Excavating Tragical Perspectives in Early Christianity

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for the monograph by establishing the paucity of actual works of early Christian tragedy, but also the growing Christian recognition of the power of tragedy to convey the vulnerability of the human condition and the subjection of all creation to what the Apostle Paul himself called an existential “vanity” or “futility” (Romans 8:19–23). The Christian reception and reworking of tragedy, however, stood at the end of a long evolution of tragedy and of its role in Greco-Roman civilization, which included strong philosophical criticism of the genre (Plato) and vigorous defense of its cultural utility (Aristotle). Christian polemicists against pagan theatrical art seized on the antecedent philosophical criticism but also developed their own, and included tragedy in their condemnation of the immorality, seductiveness, and irreligion of all pagan entertainment and “spectacle.” Yet Christian thinkers began their own rehabilitation of salvageable elements of tragedy as a literary, rhetorical, and dramatic artform. Some found noble and even theologically enriching passages in the ancient tragedians. Others looked, however, to free the genre to Christian appropriation, and to develop uniquely Christian forms of “tragical mimesis” for the edification of their audiences.

A Study in Repetition and Revival

This chapter offers close readings of a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century play-scripts about the murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, including works by Douglas Jerrold, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Alfred Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Tracing their performance over 100 years involves the exploration of changing attitudes to the performance of Christian worship and sacrifice on stage and, more broadly, the changing status of the Established Church itself. In the repetitions and variations of Becket’s narrative deployed over time, we can chart changes in the idea of Christian tragedy, renewed appreciation of the communal significance of religious ritual, especially in the revival of the classical chorus, and a growing sense that sacred drama was not just an aberration to be carefully policed and perhaps suppressed, but part of the living fabric of English national drama with a performative future as well as a past.