Murder in the cathedral

With an introduction and notes by Nevill Coghill. Includes three appendices: on the historical situation, on The metre of Everyman, which influenced the versification of Murder in the cathedral and on Tennyson's Becket, which offers an interesting contras

Murder in the Cathedral is a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, first performed in 1935, that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Eliot drew heavily on the writing of Edward Grim, a clerk who was an eyewitness to the event. The play, dealing with an individual's opposition to authority, was written at the time of rising fascism in Central Europe. Some material that the producer asked Eliot to remove or replace during the writing was transformed into the poem "Burnt Norton"