Murder in the Cathedral

The verse dramatization of the medieval murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Archbishop Thomas Becket speaks fatal words before he is martyred in T. S. Eliot’s best-known drama, based on the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170. Praised for its poetically masterful handling of issues of faith, politics, and the common good, T. S. Eliot’s play bolstered his reputation as the most significant poet of his time. It has been performed on stage, film, and television since 1935 and was the basis for the opera Assassinio nella Cattedrale by the Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti.