Editing T. S. Eliot (section)

==Plays==
{{Main|Sweeney Agonistes|Murder in the Cathedral|The Rock (play)|The Family Reunion|The Cocktail Party|The Confidential Clerk|The Elder Statesman (play)}}
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 [[Literature in English#Jacobean literature|Jacobean]] verse drama; witness his allusions to [[John Webster|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."<ref name="upuc">Eliot, T. S. ''The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism'', Harvard University Press, 1933 (penultimate paragraph).</ref>

After ''The Waste Land'' (1922), he wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form and style". One project he had in mind was writing a play in verse, using some of the rhythms of early [[jazz]]. The play featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. Although Eliot did not finish the play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titled ''Fragment of a Prologue'' (1926) and ''Fragment of an Agon'' (1927), were published together in 1932 as ''[[Sweeney Agonistes]]''. Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as one.<ref name=Gallup/>

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.<ref name=Gallup/> [[George Bell (bishop)|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 martyrdom of [[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."<ref name="learner.org"/> 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]]<ref name="Darlington">{{cite ODNB|url=http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36063|title=Henry Sherek|last=Darlington|first=W. A.|year=2004|access-date=27 July 2014|doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/36063}}</ref>). The Broadway production in New York of ''The Cocktail Party'' received the 1950 [[Tony Award]] for Best Play. Eliot wrote ''The Cocktail Party'' while he was a visiting scholar at the [[Institute for Advanced Study]].<ref>[https://www.ias.edu/files/pdfs/publications/letter-2007-spring.pdf T. S. Eliot at the Institute for Advanced Study], ''The Institute Letter'', Spring 2007, p. 6.</ref><ref>[http://www.ias.edu/people/cos/users/teliot01 Eliot, Thomas Stearns] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150119203650/https://www.ias.edu/people/cos/users/teliot01 |date=19 January 2015 }} IAS profile.</ref>

Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out to write a play, I start by an act of choice. I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge. And then lines of poetry may come into being: not from the original impulse but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind."<ref name="learner.org"/>