Murder in the Cathedral

‘Murder in the Cathedral’, written for the Canterbury Festival in 1935, was one of T. S. Eliot’s first dramatic achievements. It remains one of the great plays of the century. Like Greek drama, its theme and form are rooted in religion and ritual purgation and renewal, and it was this return to the earliest sources of drama that brought poetry triumphantly back to the English stage. It is reissued with new covers featuring artwork by Cyril Power to join the commemorations marking 850 years since Thomas Becket’s dramatic murder.