SOURCE: “The Historical Pageant: The Rhetoric of Action,” in The Christian Tradition in Modern British Verse Drama: The Poetics of Sacramental Time, Rutgers University Press, 1967, pp. 58-63.

In the following excerpt, Spanos focuses on the religious pageant The Acts of Saint Peter.

Like the post-Romantic poetic Histories, the pre-Canterbury Pageant drama sought to infuse poetry into Biblical events by locating the action, through verbal and visual decor, in a remote past. It achieved instead a “charming medievalism” and a pious sentimentality. Charles Clay's famous The Joyous Pageant of the Holy Nativity, written in the early twenties, is a notable example.¹

Gordon Bottomley's pageant, The Acts of Saint Peter, written for the octocentenary celebrations of the consecration of the Cathedral Church of St. Peter at Exeter a decade later (1933), represents a significant advance over these and, in some respects, over his own earlier efforts. There is in the sequence...