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‘Playwrights Are Not Evangelists’: Dorothy L. Sayers on Translating the Gospels into Drama
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2017
Abstract
Dorothy L. Sayers's twelve-part wartime radio life of Christ The Man Born to be King has been judged ‘an astonishing and far-reaching innovation’, not only because it used colloquial speech and because Jesus was a character voiced by an actor, but also because it brought the gospels into people's lives in a way that demanded an imaginative response. In spite of this, Sayers insisted that her purpose was not evangelization. Sayers's writing on theological aesthetics asserts that a work of art will only speak to its audience if the artist ‘serves the work’ rather than trying to preach. This article locates her thinking in the context of William Temple's sacramentalism and Jacques Maritain's neo-Thomism, suggesting that Temple's biblical exegesis was central to her approach in dramatizing the gospels. Finally an argument is made for Sayers's influence on mid-century thinking about the arts through her association with Bishop George Bell.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017
References
1 Sayers, Dorothy L., The Man Born to be King (London, 1943)Google Scholar.
2 Sayers was one of the scriptwriters for a local pageant in 1908 when she was fifteen, and included a short satirical verse play, ‘The Mocking of Christ’, in her second published work, Catholic Tales and Christian Songs (Oxford, 1918).
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7 The Just Vengeance, for the 1946 Lichfield Festival and The Emperor Constantine for the 1951 Festival of Britain in Colchester. This was followed by a London run in 1952 of a shortened version of the latter, Christ's Emperor, at St Thomas's, Regent Street.
8 Sayers, Dorothy L., transl., The Divine Comedy, 1: Hell (Harmondsworth, 1949)Google Scholar; 2: Purgatory (Harmondsworth, 1955).
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13 London, LPL, Bell papers 208, fols 256–64, Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘Memorandum for the possible Formulation of a Statement of Oecumenical Doctrine based on the Highest Common Factor of Consent among the Christian Churches’, 1942.
14 Between 1938 and 1947 several comparable projects were discussed by members of the theological discussion group The Moot, and in January 1939 John Baillie's comment on the draft of a pamphlet presented by its convenor, Oldham, J. H., was that ‘for general distribution it would need to be rewritten by someone, like, e.g. Dorothy Sayers’: Clements, Keith, ed., The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938–1944 (London, 2010), 148Google Scholar. In the event, Sayers was not involved, and the pamphlet was published by Oldham as The Resurrection of Christendom (London, 1940).
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47 Sayers, Man Born, 77.
48 Ibid. 20.
49 Matt. 5: 6; ibid. 143.
50 Matt. 5: 9; ibid.
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54 Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 357.
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72 Ibid. 230.
73 Ibid. 343 (John 21: 25 AV).
74 Ibid. 20.
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77 LPL, Bell papers 151, fols 190–6, at 193.
78 Ibid., fol. 169.
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