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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

Margaret Wiedemann Hunt
Margaret Wiedemann Hunt*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
*
*7 Lenton Rd, The Park, Nottingham, NG7 1DP. E-mail: [email protected].
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 53: TRANSLATING CHRISTIANITY , June 2017 , pp. 405 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017 

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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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10 Published as The Greatest Drama Ever Staged (London, 1938).

11 Sayers, Dorothy L., The Mind of the Maker (London, 1941)Google Scholar.

12 Other contributions to the debate included Bell, G. K. A., Christianity and World Order (Harmondsworth, 1940)Google Scholar; Temple, William, Christianity and Social Order (London, 1942)Google Scholar. Whale, J. S.’s Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, 1941)Google Scholar was admired by Sayers as a benchmark.

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).

15 Sayers, ‘Memorandum’, fol. 257.

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17 Giles Watson, ‘Catholicism in Anglican Culture and Theology: Responses to Crisis in England (1937–1949)’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1998), 221–70, at 248; cf. idem, ‘Dorothy L. Sayers and the Oecumenical Penguin’, VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review 14 (1997), 17–32.

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36 Fletcher, Artist, xix.

37 Ibid. 63.

38 Radio was not subject to the Lord Chamberlain's jurisdiction, although the scripts were submitted for his approval as a matter of courtesy. He made no objection to the inclusion of Jesus, provided that there was no studio audience and that Jesus's longer speeches were based on his words as recorded in Scripture: James Welch, Foreword to Sayers, Man Born, 15.

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45 Ibid. 343.

46 Ibid. 294.

47 Sayers, Man Born, 77.

48 Ibid. 20.

49 Matt. 5: 6; ibid. 143.

50 Matt. 5: 9; ibid.

51 Ibid. 117.

52 Welch, Foreword, ibid. 9–16; Wolfe, Churches and the BBC, 218–38; Reynolds, Life and Soul, 317–28; Coomes, Careless Rage, 11–25.

53 The broadcasts were on Sundays.

54 Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 357.

55 Ibid. 373.

56 James Welch, ‘The Man Born to be King’, Radio Times, 19 December 1941, 5.

57 Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 45.

58 Maritain, Jacques, Art and Scholasticism with other Essays, transl. Scanlan, J. F. (London, 1947 edn), 49Google Scholar.

59 Ibid. 52.

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69 Barbara Reynolds, in a discussion of original sin, has drawn attention to a remark by Sayers in an unpublished letter: ‘The Incarnation is the answer, and the only answer, to the whole problem of free will and suffering’: Reynolds, Barbara, ‘The Just Vengeance’, in Proceedings of the 1996 Seminar, ed. Simpson, Christine R. (Hurstpierpoint, 1997), 5–16, at 12Google Scholar.

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71 Ibid. 23.

72 Ibid. 230.

73 Ibid. 343 (John 21: 25 AV).

74 Ibid. 20.

75 Sayers, Search and Statement, 130.

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77 LPL, Bell papers 151, fols 190–6, at 193.

78 Ibid., fol. 169.

79 George Bell, ‘Church and Artist’, The Listener, 14 September 1944, 298.

80 Quoted in Jasper, Ronald C. D., George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (Oxford, 1967), 133Google Scholar.

81 For a full discussion of the episode of the Lambeth doctorate, see Webster, Peter, ‘Archbishop Temple's Offer of a Lambeth Degree to Dorothy L. Sayers’, in Barber, Melanie and Taylor, Stephen, with Sewell, Gabriel, eds, From the Reformation to the Permissive Society, CERS 18 (Woodbridge, 2010), 565–82Google Scholar.

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85 Sayers, Dorothy L., transl., Tristan in Brittany (London, 1929)Google Scholar.

86 Wolfe, Churches and the BBC, 237–8.