Somehow, I don’t feel like doing more on politics right now, though I did have opinions of the State of the Union, and, as I sit here now, CNN is telling us about yet another object of some kind that showed up near Alaska and was dispatched by the Air Force. Well, maybe more on that later.

For now, I want to reflect on a great playwright, Jean Anouilh, and a great movie made from one of his plays, “Becket.” The title of the play was actually “Becket or the Honor of God,” a title that was likely thought too cumbersome for a movie.

If you know your history of Medieval England or of the Medieval Roman Catholic Church, then you likely know the basics of this story. Henry II was King of England in the mid-12th century and Becket was his cohort and one time companion in wenching and drinking and so on. But the power of the Church was crowding the King and he made his old friend Archbishop of Canterbury presuming that he would bring the Church into Henry’s camp. It was getting cantankerous and ambitious and was perceived by the King as a threat, a perception that may have been somewhat overdone but was not ridiculous.

Now, I’ll try to hold off the one-time-history-teacher desire to explain everything in detail, but I think I need to add a couple of things that a less history oriented reviewer most likely wouldn’t. The position of Archbishop of Canterbury today is one of the highest Protestant ecclesiastical positions in the world. He is the leader of the Anglican Communion, a world wide organization including of Church of England at home, the Episcopal Church in this country and other manifestations of Anglicanism around the world. This has been the case since Thomas Cranmer in the 16th century. Anglicans are found all around the world thanks to the British Empire.

But in Henry’s time, it was different. The Archbishop was merely( not a very mere merely)the leading Roman Catholic ecclesiastic in England. He was clearly a man of great power, but he was subordinate to the Pope, at least in theory and to some extent in fact. He could do a great deal on his own in a time when it might take weeks to get messages to and from the Pope and when the Pope had a lot of irons in the fire of European politics and diplomacy. But ultimately he was not all powerful and if push came to shove he would have to yield to the Papacy.

Henry was right, however, to consider the Archbishop a powerful man and a both a potentially useful ally, but also a possibly dangerous adversary. When the position of Archbishop was vacant Henry saw his chance. In view of the recent resistance of the English church leaders to his plan to increase royal power, why not get an Archbishop who would support the King? How about his old pal, Thomas Becket?

If you know your history of our Supreme Court you know that Presidents are never sure what an appointed justice will do once on the court. The same applies in other realms as well, and Henry encountered it here. Becket, surprised and somewhat dismayed by the offer, nonetheless decided to accept. It is possible that he thought he could maintain his friendship with Henry and maintain the Church at the same time. In any event, he took the job(his lack of background for it meant little at the time) and seems to have had a somewhat self-induced conversion experience as he did so.

This is portrayed in the movie by showing us Becket’s willingness(Beckett is excellently portrayed by Richard Burton) to give away many of his personal possessions as the takes up the new role. He doesn’t mind.”It’s all so easy,” he says. And here we get a look at both Becket’s character and at Anouilh’s talent and inclinations. As already stated he is my favorite playwright. He wrote many different kinds of plays but always(at least usually)stayed within the bounds of structure and story telling as learned from masters such as Giradoux and Pirandello. He rarely, if ever, wandered into the Theater of the Absurd of Ionesco and other near contemporaries.

I do not wish to decry the Theater of the Absurd, as I think it produced some good and insightful works, but I prefer , on the whole, plays that stay within what I think could be called existential reality. Anouilh did this. And he did it to write many types of plays; He could do tragedy and something like farce. He could do psychological studies and historical studies. He could combine these two which is pretty much what happened with “Becket.” His characters could be bleak or humorous, sometimes both. And the thing that always impressed me was that so often they could express, calmly, an acceptance of the world around them. Both cynical and tolerant outwardly, they frequently could remain quiet and detached-seeming as they felt their hearts break or watched their dreams disintegrate. They could also often reflect on past disappointment and pain with a shrug of regret, not outward roaring of defiance or anger, and with the tears unshed and the pain tamed, subdued and absorbed in a civilized and sophsiticated armor of despair.

It was perhaps his most remarkable talent, however, to connect with the past and bring it into the present. That is, he could take something old, say real history(“Becket”) or ancient theater(“Antigone”) and present the story with an awareness of modern psychological understanding. But he could do this without losing the thread of the story, that is, what really happened in history or what the ancient dramatist wrote. I suppose that his best known and most admired play is “The Lark,” about Joan of Arc which would be a good place to start reading him if you’re willing to dive into Anouilh at his most dramatic. But I re-watched “Becket” recently and that is the movie I feel compelled to write about.

There are a few other anomalies to note about “Becket.” Anouilh did not do the screenplay, though for all I know he may have had a hand in it. The screenplay was done by veteran Hollywood writer Edward Anhalt, a writer with a reputation for hating to write and having to be bullied or bribed into doing his job. But apparently he did the job well enough. “Becket” won him an Oscar for Best Screenplay Based on Another Source.

The Anhalt screenplay deviates a bit from Anouilh and from history in a few ways, mostly not too important. The long standing tension between the royal power maven, Henry and the Church was mostly concerned with the Church’s “right” to try criminal-behaving clerics in church courts(rather than the royal ones) where they could usually expect a lighter sentence. Anhalt’s script makes it more about an obscure Lord’s rebellion against the Church regarding the behavior of one of his vassals. Perhaps not really a big deal and it still gets the point of royal-ecclesiastical conflict, but way change it?

While Henry and Becket were no doubt friends before the appointment of the latter to Canterbury, there is some doubt they were as buddy-buddy as the movie would have them, and the chasing girls together thing may well be fiction. More on this actually interesting point later.

The historical accuracy of the film is, I would say above average, though not quite as astute historically as “The Lion in Winter,” PeterO’Toole’s later go-round as Henry II. But “Becket” is clearly the superior of two as a work of the art of the cinema.

One point of inaccuracy is the portrayal of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s wife. Katherine Hepburn’s Eleanor in “Lion” is I would say a much more accurate portrait of that redoubtable lady. The Anouilh/Anhalt Eleanor(Pamela Brown) serves her purpose in the script quite well, but her hyper-pious, weak but annoying portrayal is not accurate, at least not according to whatever I have read about Eleanor, who was a clever and determined medieval politician.

I’m not even getting involved in the Norman-Saxon thing which is largely beyond the meaning of the story and its aesthetic or spiritual points. For the record, it appears that Becket was Norman, not Saxon.

But this is a great film, much greater than “Lion” which has excellent performances but not the emotional/spiritual depth of Anouilh. So, with those asides, I turn to the film itself.

What always seemingly fascinated Anouilh, whether writing about the Middle Ages or 20th century Europeans, was the interior experience, the inner man or woman and what they went through in their own minds and hearts–and at what cost and with what effects, inner and outer. The historical record does not tell us a lot about Henry II and Becket in this regard, but the story of the two of them has almost endless opportunities for exploring these ideas.

I have already mentioned Becket’s quick “conversion” upon his appoinment as Archbishop. This is handled quickly in the movie, with a short scene of Becket having a sort of give-away, apparently at home, where people are invited to come and take what they please. What is really effective is not the quality of the goods(which I have mostly forgotten)but the quality of the attitude Becket takes, his facial expression, his whole aspect. This is clearly a man making a big change but doing it for cause, not just for power. There is a sense in which he is still Becket, but also a new man.

Becket’s fairly sudden change from supporter of royal power to defender of church rights is a matter of historical record. But Anouilh seems to have seen it as more than that, or at least having deeper roots than just power and ambition. Without making too much of it, and without histrionics, he manages to make Becket’s change not only quick but inevitable and also honorable. It should be noted, incidentally, that over the whole arc of history since the Middle Ages, Becket would be seen by most historians, psychologists and other scholars as on “the wrong side of history.” But Anouilh wrote him and Burton played him just the opposite, a crusader not for an oppressive church power(and you could make an argument for that), but for church independence from political meddling and rapacious ambition(you could make an argument for that too).

Anouilh seems to have been obsessed, among other things, with honor and the role honor plays in human relationships–and particularly with its apparent competition with love. Becket, it appears is really an empty man, a friend of the king but not as fond of the king as the king is of him, loving his mistress, but not with the tenderness with which she loved him, looking for something/someone to love and finally reaching this emotional ambition in his complex relationship with God.

But the conclusion is not quite the one we might have expected. Some people would say that he found the truth or at least his true love, in love of God. But this is not quite correct, not completely. In Anouilh’s mind, Becket never could quite love God. But he did come to love the “Honor of God,” and while this did not make his life complete it came as close as anything ever did. Becket is basically a lonely man, lonely for some kind of intimacy, but he fails to find it in human relationships and in honors and accomplishments. He also finds just the love of God not quite totally fulfilling. It is only when he comes to love God’s honor that he is complete, or as close as he’s likely to get on the earth. And I guess you could say that there is a sense in which the honor of God is a substitute, a substitute for a man who longs for love but cannot love fully–except perhaps in this one thing.

I guess you could say that according to Anouilh, if not to any historical sources, Becket’s later actions flow from this feeling, this love of God’s honor. Becket defies the king in the matter of the errant knight and this sets off a broader, overall quarrel about the King’s drive for more power and Becket’s determination to defend the Church’s power(its honor)against him. He flees to France where a sympathetic but cagey King Charles VII offers him shelter and support, but only within the limits which he thinks, literally, politic. Pope Alexander III pursues a similar policy-outwardly backing Becket’s actions, blessing and encouraging him, but taking no substantial action to help Becket with the struggle with his own king. So, in the end, he is almost literally a man alone, standing for his honor, or God’s and with no help except that of a few loyal followers, none of them extremely powerful or influential in the councils of the world. The world, apparently, was not yet ready to recognize all the internal conflicts we see in this story’s 20th-century retelling; but it is unproven, but not unfeasible that those conflicts could have been there, much as the playwright stated.

But what about Henry II? Though seldom overlooked, he is often taken not too seriously in this conflict. He may have been on what many moderns would call the right side of history but he was on the wrong side of showmanship. Even to moderns, Becket makes a more appealing character, a man who fought for principle against all his “worldly” interests and eventually died for it. Henry’s case has been, I think, to some extent let go, except perhaps by his personal biographers.

How much Henry was like Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of him, I don’t know. But O’Toole apparently read some of the sources or at least the histories of him and had some idea of what he was doing. Whether he discussed his role with Anouilh or Anhalt I don’t know. He played Henry as a not entirely unlikely character. Born to be a king and behaving like one, he could be arrogant, grasping and arbitrary. He might have been a tough boss and he quite possibly was (Becket likely would have agreed) a difficult friend. But he also seems to have had humor, some imagination, and the intelligence or at least the political acumen to play a crafty game himself. And behind all of that there may have been some realization of his background (The Plantagenets) and his duty to carry on the tradition.

But Henry also, like so many people of the past whose inner lives we have to guess at, was fertile ground for the intellectual/psychological ambition of Anouilh, and he gets his moments on stage/screen which are worthy of note. Early on we get a look at his character when he and Becket want the same girl for the night. Henry yields but insists that Becket promise to pay him back, favor-for-favor, a promise Henry later on holds him to with tragic results. There is serious doubt as to the historical accuracy of this incident, but it does give us an insight to some assumptions about Henry–assumptions that may have been true.

But the main emotion that Henry seems to feel through out the story is one of betrayal. He raised Becket to the top and look what he got for it. And this is not without some justification. It appears that medieval appointments of this sort were often made for a mixture of ecclesiastical and political reasons and that each side expected to get something. Henry had expected loyalty from Becket. He did not get it.

Was Becket the one more deserving of our admiration here? Yes, I think he was. He behaved with honor, as he intended. But Henry reacted, in Anouilh’s mind, as much out of personal as political feelings. Though his outrage as a King was real enough, he seems more moved by his betrayal by a friend–the personal was more important than the political(perhaps usually the case with an artist rather than a politician).

We see this in more ways than one, but particularly in a couple of revelatory scenes in which Henry expresses his true self and his true pain. “I loved him and he loved me less,’” or words to that effect are heard. Henry sounds almost like a jilted lover. Today this would likely lead to an extensive discussion of whether there was a sexual relationship between these two. I doubt seriously there was, but I think it’s possible there was a mental/emotional sexual longing, perhaps usually subliminal, on the part of Henry. I’m less certain about Becket.

But here is the real story in my opinion-whether Anouilh would agree I don’t know. The fact is that pain is pain and unrequited love is unrequited love, sexual or not, homosexual or not. And this is the source of the main part of Henry’s very real pain, regardless of how aware of it he may be. Again, whether this is historically true is uncertain, but dramatically and emotionally true, it certainly is, and this was what Anouilh was good at finding–the actual source of the pain, whether medieval or 20th century, and in many cases finding them to be much alike.

This is particularly seen in that Henry is told by Becket at one point that he must learn to be alone and later on he echos this advice to an aide who inquires as to his emotional state. “I am learning to be alone,” he says. I doubt a medieval monarch would ever had said this, possibly might have had trouble understanding it. But it fits perfectly here, and it marries the despair a medieval king felt to the 20th century idea of personal disappointment and loneliness.

In the end Henry loses his temper and cries out something about which there has been some conflict of opinion and much dispute. “Will someone not rid me of the criminous clerk(cleric)?’ is one version. Or perhaps it was “of this troublesome priest?” In any event, it was something like that, which induced four of his knights to take him not only seriously but literally. They went after Becket and murdered him in his own cathedral.

Henry comes off at the end as both defiant and broken. He is forced to do a penance for his role in Becket’s murder, which consists of having several monks whip his back in public. He goes through the required ceremony of thanking them, then, in a contemptuous aside, refers to them as pigs. It has always seemed to me that there is something approaching heroic in Henry’s reaction to this. He is a man in considerable physical pain and much greater psychological pain–but he is still King and he goes on.

His life will be more empty now, but at least he has a purpose. He will pursue his own destiny and duty and if he must do it without the love of a good friend or a warm woman, then that will be his lot. But he will do it anyway. He has learned to be alone.