Plays

Collected Plays gathers the dramatic work of Charles Williams (1886–1945), the poet, novelist, theologian and longtime editor at Oxford University Press who belonged to the circle around C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The volume appeared in 1963, edited with an introduction by John Heath-Stubbs, and brings together plays written between the late 1920s and the war years. Most were composed for particular occasions and particular places: cathedral festivals, church halls, amateur companies, and, in the case of Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, the Canterbury Festival of 1936, commissioned in the wake of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Williams wrote for performers who were not professionals and for audiences who came to worship as much as to watch, and the plays carry that purpose in their bones.

The plays take up the questions that run through all of Williams's work. What does it mean for one person to bear another's burden? How does grace arrive through ordinary persons, and how does self-regard corrupt the very love it imitates? Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury stages the archbishop's long fall into compromise and his final recantation and recovery in the fire, treating his weakness as the site where a larger mercy operates rather than as a mere failure of nerve. Seed of Adam and The House by the Stable work the Christmas mystery in a lighter and sometimes comic key, while Judgement at Chelmsford and The House of the Octopus test the Church and the mission field against the pull of power and fear. The verse is dense, compressed and idiosyncratic, closer to a liturgy than to realist drama, and it asks to be heard aloud. Williams's governing convictions, the doctrine of exchange and substitution, the way of affirmation that finds God in created things, and the belief that love between persons can be a path into the divine, give the plays their shape.

The collection matters because it shows Williams's theology in motion rather than in exposition. His essays and novels argue for coinherence and substituted love; the plays enact them, often in a few spare lines at a moment of crisis. They are also a record of a distinctive twentieth-century experiment in religious drama, in which the Church turned again to the stage as a place for teaching and devotion.

Who should read this: readers who already know something of Williams, whether through He Came Down from Heaven, The Figure of Beatrice or his novels, and who want to see his thought tested in dramatic form, as well as anyone interested in the history of liturgical and religious theatre. It is not an easy entry point to Williams, and readers wanting a plainspoken devotional guide or conventional narrative drama will likely find the verse and the stylization a barrier.