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Sweeney, Becket, and the "Marina Figure" in Eliot's Modern Plays

When Eliot began composing his four plays about modem family and social life, he still, it seems to me, had very much in mind the two characters he had created some years earlier, Sweeney and Thomas Becket. Echoes from these two characters and what they represent occur throughout the plays; at the extreme, one might say that, together, they represent man as living in the shadow of the brothel as well as the shadow of the cathedral. They suggest also a pattern of development; each play is, on one level, a version of man's troubled journey from the experiences and temptations of the Sweeney-world to the redeeming graces of the Becket-world. However, whatever our understanding or judgment of Sweeney and Becket, I think it's fair to say that they do not strike us as "familiar" or "social" figures. For example, in the plays built around them, the two "Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama" and Murder in the Cathedral, there is little that can be called "feminine" except for the women who are used by men in Sw...