Posted on 20th Sep 2024 09:32:26 PM Theatre and Drama
The dramatic function of something is how it helps the story to move on, how it helps the drama to progress, what it does for the story structurally. I.e., a character's dramatic function describes the structural reason of the character which is in a story. The dramatic function of a character describes the purpose of its being. So, the dramatic function of a character is different from the characters dramatic functions. A character's dramatic role would be a descriptive label identifying who they are or what they do in the story. For example, The Policeman, The Wife, The Estranged Father-in-Law, the Bully, the Youngest Daughter, etc. On the contrary, a character's dramatic function is defined by the character elements assigned to that character, such as Chaos, Trust, Desire, etc. The dramatic functions indicate the motivations, methodologies, standards of evaluation, and purposes the characters employ in an effort to resolve the story's problem.
T. S. Eliot's short play, Murder in the Cathedral, was originally written for the Canterbury festival and tells the story of the murder of Archbishop Thomas Beckett (1118-70) by Henry II's henchmen. It is essentially an extended lyrical consideration of the proper residence of temporal and spiritual power, of the obligations of religious believers to the commands of the State, and of the possibility that piety can be selfish unto sin.
The play opens as Beckett returns to Canterbury in December of 1170, after seven years in exile. Four Tempters approach him, separately, and offer him reasons why he should cease to resist Henry. But Beckett resists this blandishment.
In the Murder in the Cathedral the four knights – Reginald Fitz Urse, Sir High de Morville, William de Tarci and Richard le Breton, appear in the second part of the drama. As Part One saw the entrance of the four Tempters, this Part features four Knights, who enter the Archbishop's Hall, telling the three Priests that they have urgent business from the King that they must share with Thomas. Impatient and anxious, the Knights bully the Priests until Thomas appears. In this part of the play Beckett is confronted and murdered by Four Knights, acting at the behest, explicit or otherwise, of Henry. Beckett had further antagonized Henry, upon his return, by opposing the coronation of Henry's son. This prompted the King to his infamous utterance: "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" On December 29, 1170, four knights of his court assassinated Beckett inside the Canterbury cathedral, turning an already heinous act into a cause celebre throughout Christendom. Eliot uses this section of the play to explore the possibility that Beckett was actually wrong in his argument with Henry.
In their initial confrontation the Knights are quite worked up, but Beckett answers reasonably:
THE THREE KNIGHTS
You are the Archbishop in revolt against the King; in
rebellion to the King and the law of the land;
You are the Archbishop who was made by the King;
whom he set in your place to carry out his command.
You are his servant, his tool, and his jack,
You wore his favours on your back,
You had your honours all from his hand; from him you
had the power, the seal and the ring.
This is the man who was the tradesman's son: the back-
stairs brat who was born in Cheapside;
This is the creature that crawled upon the King;
swollen with blood and swollen with pride.
Creeping out of the London dirt,
Crawling up like a louse on your shirt,
The man who cheated, swindled, lied; broke his oath
and betrayed his King.
THOMAS
This is not true.
Both before and after I received the ring
I have been a loyal subject to the King.
Saving my order, I am at his command,
As his most faithful vassal in the land.
But is that "Saving my order" which sticks in the craw of royalists, the idea that Beckett owes a higher duty to the Church, on some things, than to the Crown. Just as the Knights are about to strike him down they are interrupted by some priests and Beckett has time to prepare himself for the now inevitable end, though the priests urge him to hide :
PRIESTS (Severally)
My Lord you must not stop here. To the minster.
Through the cloister. No time to waste. They are coming back, armed. To the altar, to the altar.
THOMAS
All my life they have been coming, these feet. All my life
I have waited. Death will come only when I am worthy,
And if I am worthy, there is no danger.
I have therefore only to make perfect my will.
After they level other charges and demand that he absolve those bishops that “he had previously excommunicated, Thomas refuses, saying that, “It is not Becket who pronounces doom, / But the Law of Christ's Church.” He exits and the Knights follow, leaving the Chorus to describe the evil that they have recently witnessed. Thomas reenters to comfort the Chorus. The Priests, however, drag Thomas into the cathedral while he protests.
Beckett can now sense that he is approaching the proper attitude of selflessness, that he is truly accepting martyrdom in defence of the ideas and ideals of the Church, rather than selfishly seeking martyrdom for personal reasons of fame and glory. So when the Knights return and the priests propose barring the doors, he says:
Unbar the doors! Throw open the doors!
I will not have the house of prayer, the church of Christ,
The sanctuary, turned into a fortress.
The Church shall protect her own, in her own way, not
As oak and stone; stone and oak decay,
Give no stay, but the Church shall endure.
The church shall be open, even to our enemies. Open the door!
The scene then shifts inside the cathedral, where the Priests are barring the doors while Thomas insists, “I will not have the Church of Christ, / This sanctuary, turned into a fortress.” He also says that, “The Church will protect her own,” but the Priests argue that the Knights are not in their right mind. Thomas persists, however, and commands the Priests to open the door. The Knights enter, searching for Becket. After refusing to recant any of his former convictions or renounce any of his former actions, Thomas prays: “Now to Almighty God... I commend my cause and that of the Church.” The Knights then start doing what they came to do, during which the Chorus laments the curse being placed on their land and their lives. After their cry of, “Clean the air! Clean the sky! Wash the wind!” Thomas is finally dead.
Thomas's unshaken devotion to his spiritual life is seen throughout the Interlude and Part Two. In Part Two, when faced with the menace of the four Knights, Thomas refuses to flee, since he is "not in danger: only nearer to death. Believing so, Thomas orders a priest to open the door of the cathedral. He then proclaims, “I give my life / To the Law of God above the Law of Man.” As the Knights kill him, Thomas does not beg for any mercy or postponement; instead, he begins a prayer Almighty God. Although tempted with physical pleasures and threatened with physical violence, Thomas remains true to what he sees as the pattern of God's will in his life. Here the Four Knight helps to show Thomas’s devotion to his spiritual life. Without the help of the knights it would not have been possible to show Thomas’s devotion to the full degree. By refuting the four tempters he showed his mental strength but it would not have been clear without the four knights that he can also withstand the threat of physical violence.
Eliot, however, does not leave it at that. He also allows the murderers to have their say, and they do so in a direct conversation with the audience:
[The KNIGHTS, having completed the murder, advance
to the front of the stage and address the audience.]
FIRST KNIGHT
We beg you to give us your attention for a few moments. We know that you may be disposed to judge unfavourably of our action. You are Englishmen, and therefore you believe in fair play: and when you see one man being set upon by four, then your sympathies are all with the underdog. I respect such feelings. I share them. Nevertheless, I appeal to your sense of honour. You are Englishmen, and therefore will not judge anybody without hearing both sides of the case.
As they put their case, it becomes clear that this murder is not self-serving either:
THIRD KNIGHT
We are not getting anything out of this. We have much more to lose than to gain. We are four plain Englishmen who put our country first. I dare say we didn't make a very good impression when we came in just now. The fact is that we knew we had taken on a pretty stiff job; I'll only speak for myself, but I had drunk a good deal--I am not a drinking man ordinarily--to brace myself up for it. When you come to the point, it does go against the grain to kill an Archbishop, especially when you have been brought up in good Church traditions. So if we seemed a bit rowdy, you will understand why it was; and for my part I am awfully sorry about it.
We realised this was our duty, but all the same we had to work ourselves up to it. And, as i said, we are not getting a penny out of this. We know perfectly well how things will turn out. King Henry--God bless him--will have to say, for reasons of state, that he never meant this to happen; and there is going to be an awful row; and at the best we shall have to spend the rest of our lives abroad. And even when reasonable people come to see that the Archbishop had to be put out of the way--and personally I had a tremendous admiration for him--you must have noticed what a good show he put up at the end--they won't give us any glory.
When we consider the unification of power in the hands of central authorities which the forging of the modern State requires, few can argue with the point that the Archbishop and his defence of the Church courts did indeed need to be "put out of the way." We may, we must, disapprove of their methods, but the Knights should be seen as just as much duty-bound as Beckett.
It is this kind of interplay and the confrontation between Church and State which informed society at its healthiest. It was men like Beckett and the Knights, willing to sacrifice even their lives in discharging their respective duties, who created the great Western institutions. So long as there were men like Beckett for the State to reckon with, to stand as moral examples and human rebukes to the power of the State, there existed a serious counterbalance to the worst excesses of that power. Indeed, such was the weight of Christian revulsion against this murder that Henry had to scourge himself publicly to atone for it.
The Four Knights Sent by King Henry to kill Thomas, parallel the Four Tempters of Part One. While the Tempters offer intellectual and spiritual trickery, the Knights threaten Thomas with physical violence, ultimately following through on their threat when they kill him near the end of the play. When they arrive at the cathedral and demand that Thomas acquiesce to the King's demands, he refuses. They murder him and then "present their case'' to the audience in the form of a mock inquest in which they assert their blamelessness in the entire affair. Although their names are mentioned during their speeches to the audience, the Knights are not as different from each other as are the Three Priests.
Bibliography
Eliot, T. S. Murder in the Cathedral, Harcourt Brace, 1935.
Eliot, T S "Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry" in Selected Essays, Faber and Faber.
Browne, E. Martin. The Making of T.S. Eliot's Plays. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Browne, E. Martin. "T.S. Eliot in the Theatre: The Director's Memories", T. S. Eliot - The Man and His Work, Tate, Allen (ed), Delta, New York, 1966.
Hoellering, George. "Filming Murder in the Cathedral." T.S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday. Ed. Neville Braybrooke. New York: Books for Libraries, 1968. pp. 81–84.
Robert Speaight. "With Becket in Murder in the Cathedral", T. S. Eliot - The Man and His Work, Tate, Allen (ed), Delta, New York, 1966.
Dramatic, Function, Knights, Murder, Cathedral, Dialogue, Poetry, Eliot, Theatre, Directors, Memories, Filming, Becket, Canterbury, Festival, Archbishop, Thomas, Beckett, Morville, William
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