SOURCE: Roy, Emil. “The Becket Plays: Eliot, Fry, and Anouilh.” Modern Drama 8, no. 3 (December 1965): 268-76.

In the following essay, Roy underscores the differences between T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Christopher Fry's Curtmantle, and Anouilh's Becket.

Within the last three decades the martyrdom of Thomas Becket has furnished dramatic material for notable plays of T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Jean Anouilh.¹ Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and all of Fry's work including Curtmantle (1961) stem directly from Eliot's determination to have a poetic drama. Although Anouilh's play Becket, or the Honor of God (1961) owes little or nothing to Eliot or a theory of poetic drama, all three writers have dissociated themselves from modern realism. As Francis Fergusson has said in another context, they use the stage, the characters, and the story to demonstrate an idea which they take to be the undiscussible truth.² Eliot takes dramatic root in...