Discuss Murder in the Cathedral as a religious drama.

After his joining the Anglo-Catholic church, T.S.Eliot was
commissioned to write a play to be enacted at the Canterbury festival in 1935. Eliot
chose the chronicle material of the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, by King Henry the Second's men in the Canterbury cathedral in 1170. Eliot
transformed the historical conflict between the King and the Archbishop, between the
secular head of England and her ecclesiastical head, into a Christian martyrdom play,
chiefly modelled on the medieval Morality drama, a play in the verse medium that
attempts to reinforce the liturgical origins of drama in
England.

In the first part of his play Eliot highlights the
temptations of Becket by the Four Tempters, and this episode is clearly reminiscent of
the temptations of Christ himself. In the second part, Becket resigns his will to the
Will of God, and calmly surrenders his head before the swords of the Four Knights as
sent by King Henry for the Archbishop's assassination. The intermediate section in prose
shows the preparation of the Archbishop as he delivers his sermon on
martyrdom.

Eliot's play foregrounds the theme of Christian
martyrdom as Becket realizes that by being killed within the premises of the Canterbury
cathedral at the hands of the Knights, he is going to become the champion of God, to
vindicate the preordained glory of a martyr to his faith. The murder of Becket is the
sacrificial death of a martyr, a re-enactment of the martyrdom of Christ, a validation
of Dante's famous note in Paradiso:"en la sua voluntate e nostra
pace(in His Will is our peace)".