Collected Plays – T. S. Eliot (1962) (1st edition)

S$68.00

Collected Plays – T. S. Eliot (1962) (1st edition)

S$68.00

Title: Collected Plays

Author: T. S. Eliot

Publisher: Faber and Faber, London, 1962. First edition.

Condition: Hardcover, with dust jacket. Good. Minor staining and sunning to dust jacket spine, some foxing to edges and endpapers, bookseller’s sticker on endpapers. Small closed tear to corner of dust jacket.

SKU: eliot-plays Categories: , Tag:

Includes:

Murder in the Cathedral

The Family Reunion

The Cocktail Party

The Confidential Clerk

The Elder Statesman

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and “one of the twentieth century’s major poets.”

With the important exception of Four Quartets, Eliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land. In a 1933 lecture he said “Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He would like to be something of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it.”

A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted credit only for the authorship of one scene and the choruses. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the production of The Rock, and later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, Murder in the Cathedral, concerning the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot’s control. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that “for [Eliot], Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his religious sensibility.” After this, he worked on more “commercial” plays for more general audiences: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958) (the latter three were produced by Henry Sherek and directed by E. Martin Browne[62]). The Broadway production in New York of The Cocktail Party received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play.