects of the Greek theatre which have influenced Eliot’s verse drama. III.. Murder in the Cathedral as a historical verse drama 8 Eliot accepted the commission to write a play for the Canterbury Festival of June 1935 at the behest of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and chose the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, the most famous of all English saints as his subject matter. Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury between 1162 and 1170 when he was brutally murdered on the 29th of December in his own Cathedral church by four knights, Reginald Fitz Urse, William de Traci, Hugh de Morville and Richard Brito, who claimed to have done it fulfill King Henry II’s wishes.

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