“The Dogma Is the Drama”: The Lasting Consequence of Sayer’s Radio Play Cycle – “The Man Born to be King”

During the Second World War, Dorothy L. Sayers’s radio play cycle, The Man Born to be King, gave hope and truth to a country during a time when they needed it most. While many in Great Britain had forgotten the dogmas or a “spiritual consensus” of those religious things that established their culture, Sayers counteracted this event with her radio dramas about the life of Christ, reconnecting the mid-century British to their Christian heritage.¹ Although Sayers was widely known for her detective series, her radio plays more importantly influenced a generation of Britain towards spiritual truth.

Detective Fiction to Dogma and Drama

An unplanned pregnancy sobered Sayers during her period of detective fiction fame after publishing Whose Body? in 1923. As she matured, so did her work. Sayers gave up her detective writing in 1937 with the launch of Busman’s Honeymoon, which was adapted from her play by the same name. She had written over nineteen detective novels by this time, but her gaze was drifting towards the theater. She presented The Zeal of Thy House in 1937 which toured the next year.

Sayers had “long been wrestling with the issues of rebuilding British society after a world war before the Second World War even started.”² Correspondence with T.S. Eliot about a Christian writing society piqued her interest for participating in the discussion at large.³ Sayers notes in a letter from April 17, 1940 that people were writing to her and begging for more detective stories “to keep their minds off the war.” However, Sayers replied that her recent book about Christianity, Begin Here, would make them “happier and much more useful citizens.”⁴ Just a month later in 1940, Dr. William Boothby Selbie, the principal at Mansfield College, Oxford, published a pamphlet arguing that Christian dogma was “hopelessly irrelevant in the life and thought of the average man . . . ”⁵ She, in turn, responded to this pamphlet through a speech titled “Creed vs Chaos” which ended up as a series of speeches in a book called Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World and later Letters to the Diminished Church. The essay “Creed vs Chaos” states the nature of Christian dogma, explains why it is important, and itemizes seven points of Christian doctrine that the Christian should know (God, Man, Sin, Judgment, Matter, Work, Society). She believed that Christian principles depended on “Christ’s authority.” She says, “If the average man is required to believe in Christ and accept His authority for Christian principles, it is surely relevant to inquire who or what Christ is, and why his authority should be accepted.”⁶

According to Sayers, a play was an important vehicle to test and prove claims. She says, “There is no more searching test of a theology than to submit it to the dramatic handling; nothing so glaringly exposes inconsistencies in a character, a story, or a philosophy as to put it upon the stage and allow it to speak for itself.”⁷ With that, Sayers set out “to tell that story, to the best of my ability, within the medium at my disposal . . . ”⁸ Although Sayers had already received fame for her detective novels, her radio play cycle, The Man Born to Be King, became a highlight of her career from December 1941-October 1942, converging her talent for character development and love of Christian dogma.

During World War II, religion played an important role in how both Britain and Germany articulated their ideology. The BBC addressed the lack of understanding regarding Christian dogma with religious radio.⁹ Kenneth M. Wolf describes in, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation 1922-1956: The Politics of Broadcast Religion, “A Sayers play on the Life of the Lord would not only make radio history, it would be a landmark for religious education and the life of English speaking Christianity.”¹⁰ The public presentation of these plays could also help Britain muster sympathy from America (not yet involved in the war) as another Christian nation.¹¹ Her presentation of Christian dogma would also become a means by which Great Britain could find a source of commonality during the time of war and act as a “spiritual balm for a nation at war.”¹² As Hannah Elias says in her dissertation about radio and religion, “ . . . religion, in the Second World War as in 21st century Britain, can operate as a site of commonality and shared experience, allowing a communal identity to develop . . . ”¹³Sayers’s spiritual dramas offered knowledge and inspiration to those not educated in Christian dogma as well as a specific moral language on which Great Britain could agree, but not without difficulty.

“Drama” for the Radio Dogma

While The Man Born to be King would eventually be well-received by the public and reach millions of listeners, there were times early in the writing and production process when it looked like the radio dramas were never going to make the airwaves.¹⁴ In 1940, Reverend Dr. James W. Welch, Director of Religious Broadcasting for the BBC, approached Sayers about creating a radio drama regarding the life of Christ for The Children’s Hour.¹⁵ There were many negotiations at first regarding the depiction of Christ. At this time in Great Britain, the person of Christ was not allowed to be portrayed on the stage, but there was no specific rule involving radio.¹⁶ In 1941, Lord Chamberlain gave permission for Sayers to impersonate Jesus for entertainment on the radio.¹⁷ There was no precedent for this endeavor since, “ . . . the thing was therefore, a quite new experiment, undertaken in the face of a good deal of prejudice, and in the absence of any adequate standards of comparison.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, Sayers’s radio drama portraying a dignified Christ proved an effective medium for communicating truth to a nation in need.

“The Play’s the Thing” for Dogma

In Hamlet, Shakespeare uses a drama to reveal events of the recent history of his father’s death to King Claudius’s courtiers warning them: “There is a play tonight before the King / One scene of it comes near the circumstance / Which I have told thee of my father’s death . . . ”¹⁹ Shakespeare also knew that the medium of a play is a powerful form for revealing truth for those who need to see it. Sayers also believed that this medium was an effective form for revealing both historical truth and the truth of Christian dogma, saying that the playwright’s job was to tell the truth from “his own end” and they were to “trust the theology to emerge undistorted from the dramatic presentation of the story.”²⁰ She also adds that “This it can scarcely help doing, if the playwright is faithful to his material, since the history and the theology of Christ are one thing: His life is theology in action, and the drama of his life is dogma shown as dramatic action.”²¹

Sayers spent a whole year researching the gospels and their meaning in the original Greek which she then translated into beautifully characterized radio plays. She used the four gospels as equal “witnesses of truth” by combining and preserving the important facets of the story.²² According to Wolfe, Sayers was merely, “repeating the work of the gospel writers themselves. Their work was to paint a picture . . . of Jesus of Nazareth . . . The gospels are a portrait in miniature. Miss Sayers’s plays provide the same.”²³ Sayers brought the history and the theology of Christ into the living rooms of Britain and presented them in a very personal way. Wolfe further explains:

Dorothy L. Sayers had decided from the outset that this would not be ‘church’ speaking to the nation, but Christian tradition speaking to each fireside listener. That had not quite happened to the gospel story ever before . . . That it was the most astonishing and far-reaching innovation in all religious broadcasting so far is beyond dispute.²⁴

Sayers “innovation” allowed the dogma to speak for itself by portraying the biblical characters as relatable humans. She illustrates, “God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own . . . In a nation famous for its religious genius and under a government renowned for its efficiency, He was executed by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators . . . If that does not shock them, nothing can.”²⁵ Additionally, the details of Christ’s story presented so familiarly with the British vernacular, advanced the “shocking” experience for many.²⁶ She says, “Tear off the disguise of the Jacobian idiom, go back to the homely and vigorous Greek of Mark and John, translate it into its current English counterpart, and there every man may see his own face.”²⁷ Crystal Downing describes the effect of Sayers’s creative vernacular language which was “connected to her belief in the Incarnation.”²⁸ She explains that The Man Born to be King and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin were influential because, “ . . . each author reflected her era even as she challenged it, enabling readers and listeners to understand enough in order to be shocked.”²⁹

Revealing the process of creating a drama, Sayers says the playwright, “ . . . must be able at will to strip off his knowledge of what is actually taking place, and present, through his characters, the events and people as they appeared to themselves at the time.” In other words, the characters of the play in real time do not know the outcome of their situation as a moment in history, yet the audience does. The audience knows the outcome of the story, and they have a special knowledge as people living in the future. This gives them insight to the causes and the consequences of things happening right before them. However, according to Sayers, “We judge their behaviour as though all of them — disciples, Pharisees, Romans, and men-in-the-street–had known with Whom they were dealing and what the meaning of all the events actually was. But they did not know.”³⁰ Watching or listening to the history of events play out in real time helps people to realize the circumstances in which things were happening. It is hard to unknow what is known about history, but when the audience sees (or listens to) the play acted before them, and they put themselves in the shoes of the historical players of that time, they forget what they know as people in the future, and they can have more empathy for the people of that time. For example, Sayers, in the introduction to The Man Born to be King, reminds readers of her plays that:

Herod the Great was no monstrous enemy of God: he was a soldier of fortune and a political genius — a savage but capable autocrat, whose jealousy and ungovernable temper had involved him in a prolonged domestic wretchedness. Matthew the publican was a contemptible little quisling official, fleecing his own countrymen in the service of the occupying power . . . Pontius Pilate was a provincial governor with a very proper desire to carry out Imperial justice but terrified . . . Caiaphas was the ecclesiastical politician appointed, like one of Hitlers bishops, by a heathen government . . . As for the Elders of the Synagogue, they are to be found on every Parish Council — always highly respectable, often quarrelsome, and sometimes in a crucifying mood.³¹

Here radio dramas helped people see themselves in each of the characters so they could objectively evaluate the historical decisions they made in response to Christ as the Son of God.

She took liberty with her characterization of Judas Iscariot, the traitor, saying, “Judas in the gospels is an enigma.” The gospels are not clear why Judas betrayed Jesus. There is no discussion of how he became a disciple. Sayers chose to show how he became a disciple and gave him a motive for his betrayal which is less like the common villain. Her portrayal of Judas has him betray Jesus in a way that everyone could understand: “the deadly corruption of the proud virtues.”³² Sayers portrays Judas proud, not the “obviously villainous”³³ to which no one could relate. Pride is a sin in which everyone partakes, and Sayers used this vice to bring this historic story to everyone who listened. Sayers ends her introduction to the plays by reminding the reader her plays are “first and foremost, a story — a true story, the turning point of history, ‘the only thing that has ever really happened.’”³⁴

This theatrical medium for dogma and history has its creative limitations. Aristotle says that “In a play one cannot represent an action with a number of parts going on simultaneously; one is limited to the part on the stage and connected with the actors.”³⁵ However, this likely was beneficial for Sayers’s intentions. Her purpose for this play was to reveal the truth of dogma within a historical context. A drama, though limited to showing one scene or action at a time, allowed the audience to focus on the moment before them, highlighting the dogma within a specific scene. The dramatic production offers the audience an attentive moment with a divine purpose. As a third-party witness, the audience participates in the play, extracting the truth of history through poetic means.

George Bernard Shaw agrees that a play offers a unique point of view, saying “ . . . for the theater imposes unities of time and place from which Nature in her boundless wastefulness is free.”³⁶ The characters in the play are uniquely presenting, in present time and space, a truth to other humans at the same time and space, about a reality from a different time and space. He says later that, “ . . . it is the business of the stage to make its figures more intelligible to themselves than they would be in real life; for by no other means can they be made intelligible to the audience.”³⁷ History and dogma portrayed through the medium of theater help people understand the historical players and circumstances in a unique way: humans embodying other humans while being watched by humans. This triple threat of human interaction is powerful for interpreting the truths of both history and truths of spiritual dogma. This proved to be true for radio drama as well.

Dogma “Nott” Dogmatism: Sayers’s Lasting Influence on British Society

People continued discussing the radio broadcast two years after the first production. Dorothy Gordon discloses in a 1944 article from The Elementary English Review: “The daily ‘Children’s Hour’ broadcasts, from five to six in the afternoon, included Dorothy Sayers’s play, The Man Born to be King, a series which has gained a wide audience among adult listeners.”³⁸ This new form, at the time scandalous in its presentation, opened the eyes of its audience, revealing the characters of history in a new light. Melissa Dinsman acknowledges that the radio drama especially, piped into people’s home in their intimate spaces, gave a special kind of power to the dramas: “With regard to The Man Born to Be King, this meant that Jesus’s voice was additionally effective because it reached the listener at home–his message became part of the private environment, rather than say a shared public experience in a church.”³⁹ This was unique to history since it was the first time that the voice of Jesus was reaching a large private audience even though a large audience was not the intent of Sayers. Her plays started a “religious conversation” with the “active listener.”⁴⁰

After the initial production of The Man Born to be King on the BBC, Sayers continued to write and speak about Christian dogma in the public sphere. Her successful radio dramas sealed her influence as a Christian influencer. The Man Born to Be King caught the attention of another Christian influencer, C.S. Lewis. Lewis had just given his first speeches on the radio in favor of Christianity in August of 1941, some of which were published as part of his apologetics book, Mere Christianity.⁴¹ Sometime in April of 1942, Sayers and Jack began corresponding.⁴² He became a fan of Sayers and her plays, admitting after they were published, that he read them every year in preparation for advent.⁴³ The two BBC communicators supported each other in both their apologetics work as well as their scholarly work and as “the most well-known writers to be broadcast on wartime BBC radio.”⁴⁴

As public leaders, they were open to public criticism. In late 1953, Kathleen Nott attacked Sayers and Lewis as well as other known Christian writers such as G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, and others in her book The Emperor’s Clothes. While Sayers and Lewis were arguing that Christianity was waning, she and fellow atheists argued that Christianity was dangerously rising.⁴⁵ Nott believed that both Sayers and Lewis were using Christianity inappropriately, “drawing unwarrantable moral conclusions from the decline of dogmatic religion,” making “our mortal state more miserable than it need be.”⁴⁶ She regarded Sayers’s writing and speaking as “dogmatism.” While dogma includes foundational opinions shared by a community for understanding truth (as evident in the early Ecumenical Councils), dogmatism allows for no argument. Nott’s opinions of both Lewis and Sayers reflects the modern academic voices of the time, voices which condemned Christians as “emotional, not intellectual,” and regarding Christianity as a “kind of emotional security” with a “preoccupation with Sin.”⁴⁷ She further says:

They are both writers and broadcasters with considerable popular appeal; and if, as I hope to show, their apparent willingness to probe the most fundamental intellectual issues merely masks this underlying wish, their distractive performances serve to put objective and verifiable thought in greater popular danger than it generally is in.⁴⁸

In essence, Nott explains the common misconceptions of Christian thinking of the time: it was “dangerous” and not “verifiable” as scientific understandings were and therefore should not be seriously considered as part of the conversation. She, and other academics during this period, believed that “sciences show men at work employing, among other mental capacities, their reasoning powers” while people like Sayers and Lewis and others, “do not find this fact.”⁴⁹ These assertions show that Sayers’s important articulations regarding dogma did not go unnoticed by the opposing side of the public eye. While her radio dramas, speeches, and essays received accolades from much of the public, they also brought criticism and ridicule revealing the sensitive nature of the discussion. Her words about the importance of Christian dogma were making an impression on the fabric of British society. Sayers had an opportunity to rebut Nott publicly although Nott did not show up for the debate (since T.S. Eliot bowed-out last minute). Sayers concludes her thoughts to Nott reminding the audience that the importance of the Church and its dogmas in society resides in truth and charity. Charity does not especially come easy. She ended by saying, “That is the trouble with the Christian graces–that without Grace, they are impossible.”⁵⁰ In sum, she said that charity within society has no foundation if it is not based on Christian dogma, therefore understanding Christian dogma is fundamental to the moral fabric of British society.

Conclusion

At the time of her death in 1957, Sayers had an impressive list of novels, essays, non-fiction, and plays, however, her magnum opus is her play cycle, The Man Born to Be King. Her Children’s Hour radio drama would give hope and purpose to listeners of all ages during BBC radio broadcasts. She would later continue sharing the importance of Christian dogma as a foundation for morality in the British nation through speeches and essays. While she received criticism for her public beliefs with others such as C.S. Lewis, she participated in elevating the status of Christian truth during the 1940s and 1950s before a tide of godless humanism washed up on British shores. Dorothy L. Sayers, through her wit, drama, and intellect, bolstered Britain’s faith during a time when she needed it most, reminded people where their ethics originated, and articulated the importance of Christian dogma for treating each other charitably and humanely.

Sayers asserts in an essay reprinted in Letters to the Diminished Church, “The dogma is the drama — not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to lovingkindness and uplift, not the promise of something nice after death — but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed though the grave and gate of death.”⁵¹ This statement summarizes Sayers’s primary goal for British society in the first half of the twentieth century — to know and love the beauty of the incarnate Christ. She accomplished this goal through The Man Born to be King, bringing a personal encounter with Christ and all of those who participated in the story of his birth, death, and resurrection into the living spaces of Great Britain.

Notes:

1 Hannah Elias, “Radio Religion: War, Faith and the BBC, 1939-1949” (Dissertation, MacSphere, 2016), v.

2 Colin Durez (Death, Dante, and Lord Peter Wimsey: Dorothy L. Sayers, a Biography), Oxford: Lion Hudson limited, 141.

3 Ibid.

4 Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume 2: 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 161.

5 Ibid, 169.

6 Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 49.

7 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (Eugene: WIPF and Stock, 2011), 37.

8 Ibid, 38.

9 Bethany Wood, “Incorporation of the Incar (Nation): Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King,” Ecumenica 3, no. 2 (2010): 7-30, https://doi.org/10.5325/ecumenica.3.2.0007, 8.

10 Kenneth M. Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation 1922-1956: The Politics of Broadcast Religion (London: SCM Press, 1984), 221.

11 Melissa Dinsman, Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 56.

12 Hannah Elias, “Radio Religion: War, Faith and the BBC,” 1939-1949, 10.

13 Ibid, 3.

14 Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers, 299.

15 Durez, Death, Dante, and Lord Peter Wimsey, 183.

16 Ibid, 35.

17 Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation 1922-1956: The Politics of Broadcast Religion, 223.

18 Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 36.

19 William Shakespeare, The Plays and Sonnets, ed. M J Adler and P W Goetz, 2nd ed., vol. 25 (Chicago; Auckland; London; Madrid; Manila; Paris; Rome; Seoul; Sydney; Tokyo; Toronto: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 49.

20 Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 38.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid, 53.

23 Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation 1922-1956: The Politics of Broadcast Religion, 227.

24 Ibid., 236.

25 Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 41.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Crystal Downing, Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2020), 205.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid, 40.

31 Ibid, 41.

32 Ibid, 48.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid, 55.

35 Aristotle, The Works of Aristotle, ed. M Adler and P Goetz, 2nd ed., Vol. 8 (Toronto: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 695.

36 George B. Shaw et al., Imaginative Literature: Selections from the Twentieth Century., ed. M Adler and P Goetz, 2nd ed., vol. 59 (Chicago; Auckland; Geneva; London; Madrid; Manila; Paris; Rome; Seoul; Sydney; Tokyo; Toronto: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 60.

37 Ibid, 62.

38 Dorothy Gordon, “Radio for Children: Ours, Our Allies’, Our Enemies’,” The Elementary English Review 21, no. 4 (1944): 133–37.

39 1. Melissa Dinsman, Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 63.

40 Ibid.

41 Durez, Death, Dante, and Lord Peter Wimsey, 160.

42 Gina Dalfonzo, Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy l. Sayers and C.S. Lewis, 179.

43 Durez, Death, Dante, and Lord Peter Wimsey, 162.

44 Ibid, 160.

45 Dalfonzo, Dorothy and Jack, 136.

46 Kathleen Nott, The Emperor’s Clothes. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954), 31.

47 Ibid, 254.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid, 2-3.

50 Dorothy L Sayers, “A Debate Deferred, Part I: The Dogma in the Manger: A Reply to Kathleen Nott,” An Anglo-American Literary Review 3 (1982): 37.

51Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 20.