Literature Library study guide
Murder in the Cathedral
Thomas Becket returns to Canterbury knowing political conflict may kill him, but the play tests whether accepting martyrdom can remain faithful rather than become another form of ambition.
- Literary form
- Verse drama
- First published
- 1935
- Literary period
- Twentieth-century modernist religious drama
- Region / tradition
- England
- Original language
- English
What happens in this work?
Murder in the Cathedral dramatizes the final days of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was killed in 1170 after conflict with King Henry II. The play begins on 2 December with the Women of Canterbury waiting in fear. They are not court historians or political leaders. They represent people who endure the consequences of conflicts they do not control and would prefer ordinary suffering to the arrival of a great event. Three priests announce that Becket is returning after seven years away. His arrival promises spiritual authority and threatens political violence at the same time. From the start, the question is not whether danger exists but what kind of meaning people will give it.
Four Tempters visit Becket. The first offers a return to easy friendship, safety, and pleasure with the king. The second offers political power through serving the king as Chancellor again. The third proposes alliance with rebellious barons, turning church authority into a political weapon against royal power. Becket rejects these paths, but the fourth temptation is harder because it uses his own spiritual language. It invites him to seek martyrdom deliberately so that he can gain eternal glory and triumph over enemies. Becket recognizes that a deed can look holy while being driven by pride. He must accept the possibility of death without arranging death as a personal achievement.
An interlude takes the form of Becket’s Christmas sermon. He explains the Christian understanding that rejoicing and mourning meet in martyrdom and that a true martyr does not manufacture sainthood through personal will. The form changes the relationship between actor and audience: spectators temporarily become a congregation addressed by the Archbishop. When Part Two begins on 29 December, four knights arrive and accuse Becket of treason. They demand that he answer the king, reverse his resistance, or leave. Priests try to protect him and close the cathedral doors, but Becket orders them opened. The choice can appear brave, obedient, proud, or politically provocative depending on how an audience interprets the spiritual test established earlier.
The knights kill Becket in the cathedral. The Women of Canterbury respond through a chorus filled with bodily, natural, and domestic images of violation. They had feared becoming witnesses because witness creates responsibility: after seeing the murder, they cannot return to ignorance. The priests lament and move toward praise of martyrdom. Then the play makes a startling change. The four knights step forward and address the audience in ordinary modern prose. They offer reasonable-sounding defenses: that they had no selfish motive, that Becket threatened constitutional order, that his behavior amounted to suicide, and that practical citizens should judge calmly rather than emotionally.
The ending returns to choral praise and prayer, but the knights’ speeches prevent the audience from treating the event as a distant picture with an automatic label. Eliot makes spectators into a jury hearing competing accounts. A student does not have to share the play’s Anglo-Catholic theology to analyze its central problem. Becket must distinguish faithful acceptance from hunger for power; the knights turn state violence into administrative necessity; the chorus moves from avoidance through contamination toward witness. The murder itself is historically known before the play begins, so suspense comes from motive, language, and judgment. Who controls the story after political violence? How can a person act without making private ambition look like public duty? And what responsibility falls on ordinary people who want only to be left outside the conflict?
What was happening when it was written?
Eliot wrote the play for the 1935 Canterbury Festival, and it was first performed in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral. The cathedral archive preserves the annotated prompt book from that production. The canonical record’s 1934 date likely reflects the beginning of composition or an early bibliographic assignment; the first performance and first Faber publication were in 1935. The historical Thomas Becket had been Henry II’s Chancellor before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. Conflict over royal authority, church privilege, and clerical jurisdiction led to exile and then to his return; four knights killed him on 29 December 1170. Eliot, who had joined the Church of England in 1927, drew on Greek chorus, medieval religious drama, sermon, verse dialogue, and modern prose. The play was written while authoritarian politics were intensifying in Europe, which makes the knights’ appeal to order and necessity especially important without turning them into exact stand-ins for one regime.
Who matters, and why?
Thomas Becket
Becket is not tested only by fear of death. His hardest danger is spiritual pride: the wish to control martyrdom and its future meaning. His actions require judgment because sincere faith, political resistance, personal authority, and theatrical self-awareness remain close together.
The Women of Canterbury
The Chorus speaks for ordinary people who expect to pay for elite conflict. Their desire not to know is understandable, yet events make them witnesses. Their changing images give the murder social, bodily, environmental, and spiritual consequences beyond one famous man.
The Four Tempters
The Tempters organize possible motives from comfort through political power to spiritual fame. The fourth is strongest because it cannot be rejected by changing goals alone; Becket must examine why he wants the apparently correct goal.
The Four Knights
The Knights perform violence and then become advocates for their own interpretation. Their modern prose invites the audience to recognize familiar public language about stability, duty, and reason. Persuasive style does not make their account neutral.
The Priests
The Priests provide institutional memory, fear, protection, lament, and later religious interpretation. Their effort to bar the doors conflicts with Becket’s command to open them. They show how followers must act when spiritual leadership invites physical danger.
Big ideas to track
Right action and wrong motive
The fourth temptation makes motive central. A person can perform an act that others praise while secretly seeking glory, revenge, or control. The play asks whether Becket can release ownership of both death and reputation.
Political violence and public explanation
The knights do not deny the killing; they reframe it as necessary service to order. Their speeches show how violence seeks legitimacy after the act through calm vocabulary, selective evidence, and claims that alternatives were impossible.
Witness and ordinary responsibility
The Women of Canterbury first want to avoid history because awareness brings danger and guilt. Once they witness the murder, neutrality is no longer available. The play treats seeing and naming as burdens that can also create community.
Church, state, and competing authority
The historical conflict concerns more than private dislike between king and archbishop. Royal law, clerical power, political loyalty, and spiritual obedience claim the same people. Each institution presents its authority as a form of necessary order.
How the writing works
Chorus and changing collective imagery
The Women speak in patterned verse that moves among seasons, animals, kitchens, blood, earth, smell, and prayer. Their language translates distant political struggle into daily physical experience and shows the community changing under pressure.
Sharp changes of public form
The play moves from poetic chorus to temptation dialogue, Christmas sermon, ritual murder, and modern prose defense. Each form asks the audience to listen differently. No single style receives automatic ownership of truth.
Known ending and internal suspense
The title announces murder and history supplies the victim. Suspense therefore moves inward: what will Becket want, how will the community respond, and which account will audiences accept? Foreknowledge makes motive more important than surprise.
Moments to notice while you read
The Women of Canterbury resist the coming event
What to notice: Identify the ordinary routines they value, the danger they expect, and why avoiding knowledge seems safer than welcoming Becket’s return.
Why it matters: The opening refuses a heroic viewpoint. Historical greatness first appears as a threat to people who know they will suffer without controlling the decision.
The first three Tempters offer worldly paths
What to notice: Separate pleasure, royal office, and baronial alliance, then connect each offer to Becket’s past roles and possible future power.
Why it matters: The sequence shows that resistance to one authority can still become a search for another kind of control. Becket’s problem is larger than simple loyalty.
The fourth Tempter offers martyrdom
What to notice: Compare the action proposed with the motive attached to it, and watch why an apparently spiritual offer frightens Becket more than worldly temptation.
Why it matters: The scene gives the play its moral center. Correct appearance cannot purify an act pursued for fame, revenge, or domination over future memory.
The Christmas sermon addresses the audience
What to notice: Notice the shift from dramatic exchange to public teaching and how the sermon defines martyrdom before the knights arrive.
Why it matters: The sermon prepares a standard for judging Becket, but its authority is also theatrical. Spectators must decide how teaching and action fit together.
Becket orders the cathedral doors opened
What to notice: Examine the Priests’ practical fear, Becket’s reasons, the earlier temptation, and the difference between accepting danger and seeking it.
Why it matters: The action cannot be judged from outcome alone. It forces the audience to test motive at the exact point where spiritual commitment and self-dramatization might look identical.
The Knights defend themselves in prose
What to notice: List each argument, the audience it imagines, the facts it selects, and the effect of replacing verse and ritual with modern reasonable speech.
Why it matters: The sudden style makes medieval violence sound administratively familiar. It turns spectators into jurors and exposes how calm explanation can normalize force.
The Chorus moves from horror toward witness
What to notice: Compare the women’s first wish to remain outside events with their later bodily images, confession of shared sin, and final praise.
Why it matters: The community does not escape contamination, but it gains a language for responsibility. Witness means carrying the event rather than watching it without consequence.
Questions to test your understanding
Answer in your own words. Then point to a specific moment in the work that supports your answer.
- Why is the fourth temptation more dangerous to Becket than safety or political power?
- How does the Chorus change the story from a conflict among powerful men into a communal event?
- What is gained and what is risked when Becket orders the cathedral doors opened?
- Choose one Knight's defense and explain how its language tries to make violence seem necessary.
- Why does Eliot place a sermon and modern prose speeches inside a verse play?
- Can an audience ever know that Becket has rejected pride completely, or is uncertainty part of the test?
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Eliot's play remains protected by copyright in many jurisdictions. This guide contains original educational commentary, reproduces no passage, and points readers to the official Eliot resource and libraries for lawful editions.