Day 33: Murder in the Cathedral, by T S Eliot

Another of the handful of plays I first came into contact with at school. I was a part of the chorus when we did it, and although the lines were broken up between several groups of us, at one point I ended up learning over half of them to cover for people. Long story, but it meant I pretty much crash-learned the words and didn't get a lot of time to really think about the meaning. The whole thing being rather poetic and being spoken in groups meant really emotive acting sort of wasn't a requirement, though reading the whole thing again now I can see it really should have been.

I find Eliot's writing style very easy to read, and I like the way he plays with the language in his poetry. While I haven't read a lot of his work before, when I was a kid I utterly fell in love with Cats as a musical (I've mentioned it before I think) and in my teens tracked down a copy of Old Possums Book of Practical Cats and was not in the least disappointed. I find it impressive that without resorting to too much archaic phrasing it all still feels believable for the time period it's meant to show. Maybe that's partly because the story thread was picked up in Blackadder, where archaic language tends to get thrown at the fourth wall as a matter of course (not to mention literally beating up Shakespeare) so I find myself drawing certain similarities there. Of course this play came first and was more than likely a large part of the inspiration, but I'd seen the series before I came across the play.

The multiple epilogues - first the knights, then the priests and villagers - certainly do the job of twisting the take-away message. It's somewhat rare to see everyone's motivations and explanations in a single play. It does make the last part of the play a little bit clunky compared to the rest, particularly the knights' stories delivered in prose rather than verse, but that change of pace and tone fits entirely with what they're saying - that really this bishop wanted to die a martyr and pretty much brought it on himself, that as the killers they did it not for pleasure but because they were sent. The various reactions of those who live on in the town tell another story, that he is remembered as a martyr, perhaps because they don't know why or how he came to that end.