EXPLORING THE LYRIC-DRAMATIC INTERACTION IN THE WORK OF T.S. ELIOT by Patrick Prashant Coelho A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Theatre Victoria University of Wellington 2010 Abstract T. S. Eliot‘s fascination with the interaction between the lyric and the dramatic is evident from the fact that his poetry was often dramatic even before he began to write verse drama. Part of the reason for this interaction in Eliot was a kind of radical modernism that ensured a return to a primitivism where there was little distinction between the lyric and the dramatic. In this thesis I argue that this interaction is central to the nature of Eliot‘s creative work. The need for an interaction between the lyric and dramatic meant that The Waste Land (1922) possessed several dramatic qualities making it a precursor to Eliot‘s entry into the realm of poetic drama with the play, Sweeney Agonistes (1932). As part of my thesis, I conducted theatre workshops of the first two parts of The Waste Land in order to discover what dramatic elements emerged from the text and how their presence affected the lyric- dramatic interaction in the work, something which can surface only through performance. I argue that The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes occupy critical spaces in the mapping of the lyric-dramatic interaction in Eliot‘s creative oeuvre. The intensity of the lyric-dramatic interaction in Eliot‘s poetry builds up to a moment where he comes extremely close to drama in The Waste Land moving him to ultimately write his first play, Sweeney Agonistes. While Eliot‘s works after these two texts continue to exhibit characteristics of this lyric-dramatic interaction, the nature of this interaction undergoes a transformation after Eliot‘s conversion, manifesting itself in his religious poetry and drama which turns out to be a cul-de-sac in his experimentations. The intensity of this interaction in his work then gradually reduces to a point where the lyric and the dramatic no longer overlap especially after Eliot‘s first commercially successful play, The Cocktail Party (1949). By examining the reasons for the slow disassociation of these two crucial elements in Eliot‘s later work, I aim to stress the centrality of The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes to the lyric-dramatic trajectory in his work. 1 Acknowledgements I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my supervisors Dr. Charles Ferrall and Dr. Matt Wagner whose insightful and inspiring words of advice never failed to spur me on. I would also like to thank all staff, both teaching and non-teaching, at Victoria University‘s School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, and all librarians. I wish also to thank Victoria University of Wellington for awarding me with the Victoria University PhD and PhD Completion Scholarships which have enabled me to complete this work. A heart-felt thank you goes out to all the cast and crew of The Waste Land for their hard work and dedication to the project. The work was all yours. My cast and crew included: Hannah McKie, Fiona Shaw, Yu Ting, Nicola Clements, Kristina Bunting, Dan Watterson, Tom Horder, William Mcelwee, Ralph Upton, Jacob Ennis, Paul Reddish and Gregor Cameron. Special thanks go out to Gregor, my dramaturge, who also video-recorded the performances, edited these recordings and was an invaluable font of knowledge throughout the process, and to Hannah who also designed the posters, flyers and the audience handouts for the production. Here, I need to thank Dr. Wagner once again for his wonderful supervision of the production and amazing insight into the theatre, and to Dr. Ferrall for all his advice and support before, during and after the production. Special thanks are due to theatre staff James Davenport, Horst Sarubin and Jo Bean for their help during the production. Thanks also go out to Matthias Paetzel and Sugu Pillay for their assistance during the production and to Brian McKeon for his advice on copyright laws. Thanks also to my officemate, Tim Jones, for his patient and in-depth responses to my questions over the past three years! I must acknowledge, here, my gratitude to my parents and sister, Conrad, June and Sarita, for providing me with a comforting and exciting world of literature, music and theatre in which to grow up. Among friends in India, I owe thanks to Dr. T. R. Joy, presently at Loyola College, Chennai, whose questioning gave me the answers to some of the problems related to my thesis proposal early on. I think I have covered all of the people I need to thank here and if I have missed out on anyone I beg forgiveness. But, before I end, I must thank my lovely wife Ðoan Hạ for providing me with her critical feedback and for supporting me always. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES 7 INTRODUCTION: UNRAVELLING THE THREAD OF THE LYRIC-DRAMATIC INTERACTION IN ELIOT 8 0.1 The need to study the lyric-dramatic interaction in Eliot‘s work 8 0.2 Defining the lyric and the dramatic 9 0.3 The changing nature of the interrelationship between the lyric and dramatic 12 0.4 Conclusion 13 CHAPTER ONE: ELIOT’S THEORY OF DRAMA – BUILDING A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE LYRIC AND THE DRAMATIC 14 1.1 Introduction: ‗Primitivism‘ in Eliot‘s time 14 1.2 A taste for the ‗primitive‘ in adolescence and an early interest in drama 16 1.3 The Cambridge Ritualists 20 1.4 Eliot‘s anti-realism in the drama 22 1.5 Alternatives to realism in the theatre 23 Symbolists, puppets and masks 23 The music-hall, the Chorus and cinema 26 Dance and rhythm 29 The Mass as ritual, dance and drama 32 1.6 Language and form for a modern verse drama 33 1.7 Conclusion 34 3 CHAPTER TWO: ROMANTIC IRRITATIONS AND DRAMATIC ASPIRATIONS: PLOTTING THE DRAMATIC IN ELIOT’S POETRY BEFORE THE WASTE LAND 36 2.1 Introduction 36 2.2 The dandy and ironic splitting 38 2.3 Use of the dramatic monologue 49 2.4 Spotlight on the stage: Vaudeville and marionettes 60 2.5 The dramatic in the Sweeney poems 68 2.6 Conclusion 72 CHAPTER THREE: FROM POETRY TO PERFORMANCE: THE LYRIC-DRAMATIC INTERFACE IN THE WASTE LAND 73 3.1 Critics on the dramatic in The Waste Land; the workshop production 73 3.2 Dramatic elements in the production 77 Voices, dialogue and audience 77 Rhythm, movement and ritual 87 Tension and conflict 91 Chorus and music-hall 93 3.3 Conclusion 97 CHAPTER FOUR: WANNA GO HOME, BABY? THE LYRIC IN SWEENEY AGONISTES 98 4.1 Introduction 98 4.2 Lyric elements in the play 99 The rhythm of jazz 99 Backchat and Minstrelsy 108 4 “Do you want to flirt with me?” Songs in the play 112 Melodrama: Bringing together music and drama 118 4.3 The success or failure of Sweeney Agonistes, and its incomplete status 121 CHAPTER FIVE: THE LYRIC-DRAMATIC DYNAMIC AFTER THE WASTE LAND AND SWEENEY AGONISTES 126 5.1 Introduction 126 5.2 The Rock 129 As pageant play 129 The Chorus, ritual and music 131 5.3 Murder in the Cathedral: Christian ritual and Greek Choral traditions 138 5.4 A return to secular drama: The Family Reunion 145 The shift from religious drama 145 “Why do we feel embarrassed?” The Chorus in The Family Reunion 146 Lyrical duets 149 5.5 The Cocktail Party and after 153 5.6 The dramatic in the poems after The Waste Land 158 5.7 Voices in ‗The Hollow Men‘ (1925) 159 5.8 The Ariel poems: ‗Journey of the Magi‘ and ‗A Song for Simeon‘ 162 5.9 Christian ritual, hymns and the Mass in Ash-Wednesday 165 5.10 Old Possum‟s Book of Practical Cats 169 5.11 Four Quartets 171 5.12 Conclusion 174 CONCLUSION: TYING UP THE THREADS OF THE LYRIC- DRAMATIC INTERACTION IN ELIOT 176 5 APPENDIX: WORKSHOP REPORTS 180 WORKS CITED 218 INSIDE BACK COVER JACKET: COPY OF DVD OF THE WORKSHOP PRODUCTION OF THE WASTE LAND PERFORMED IN SEPTEMBER 2008 AT VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Marie in the cafe with a male companion and on the box .........................80 Figure 2: Rising in rhythm to the opening lines of 'The Burial of the Dead' .............89 Figure 3: A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many (Complete 62, l. 62) ........90 7 Introduction: Unravelling the Thread of the Lyric- Dramatic Interaction in Eliot 0.1 The need to study the lyric-dramatic interaction in Eliot’s work Several Modernist writers believed that humankind had suffered from some kind of calamitous ―Fall‖ at a particular time in history, one that led to a culture- transforming fragmentation. For Hulme, this fragmentation occurred during the Renaissance and led to the birth of Romanticism (50). For Lawrence it was sickness, specifically syphilis, which had caused a ―grand rapture‖ around the late sixteenth century in Elizabethan England with the ―mental consciousness recoiling in violence away from the physical, instinctive-intuitive.‖ This recoiling led, in turn, to an inhibition of the intuitive in English art according to Lawrence (307-309). Also, Yeats believed that some kind of perfection had been achieved during the Byzantine period implying that there had been a ―Fall‖ of some kind in subsequent art and literature. Similarly, T.S. Eliot expressed a belief in a ―dissociation of sensibility‖ that had set into poetry in the seventeenth century and which, he believed, was a result of a split between thought and feeling after the Metaphysical poets (Selected 288).