This revised edition of Kenneth Pickering’s study of the development of the Canterbury Festival and the resurgence of religious drama, is published to coincide with the author’s appearance as Becket in a major new production of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

At the start of the twentieth century there was a great deal of hostility from the Church towards drama. Dr Pickering explores the changing attitudes which enabled the Dean of Canterbury to establish the Festival and lay the foundations for religious drama to play the important role in the spreading of the Christian message which it does today. A must for all those with an interest, either general or academic, in religious drama and the modern development of the stage.