Murder in the Cathedral Lesson Plan

Already famous for his modernist poetry and his conversion to Anglicanism, in 1935 T.S. Eliot was asked to write a play for Kent's annual Canterbury Festival. The event organizers gave few explicit instructions on subject matter or form - so when Eliot chose to dramatize and stage the infamous assassination of Thomas Becket for his play Murder in the Cathedral, it seemed both appropriate and unexpected that he would take on this challenging subject matter. Considering Eliot's reputation as a profoundly innovative writer, his decision to reimagine the familiar material of the famed death at Canterbury posed an intriguing question about how he would re-envision the story through a...