In the 1930s Eliot increasingly turned his mind to the theatre, taking up in practice what had fascinated him as a critic for many years in his studies of Elizabethan and Stuart drama. The story of his movement towards the theatre has been told many times, both from the biographical standpoint and as an aspect of his artistic development. In the second half of the Harvard lecture Poetry and Drama, published in 1951, he touches on the essentials of the story himself. No doubt his early interest in the dramatic monologue as verse form suggests a bent for drama. More to the point is the steady attention he paid to Renaissance drama as a critic over many decades. In fact, the drama was still capable of provoking superb examples of close reading from him long after he had turned his critical attention, later in life, to general topics of literary and cultural history. His reading of the first scene of Hamlet in Poetry and Drama must remind us of the practical critical acuities of his early criticism. But with all his experience as a critic, as a practitioner he still approached the theatre with a good deal of apprehensiveness. Sweeney Agonistes (composed in the mid-twenties), the two ‘Coriolan’ fragments of 1931, and his contributions to the Anglican pageant play, The Rock (1934) were his earliest excursions in dramatic writing. Another commission from the Church of England, for the Canterbury Cathedral Festival of June 1935, provided the occasion for his first sustained piece for the theatre, Murder in the Cathedral. The story of Eliot as dramatist, then, has been told many times.