Poetic Drama /Verse Drama of Modern age Essay

Eliots plays attempt to rejuvenate poesy play and usu wholey treat the same themes as in his metrical composition. They include Murder in the cathedral (1935), dealing with the final hours of doubting doubting Thomas Becket The Family Reunion (1939) The Cocktail Party (1950) The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1959)..(1) Indeed, Eliot hoped t palpebra the read and critical reception of archaeozoic upstart measure gambling would ascertain the production of in advance(p)ist rhythm playing period. In the 1924 essay Four Elizabethan Dramatists, Eliot calls for the m expenditure of Elizabethan frolictic event to adopt a r exploitationary influence on the future of playing period.(2) Yet, in his posterior indites as a write dramatist, Eliot always keeps an arms length among himself and the earlier modern prominent poets, especially Shakespe atomic number 18, whom he saw as his strongest precursors in the developing of a modernist English poesy d rama. In the 1951 piece Poetry and Drama, on the matter of measure line style in his own first study poetical drama, Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot writes, As for the versification, I was and advised at this tier that the essential was to avoid any echo of Shakespeare. hence what I kept in mind was the versification of Everyman.(3) Elsewhere, he is keenly certain of the challenges of writing verse drama for a modernist theatre The difficulty of the causation is as well as the difficulty of the audience.Both establish to be trained deuce need to be conscious of many a(prenominal) a nonher(prenominal) topics which neither an Elizabethan dramatist, nor an Elizabethan audience, had any need to k in a flash.(4) Eliot finds his whip for training his p. 105 audience and himself, as dramatist, pocketable in the examples Shakespeare and his contemporaries provide than in the field of studys their medieval predecessors left(p) behind. This essay examines Eliots status as a medieval modernist. The periodicity of Eliots Middle Ages, problematic as it is, represents the convergence of his animus against contemporaneousness and liberalism with his desire for a religiosity that is not marginal, fragmented, and compartmentalized simply quite a central to the activity of passing(a) sprightliness in a cultivation and society best characterized by the words unity, integration, and orderthe ideological voice communication of conservatism. In part, the c formerlypt of Eliot asmedieval modernist is indebted to Michael T. Salers take a shit on visual modernism, the English avant-garde, and the London Underground transport system. What Saler describes in terms of medieval modernism is very much a military position or attitude towards the relationship between aesthetic production (imagination) and the returns of consumption (reception) grounded in a affable functionalism thought to have its origins in the medieval.I should be quick to point out that Saler is rather unsure on the point with regard to Eliot himself While T. S. Eliot strength be called a medieval modernist because of his admiration for the organic and spiritual community of the Middle Ages unneurotic with his impersonal conception of art, his elitist and forma be given views isolate him from several of the central terms of the impost as I have de bookd it.Eliots ambivalence towards the archean modern and repeated turns to the medieval evidence a contradiction between Eliots keep-long desire for a clearly articulated unity, integration, and order in all aspects of everyday life, including writing and religion, and his fetishization of an early modern period he imagines in terms of anarchy, disorder, and decay. Eliot repeatedly mystifies the early modern period. In his origination to G. Wilson Knights The Wheel of squirt, Eliotgives voice to a vision of the early modern past as a period of phantasmagoric peril, uncertainty, flush unknowability provided with Sh akespeare, we seem to be moving in an air of Cimmerian darkness. The conditions of his life, the conditions under which dramatic art was then possible, seem as yet more remote from us than those of Dante verse drama is any drama write as verse to be spoken another possible global term is poetic drama. For a very long period verse drama was the dominant form of drama in Europe (and was also important in non-European cultures). Greek tr vul substructureizedy and Racines plays are written in verse, as is al just about all of Shakespeares drama, and Goethes Faust. Verse drama is particularly associated with the seriousness of calamity, providing an artistic reason to write in this form, as well as the practical superstar that verse lines are easier for the actors to memorize exactly. In the act half of the twentieth speed of light verse drama fell close completely out of fashion with dramatists writing in English (the plays of Christopher fry andT. S. Eliot being possibly t he end of a long tradition).As Eliot sank ever more deeply into his Anglo-Catholic shtik and he no longer had Pound around to cut the plunk and grain filler out of his usage, he turned to writing verse drama. He wanted toreachpeople.HeprobablywantedtobeShakespeare.Murder in the Cathedral was the first of these verse dramas, and the only bingle I good deal even begin to tolerate. The title is intended to plague a whodunnit it may be a ponderous Eliotian attempt at a witticism. The joke, much(prenominal) as it is, is that the murderee is Archbishop St. Thomas Becket, the killers are two(prenominal)(prenominal) of Henry IIs knights, and the scene of the crime is Canterbury Cathedral, anno domini 1170. If you happened to be hiatus around Canterbury in 1935, this was a big win because Canterbury Cathedral is where the thing was first transacted. (If you were hanging aroundCanterburyin1170,callmeweshouldtalk).The background male monarch Henry IIs wanted to gain influence oer the Church in England. He appointed Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury to that end because Becket was his boy. at a time in office, Beckets loyalty shifted to the Church. The two came into conflict over the behave of trying clergy in ecclesiastical courts for civil offenses, and Becket fled to France. Whilein France he continued to defy Henry, going so furthest as to exclude rough of Henrys more loyalbishops.At the commencement ceremony of the play, Becket returns from his seven-year exile in France. He goes straight to Canterbury, arriving in time for ar be given I. Four Tempters tempt him. Mean bit, Henry has put on his John Stanfa hat and made an offhand remark to some of his knights just about how convenient it would be if Becket werent around any more. The knights draw the obvious conclusion about what he means, and they depart for Canterbury. When they arrive, Becket explains that he is loyal to a higher focalise than the king. They reply that they arent, and they k ill him at the altar. The bloodshed is followed by a flesh out of self-exculpatory forensic rhetoric from the knights They argue persuasively that theyve done the right thing, hardly not too persuasively because the author doesnt agree. Exeunt knights some priests pray at each other and asperse the audience veraciousnight,goodnight.Historically, Henry disavowed the whole thing, the knights fell into disgrace, and Becket was heaponized.The whole thing suffers from Late Eliot Syndrome No tack is left unsledgehammered. He lectures us about his points rather than demonstrating or illustrating them, and the writing is practically less than inspired. Still, its better than his other verse dramas The form and the manner of speaking are at least appropriate to the solid, and the material holds up under the weight of the Message. Eliot subsequently attempt to pile exchangeable Messages onto mid century English bourgeois melodrama-inverseItdidnt make water.At the height of his powe rs, Eliot tycoon have done something receivedly interesting with Murder in the Cathedral.Christopher Fry, who has died, aged 97, was, with TS Eliot, the leading figure in the revivification of poetic drama that took place in Britain in the late forties. His most best-selling(predicate) play, The wenchs Not For Burning, ran for nine months in the due west End in 1949. But although Fry was a sacrificial victim of the theatrical revolution of 1956, he bore his fall from fashion with the stoic grace of a Christian humanist and increasingly turned his attention to writing epic films, most notably Ben Hur (1959). The Lady remains Frys most popular play the leading subprogram of Thomas Mendip has riped actors as various as Richard Chamberlain, Derek Jacobi and Kenneth Branagh. Today, one is struck by the way in which Frys euphuistic language at one point, the hero describes himself as a perambulate vegetable patched with inconsequential hair overtakes the dramatic march. But in a postwar theatre that had little room for realism, Frys medieval setting, rich verbal conceits and self-puncturing irony delighted audiences, and the play became the flagship for the revivification of poetic drama. At the same time, Eliots The Cocktail Party enjoyed a West End vogue, and a brand- freshly impetus was born. Though less of a public theorist than Eliot, Fry belt up believed passionately in the validity of poetic drama.As he wrote in the magazine, Adam In prose, we suffer the eccentricity of things, in poetry their concentricity, the sense of relationship between them a effect that all things express the same identity and are all contained in one discipline of revelation. For a period in the late 1940s and early 50s, Fry helped to resurrect English verse drama, to which he brought colour, be givenment and a stoic gaiety. How many of his plays will survive, only time move tell. But, at his best, he brought an undeniable, spiritual elan to the drab world of pos twar British theatre. He certainly deserves to be remembered as something more than the zeal for Margaret Thatchers famous remark, The ladys not for turning. For many centuries from the Greeks onwards verse was, throughout Europe, the natural and almost exclusive middling for the composition and presentation of dramatic whole kit and caboodle with any pretensions to seriousness or the status of art.Western dramas twin origins, in theGreek Festivals and in the rituals of the medieval church, naturally predisposed it to the use of verse. For tragedy verse long remained the only puritanical vehicle. In comedy the use of prose became increasingly common giving rise, for example, to such(prenominal)(prenominal) interesting courtships as Ariostos I suppositi, written in prose in 1509 and re giveed twenty age subsequently in verse. (La cassaria also exists in both prose and verse). Shakespeares use of prose in comic scenes, especially those of low life, and for stiff contrast in certain scenes of the tragedies and history plays, shows an increasing awareness of the possibilities of the medium and perhaps already contains an implicit associationbetween prose and realism. Verse continued to be the dominant medium of tragedy throughout the seventeenth century even domestic tragedies such as A Yorkshire Tragedy (Anon., 1608) or Thomas Heywoods A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603) were represent in booby verse. For all the continuing use of verse it is hard to escape the expression that by the end of the seventeenth century it had largely ceased to be a very living medium for dramatists. Increasingly the prevailing idioms of dramatic verse became decidedly literary, owing more to the work of earlier dramatists than to any real relationship with the language of its own time. By 1731 George Lillos The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell, for all its clumsiness and limitations, in its presentation of a bourgeois tragedy in generally effective pr ose archieved a theatrical life sentence and plausibility largely absent from contemporary verse tragedies from Addisons Cato (1713), Thomsons Sophonisba (1730) and Agamemnon (1738), or Johnsons Irene (1749).The example of Racine was vital to such plays, only it was not one that proved very fertile. Lillo was praised in France by Diderot and Marmontel, in Germany by Lessing and Goethe. It is not unreasonable to see Lillos work as an early and clumsy anticipation of Ibsens. The London Merchant constitutes one indication of the effective death of verse drama. Others are not far to seek. In France, Houdar de La Motte was also writing prose tragedies in the 1720s, and Stendhal, in the 1820s was insistent that prose was now the only possible medium for a viable tragedy. Ibsen largely creaky verse after Peer Gynt (1867), in favour of prose plays more straight off and realistically concerned with contemporary issues. Awell-known letter to Lucie creature (25 May 1883) proclaims that V erse has been most injurious to the art of drama It is unbelievable that verse will be employed to any extent worthy mentioning in the drama of the immediate future since the aims of the dramatists of the future are almost certain to be incompatible with it.Against the background of such a class of development, later dramatic works in verse have a lot seemed eccentric or academic this should not blind us, however, to the considerable achievements of modern verse drama and to the importance of the testimony they bear to an idea of drama often radically disparate from the prevailing modern conceptions. A music genre which has given rise to some of the most interesting work of DAnnunzio and Hofmannsthal, Yeats and Eliot, is surely not a negligible one.In the English context, the verse dramas of the Romantics and the Victorians already constituted a kind of revival part of a conscious effort to bring poetry back to the theatre. For the Romantics there was still a potential audienc e with some sense that verse was the propermedium for tragedy. The theatrical inexperience of the poets, however, made them ill-equipped for real dramatic achievement. The efforts of Wordsworth (The Borderers), 1795-6), Coleridge (eg. Remorse, 1813), and Keats (Otho the Great, 1819) remain of only antiquarian interest, judged as works for the theatre, though all have much to tell about their makers, and the Borderers, at least, is a work of considerable poetic substance. Perhaps slightly more praise might be elongated to some of Byrons verse dramas (eg. Manfred, 1817 Marino Faliero, 1820 Sardanapalus, 1821) and Shelleys Cenci (1818) contains some scenes of considerable power. For most of the English romantics, however, the keister of Shakespeare proved oppressive admiration, or rather reverence, for his example produced in their own work a poetic and theatrical idiom lacking all freshness and contemporaneity.It was in the work of other lands and languages that the example of Shake speare could work more positively. In Germany, for example, there emerged a rich new tradition of verse drama in the works of Lessing (eg. Nathan Der Weise, 1779), Goethe, Schiller, Werner, Kleist (notably in Penthesilea, 1808, and Der Prinz vonHomburg, 1821) and others. In Italy the early plays of Manzoni (Il Conte di Carmagnola, 1820 Adelchi, 1822) provided en example which only a few poet-dramatists endeavoured to follow, while others -such as Niccolini were more concerned with an attempt to revive Greek models of tragedy. (In Italy verse drama could often not escape from the keister of the operatic tradition). In America too, verse drama was being attempted by dramatists such as John Howard Payne (eg. Brutus, 1818), Robert Mongomery Bird (The Gladiator, 1831) and, a work of some quality, George Henry Bokers Francesca da Rimini (1855). In 1827-8 the English party made its famous visit to Paris, performing, amongst other works, all four of Shakespeares major tragedies. The impa ct was enormous.One of those most affected and impressed was the new Victor Hugo. In Hugos plays, much influenced by Shakespeare, romanticism plant far more effective expression in verse drama than it had ever run aground in England. In plays such as Hernani (1830), Le roi samuse (1832), Ruy Blas (1838) and Les Bur goods (1843), Hugo creates a verse idiom of immense wholeheartedness which articulates visions of concentrated and extreme human emotion. At his best Hugos dissimilarity of character, if crude, is also striking. Other succesful versedramas later in the century included Francois Coppes Severo Torelli (1883) Les Jacobites (1885) and Pour la couronne (1895), as well as Edmond Rostands Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Certainly it is in the work of French and German poets (in plays by Hebbel, Grillparzer and Grabbe as well as those of the poets mentioned earlier) and in the early verse plays of Ibsen notably cross (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) that something identical the ful l potential of verse drama is expressed. In England nothing of similar power exists in the nineteenth century. Theplays of James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) such as William Tell (1825) and The Love Chase (1837) provided effective roles for the great actor-manager Macready, but have little now to offer.Macready also acted in Lyttons The Lady of Lyons (1838) and Richelieu (1839), both of which had considerable theatrical success, and are not entirely without long-suffering merits. Poets such as Tennyson (eg. Queen Mary, 1876 Harold, 1876 Becket, 1879) and Browning (eg. Strafford, 1837 A Blot in the Scutcheon, 1843) also wrote for the theatre but displayed very little sense of the genuinely theatrical (Tennyson assumed that he could leave it to Irving to fitBecket for the stage). Other poets wrote pressure dramas neer intended for performance Sir Henry Taylors enormous Philip cutting edge Artevelde (1834) is an archetypal example of the genre, a work which, its author readily c onfessed was not intended for the stage and was properly an Historical Romance, cast in dramatic and rythmical form. Much the same might be said of two later and finer works Swinburnes Bothwell (1874) of which Edmund Gosse rightly observes that in good deal it one of the five-act Jidai-Mono or classic plays of eighteenth-century Japan, and it could only be performed, like an oriental drama, on successive nights, and The Dynasts (19038) of Thomas Hardy, the text of which occupies some 600 pages and which is described in its subtitle as An Epic-Drama of the War of Napoleon in Three Parts, cardinal Acts, and One Hundred and Thirty Scenes.The requirements and possibilities of practical theatre have clearly been left far behind the divorce of the poet from the performers seems complete. Yet there were others who seek to maintain the relationship between poetry and theatre. The plays of Stephen Phillips, for example (eg. Herod, 1901 Ulysses, 1902 Paolo and Francesca, 1902 The fagot, 1912) have neither the psychological perception of Swinburne nor the historical insight of Hardy, but they did hold the stage with considerable success. Phillips had plenty of theatrical experience, having been an actor in the theatrical guild of his cousin, Frank Benson. Phillips verse plays were produced by Beerbohm Tree, and they display a sophisticated moderate of theatrical effect and a wide-ranging, if almost wholly derivative, verse rhetoric which has, very occasionally, genuinely poetic moments.Elsewhere in the early years of the century there is to be found worthwhile work by a multitude of minor figures. Lawrence Binyons Attila (1907) and Ayuli (1923) Gordon Bottomleys King Lears Wife (1915) and Gruach (1923) John Masefields Good Friday (1917), Esther (1922) and Tristan and Isolt (1927) John Drinkwaters Cophetua (1911) and anarchy (1914) Arthur Symons The Death of Agrippina and Cleopatra in Judea (1916) T.Sturge Moores Daimonissa (1930) are all of interest and substanc e, but none can be said to make an overwhelming case for the genre, and all are, in varying degrees unable to escape from the long shadow of Shakespeare, especially as reinterpreted by the nineteenth-century.Under fresh influences French symbolism and Japanese Noh theatre in particular verse drama began to seek new possibilities. Gordon Bottomleys later works such as Fire at Callart (1939) showed an awareness of the possibilities offered by the model of the Noh. Yeats, of line of credit, had more fully explored such possibilities in works such as At the Hawks Well, The Only jealousy of Emer, The Dreaming of the Bones and Calvary ( represent c.1915-20), insofar as they were the means of firing off from the obligations of a naturalistic theatre. Verse, music, ritual and dance were woven into a antonymous whole. (Irish successors to yeats include Austin Clarke, whose verse plays have been performed by the Abbey area, the Cambridge festival family and others). In later plays su ch as The Hernes Egg (1935) and Purgatory (1938) evolves a personal and convincing idiom (both verbally and stagily) for verse drama. These are superficially simple, but metaphysically profound works, both verbally exciting and theatrically striking.Elsewhere in Europe, the work of Gabriele DAnnunzio (eg. La citt morta, 1898 Francesca da Rimini, 1901 La figlia di Iorio, 1904) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (eg. Jedermann, 1912 Das grosse Salzburger Welttheater, 1922) was bearing eloquent testimony to the continuing potential of the genre. In France Claudel was creating a series of verse plays upon religious and philosophical themes, whose intense lyricality and startling imagery for long went without full appreciation (eg. Partage de midi, 1906 Le pain in the neck dur, 1918 Le Soulier de satin, 1928-9). Other French twentieth-century verse-dramas include works by Char, Csaire and Cocteau, but the poetic qualities which characterise much that has been most striking in modern French dram a have more generally found expression in prose plays rather than verse plays as, for example, in the work of Giradoux, Anouilh, Beckett, Ionesco and Vian. In Spain, Lorca mixes verse and prose in his plays.In Britain the 1930s saw a new generation of poets whose experiments did much to broaden the range in terms both of form and content of verse drama. The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936) and The rising slope of F.6 (1937) were collaborations by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood which brought a fresh wit and intellectuality, a new radicalism of social comment and contemporary relevance, to the genre. T.S.Eliots plays notably Murder in the Cathedral(1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) offered persuasive instances of how verse might, for the dramatist, be the means by which one could get at the permanent and universal rather than the merely evanescent and naturalistic. Murder in the Cathedral was written for performance in Canterbury Cathedral, while The Family Reunion was compos ed for the commercial theatre. Theidioms of the two plays are, therefore, necessarily very different taken together the two offer a promise not wholly fulfilled by Eliots later plays, such as The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). In these later plays the verse lacks the confidence to be genuinely poetic the linguistic passion of the pre-war plays gives way to something far more prosaic. Murder in the Cathedral is, in part, striking for its mixture of verse forms and idioms the Auden and Isherwood collaborations drew on the techniques of the music hall, the pantomimist and the revue.From the 1930s onwards verse dramas have continued to be composed in Britain (and America), many of them works of considerable distinction. Most have been composed for performance outside the commercial theatre for churches and cathedrals, for universities or drama schools, or for some theatrical groups devoted to verse drama. In London, for example, the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, holding no more than 150, was opened by Ashley Dukes in 1933 and was home to E.Martin Brownes Pilgrim Players. Browne was central to the revival of verse drama in the middle years of the century. He direct all of Eliots plays, including the first performance of Murder in the Cathedral. In the 1940s he directed, at the Mercury, several important verse plays both religious (eg. Ronald Duncans This Way to the Tomb, 1945 Anne Ridlers The Shadow Factory, 1945) and comic (eg. Christopher Frys A Phoenix too Frequent, 1946 Donagh MacDonaghs Happy as Larry, 1947). Browne was also associated with the remarkable religious plays by Charles Williams (eg.Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, 1936 Seed of Adam, 1937 The put up of the Octopus, 1945). Indeed, the variety of the verse drama produced in these years was very considerable.It includes the grave beauty of Williams plays and the fantastic gaiety of Happy as Larry, its language assured at every turn by t he ballads of Dublin and the idiosyncrasies ofcolloquial Irish. In the plays of Christopher Fry there is a substantial body of work characterised, at its best, by both a vivacity (even exuberance) of language and a well-developed theatricality. Plays such as The Ladys Not for Burning (1948)), Venus sight (1950), A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) and Curtmantle (1961) display a considerable range. Fry can be funny and moving, dazzling and beautiful. He can also be verbose and sentimental. Immensely successful critically and commercially at the stock of his career, Frys reputation has suffered since. His best plays are both prehensile and entertaining, and will surely continue to find admirers. on that point is much that is rewarding, too, in the work of Ronald Duncan in Our Ladys Tumbler (1950), which has some fine choric writing, or in Don Juan (1953) Stephen Spenders visitation of a Judge (1938) is an intriguing experiment, with some highly effective moments. Louis MacNeices The Dark Tower (1946) is a rich andmysterious radio emblem play in verse. The tradition of verse drama has continued to attract writers, and they have continued to produce interesting plays such plays have, however, largely been seen (or read) only by specialised audiences. Few have found their way on to the commercial stage.Robert Gittings Out of this Wood (1955) Jonathan Griffins The Hidden King (1955) John Heath-Stubbs Helen in Egypt, (1958) Patric Dickinsons A Durable Fire (1962) the list might be extended considerably. More recent years have seen the production (or publication) of significant verse plays by, amongst others, Peter Dale (The Cell, 1975 Sephe, 1981), Tony Harrison (eg. The Misanthrope, 1973 Phaedra Britannica, 1975 The Oresteia, 1981 The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, 1990), Seamus Heaney (The Cure at Troy, 1990) and Francis Warner (eg. locomote Reflections, 1982 Living Creation, 1985 Byzantium, 1990). In America the tradition begun in the nineteenth century and continued by dramatists such as Josephine Preston Peabody (eg. Marlowe, 1901) and William Vaughn Moody (eg. The FireBringer, 1904), has had such later practitioners as Percy Mackaye (The Mystery of Hamlet, 1949), Maxwell Anderson (eg. Elizabeth the Queen, 1930 Winterset, 1935), Richard Eberhart (eg. The Visionary Farms, 1952 The Mad Musician, 1962) and Archibald MacLeish (eg. J.B., 1958 Herakles, 1967). Modern verse-drama has extended the formal possibilities of the genre far beyond the traditions ofblank-verse tragedy. A wide range of verse forms, of free-verse, and of experiments derived from the techniques of revue and music-hall have played their part in the evolution of new and striking theatrical forms.Why have so many writers continued to be attracted to verse drama when, as Peter Dale observes, his chances of beholding his work performed are generally very slight? If, like Ibsen after Peter Gynt, the dramatists aim is to write the genuine, plain language spoken in real life (letter of 25 May 1883 quoted above) he will not, presumably, be attracted to verse as a likely medium. If, on the other hand, he qualitys with Yeats that the post-Ibsen prose of Shaws plays was devoid of all emotional price reduction, or if he shares the sentiments expressed by T.S.Eliot in his 1950 lecture on Poetry and Drama, it is more than probable that he will feel it necessary to turn to verseIt seems to me that beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life when directed towards action the part of like which prose drama is wholly decent to express there is a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus This peculiar range of sensibility can be expressed by dramatic poetry, at its moments of greatest intensity. At such moments wetouch the border of those feelings which only music can express. We can never emulate music, because to arrive at the condition o f music would be the decay of poetry, and especially of dramatic poetry. Never the less, I have before my look a kind of mirage of the perfection of verse drama, which would be a number of human action and words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and musical order To go as far in this direction as possible to go, without losing that contact with the ordinary everyday world with which drama must come to terms, seems to me the proper aim of dramatic poetry.Such thoughts enable us to see modern verse drama as much more than that reception against naturalism as which it has often been depicted. At its bestverse drama is too positive an dreaming for it to be adequately understood merely as a reaction to the dominant idiom of the time. Much of what is best and most attractive in European theatre of the last 40 years might be described as post-naturalist, rather than merely anti-naturalist verse-drama has made, and should continue to make, important and characte ristic contributions to post-naturalism. According to Francis Fergussan, a poetic drama is a drama in which you feel the characters are poetry and were poetry before they began to speak. Thus poetry and drama are inseparable. The playwright has to create a pattern to relieve the poetic quality of the play and his poetry performs a double function. First, it is an action itself, so it must do what it says. Secondly, it makes explicit what is really happening. Eliot in his plays has single-minded the problem regarding language, contentandversification.In the twentieth century, the inter-war period was an age fit to the poetic drama. There was a revival and some of the poets like W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot time-tested their hands in writing of poetic plays. This was a reaction against prose plays of G. B. Shaw, Galsworthy and others because these plays showed a certain lack of emotional touch with the moral issue of the age. W. B. Yeats did not like this harsh criticism of the lib eral idea of the nineteenth century at the hands of dramatists like G. B. Shaw. So he thought the drama of ideas was a failure to grasp the reality of the age. On the other hand, the drama of entertainment (artificial comedy) was becoming dry and uninteresting. It was under these circumstances that the modern playwrights like T. S. Eliot, J.M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spendor and so on have made the revival the poetic drama possible.The Choruses.A striking feature of Murder in the Cathedral is Eliots use of poetic let loosees like the choruses in ancient Greek drama. The producer must decide the method which will project most in effect in the theatre these recurring choral passages, spoken by the Women of Canterbury. There are eight poetic rhapsodies or choruses, comprising approximately one fifth ofthe text.The poetry in the choruses invites all the imaginative enrichment which light, music and dance can give it.The chorus commenced in Greek drama, originally as a group of singers or chanters. Later, a Greek playwright called Thespis introduced an actor on the stage who held a dialogue with the leader of the chorus. Playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles added a second and a third actor to interact with the chorus.Finally, the chorus took on the role of participants in the action and interpreters of what is happening on stage. Eliot has based Murder in the Cathedral on the form of classic Greek tragedy. He uses the chorus to enhance the dramatic effect, to take part in the action of the play, and to perform the roles of observer and commentator. His chorus women represent the common people, who lead a life of hard work and struggles,no matter who rules. It is only their faith in God that gives them the strength to endure. These women are uneducated, country folk, who live close to the earth. As a result, they are in tune with the changing seasons and the moods of nature.At present, they have an intuition of death and evil. They fear that the new year, instead of bringing new hope, will bring greater suffering. The three priests have three different reactions to Beckets arrival. The first reacts with the fear of a calamity.The second is a little bold and says that there can hardly be any stay between a king who is busy in intrigue and an archbishop who is an as proud, self-righteous man. The third priest feels that the wheel of time always move ahead, for good or evil. He believes that a wise man, who cannot change the course of the wheel, lets it move at its own pace.