| Description |
In medieval England, one of the most popular forms of drama was the saint's play. These plays depicted the lives, martyrdoms, and miracles of Catholic saints. After England's Reformation most of these scripts were lost due to destruction and censorship. In the nineteenth century, a combination of interest in medieval painting and architecture as well as the Oxford and Decadent movements led to a revival of Catholicism and hagiography. The second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of plays concerning Catholic saints. This project asserts that these plays constitute a new genre, which I name "modern saints' plays." I argue that these plays represent a new manifestation of medieval saints' plays, subject to the conventions of an international modern theater. The project describes the history of saints' plays as they disappeared from England in the Renaissance and reappeared in the mid-nineteenth century. It analyzes Flaubert's Temptation of St. Antony and Wilde's Salome as examples of decadent saints' plays focusing on the suffering of the saint in a separate spiritual place. An analysis of Maeterlinck's A Miracle of St. Anthony (1904) provides a stylistic transition to the modern saints' plays written between the World Wars, which present saints in a critical dramaturgy. The central chapters consider three responses to popular interest in Catholic saints by George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. The project defines Shaw's socio-religious critique in Saint Joan, T.S. Eliot's use of several dramatic traditions to convey his meditation on the conflict between religion and political secularism in Murder in the Cathedral, and Gertrude Stein's use of literary cubism in Four Saints in Three Acts to demythologize the impressions of saints that fill the modern world. Finally, a discussion of the privatization of religion reveals a new renaissance of saints' plays in the bountiful DVD offerings of such distributors as the Ignatius Press and the Catholic network, EWTN. I suggest that with this latest iteration of Catholic saints' plays, the Church attempts to regain control over the spiritual image of saints in a desecularization of the twenty-first century. |
