I was researching info to place this work in the time period it was written. The interlude didn't seem to move the plot forward since it was mostly clarifying the themes from the first part before moving on to the second part. However I was struck by imagining what it would have been like to be in the audience of the cathedral watching the actor deliver this "sermon." I expect it would have been more impactful as a performance than reading it.
I found this interesting passage about George Bell, Dean of Canterbury (1924-1929) and Bishop of Chichester (1929-1958), who hoped to revive religious drama and "seek ways and means for the restoration of the artist and the church." Bell also commisioned the performance of John Masefield's
The Coming of Christ in Canterbury Cathedral in 1928. This quote is from
The Image of Christ in Modern Art by Richard Harries.
Quote:
He [Bell] appointed Martin Browne as director of religious drama, and meeting T.S. Eliot in 1930 helped to facilitate Murder in the Cathedral for performance in Canterbury Cathedral, as well as encouraging the novelist Charles Williams and others. He was equally keen to bring painters and sculptors into the orbit of the church. In particular he supported the refugee artist Hans Feibusch in his work for St. Wilfred's, Brighton. Although Feibusch was not a modernist there was still fierce controversy over his work but, as Bell said, "I think we have been taking too narrow a view in what we have thought of as fitting for church decoration." He was sympathetic to Feibusch when the artist remarked, "I would rather be burned as a heretic than as a bad artist."
This bringing together of religion and the arts, in particular Anglo-Catholicism and the arts, flowered after the war in literature, being associated not only with Eliot but also with writers such as Rose Macaulay and Dorothy L. Sayers. It also found expression in the commissioning of works of art by leading artists for churches. As Alexandra Harris put it, referring to the post-war revival, "The beginnings of all this, however, were in that particular turn to the local that marked English Art in the late 1930's and early 1940's." It was a turn which, as she rightly remarks, is above all expressed in Eliot's Four Quartets.
|