‘Playwrights Are Not Evangelists’: Dorothy L. Sayers on Translating the Gospels into Drama

Abstract

Dorothy L. Sayers's twelve-part wartime radio life of Christ The Man Born to be King has been judged ‘an astonishing and far-reaching innovation’, not only because it used colloquial speech and because Jesus was a character voiced by an actor, but also because it brought the gospels into people's lives in a way that demanded an imaginative response. In spite of this, Sayers insisted that her purpose was not evangelization. Sayers's writing on theological aesthetics asserts that a work of art will only speak to its audience if the artist ‘serves the work’ rather than trying to preach. This article locates her thinking in the context of William Temple's sacramentalism and Jacques Maritain's neo-Thomism, suggesting that Temple's biblical exegesis was central to her approach in dramatizing the gospels. Finally an argument is made for Sayers's influence on mid-century thinking about the arts through her association with Bishop George Bell.

Dorothy L. Sayers was already a household name when the first play in her twelve-part BBC radio life of Christ, The Man Born to be King, was broadcast in December 1941.¹ She had established a literary reputation with the detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, but in the 1930s she decided to dispose of Wimsey in marriage and move on to the dramatic genre, in which she had a lifelong interest.² Her first full-length play, Busman's Honeymoon, also published as a novel,³ was intended as the final instalment in the Wimsey saga, and this play was in rehearsal when Sayers received an invitation to write the Canterbury Festival play for 1937. The festival had been established by George Bell in 1928 when he was dean of Canterbury, and it received a new impetus in 1935 with Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.⁴ Sayers's play The Zeal of Thy House⁵ went on tour nationally and was so well received that she was commissioned to write for the festival again two years later; her second Canterbury play was The Devil to Pay,⁶ a version of the Faust legend. In 1938 she had written a nativity play for BBC radio, and this was followed by the major commission of The Man Born to be King, broadcast in instalments from December 1941. After the war she wrote two other plays for festivals⁷ and published translations of Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio,⁸ leaving the Paradiso partly completed at her death in 1957.⁹

Sayers's mid-century fame derived not only from the novels but also from her career as a lay Christian apologist: in 1938 she wrote two articles of popular theology for The Sunday Times,¹⁰ and from then on she was in constant demand as a lecturer and broadcaster. In 1941, the year of The Man Born to be King, she published a work of theological aesthetics, The Mind of the Maker, in which human creativity was compared by analogy with God's work in creation.¹¹ The book was one of the first in a series of ‘Bridgeheads’ contributing to a widespread debate in the churches about the possibility of post-war reconstruction on Christian principles,¹² and with this debate in mind Sayers also drafted a proposal, which circulated among leading churchmen, for an ‘Oecumenical Penguin’, an accessible book-length statement of the fundamentals of Christian doctrine common to the major denominations, of the sort produced by Penguin Books.¹³ Although the scheme eventually foundered,¹⁴ it is important for a discussion of The Man Born to be King because Sayers saw both projects in terms of translation: ‘the technical vocabulary of theology has become unintelligible’, she complained.¹⁵ Her correspondence about the Oecumenical Penguin with Oliver Quick, Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, makes it clear that she wanted a team of theologians to create a draft that she would literally translate by reworking it in accessible language, while, perhaps sensing the likelihood of interdenominational battles, the theologians envisaged that Sayers would do the initial writing.¹⁶ Giles Watson has argued that the proposed themes of the Penguin book closely mirrored the theology Sayers was at the same time expressing dramatically in The Man Born to be King, ‘an epic portrayal of what it meant in real terms for God to become man’.¹⁷

The commission to write the radio life of Christ was initially held up by disagreements with the BBC, but when Sayers finally got to work she started by making her own translation of the gospels from the Greek. This article will discuss Sayers's approach to translating the gospels into language that spoke to a mid-twentieth-century audience. This includes her justification for the use of the imagination in creating fictional dialogue and situations. We shall also consider translation in the wider sense of translating theological ideas into dramatic action. Sayers's plays should be located in the context of thinking both about religious arts in the mid-twentieth century and about the role of the Churches in post-war reconstruction, and it can be argued that Sayers was influenced by William Temple not only in her sacramental view of all creative work but also in her approach to exegesis and the nature and boundaries of translation. Indeed, Sayers's own writing on theological aesthetics may have been more influential than is often acknowledged, and that there is scope for further research on this.

A recent discussion of Sayers's debt to Temple's social ethics can be found in Christine M. Fletcher's exploration of Sayers's theology of work, and in focusing on the plays I am adding another area of investigation to Fletcher's argument that Temple's importance has been underestimated in Sayers studies.¹⁸ Sayers has received less attention as a theologian than as a novelist but studies of her theology include Laura K. Simmons's comprehensive overview,¹⁹ studies by John Thurmer and Michael Hampel of Sayers's Trinitarian theological aesthetics,²⁰ and Suzanne Bray's edition of and commentary on a collection of wartime broadcasts.²¹ There are chapters on Sayers's dramatic writing in Kenneth Pickering's book on the Canterbury Festival plays,²² in Kenneth M. Wolfe's book on the Churches and the BBC,²³ and in studies by Catherine Kenney and by David Coomes.²⁴ Sayers's plays are also discussed in a number of literary biographies, notably those of Barbara Reynolds²⁵ and James Brabazon,²⁶ and in the twenty-first century there has been an increased emphasis on performance and reception, and their role as contributing factors to national wartime identity:²⁷ for example, Crystal Downing's argument that Sayers anticipates a postmodernist sensibility²⁸ and Bethany Wood's MA thesis on The Man Born to be King.²⁹ Reynolds's study of Sayers's debt to Dante and her approach to the translations is an invaluable resource, as are the two volumes of Sayers's own lectures on Dante.³⁰

Sayers was a linguist who read French at Oxford, was fluent in German and had a good knowledge of the classical languages. In 1954 she opened a lecture with the words: ‘The passion for verse-translation is a kind of congenital disease. I have suffered from it all my life.’³¹ While she was translating Dante she lectured and wrote in detail about the translation process, exchanging long letters with Charles Williams and after his death with C. S. Lewis, and in these discussions she was aware that in translation ‘something, somewhere, is always lost, modified, to some extent travestied in passing from one language to the other’.³² But at the same time she believed in the power of metaphor to add new and legitimate theological meaning, as her discussion of the history of atonement imagery makes clear: ‘The peculiar Angst of our own age . . . has taken a new form, predominantly morbid and medical. This has most interestingly produced an entirely new set of Atonement images, of which the central symbol is Christ the Healer.’³³ That Sayers herself applied the word ‘translation’ to the revitalization of theological concepts through modern reformulations is apparent in her 1955 article ‘Playwrights Are Not Evangelists’: ‘The orthodox . . . should welcome, and not be alarmed by, the translation of ancient and hallowed formulae into modern speech and contemporary action.’³⁴ The previous year, in an extended personal apologia to John Wren-Lewis, Sayers had listed the things that ‘my sort can safely do’: ‘We can, so far as our competence goes, help to disentangle the language-trouble by translating from one jargon into another’.³⁵ Fletcher applies this claim to Sayers's whole ‘perception of her task and method’³⁶ and suggests that the ‘framework for understanding’ opened up by the movement between old and new versions is comparable with the process of embodying theology in drama.³⁷

On receiving the commission for The Man Born to be King in February 1940, Sayers's first and most far-reaching innovation was her request to James Welch, the BBC's Director of Religious Broadcasting, that Jesus should be a character in the drama, something forbidden on the commercial stage but legally possible on radio.³⁸ Most religious plays of the time observed the convention of not presenting Jesus, whether or not they were for commercial performance; Henri Ghéon's The Way of the Cross (1938), for instance, told the story of the crucifixion through the reactions of observers.³⁹ Sayers argued to Welch that ‘the device of indicating Christ's presence by a “voice off”, or by a shaft of light, or a shadow, or what not, tends to suggest to people that He never was a real person at all’.⁴⁰ Persuading people that Jesus ‘is the only God who has a date in history’⁴¹ was a central task both of The Man Born to be King and of the Oecumenical Penguin, and the presentation of Christ by an actor was essential. Sayers added to Welch: ‘It would not, of course, be suitable to give to Christ any speeches which do not appear in the Scriptures, but if all the other characters “talk Bible”, the realism will be lost.’⁴² The answer she proposed was modern dialogue that could ‘lift itself, without too much of a jolt, into the language of prophecy’.⁴³ Although Sayers followed the gospels fairly closely for Jesus's words, she invented dialogue using a wide linguistic register for the other characters. To Welch she pointed out that the medieval mystery plays ‘let Christ say anything that seemed natural and appropriate, but we could not go so far as this without arousing roars of disapproval among the pious’.⁴⁴ Roars of disapproval followed nonetheless.

Sayers believed that the widespread use of the Authorized Version, which she ironically designated the ‘sacred English original’,⁴⁵ made it difficult for people to engage with the content of the gospel: to churchgoers it was over-familiar, while to those outside the Churches the ‘ancient and hallowed formulae’ were incomprehensible. An example she discussed with Welch concerned John the Baptist's reluctance to baptize Jesus (Matt. 3: 13–15). Jesus's reply to John in the Authorized Version is: ‘Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.’ Sayers ‘struggled a good deal’⁴⁶ with this and her version in the play emerged as: ‘Do as I ask you now, John. It's right to begin this way, like everyone else.’⁴⁷ The problematic word was probably the multivalent Greek dikaiosunē, rendered in the Vulgate as iustitia, and Sayers decided not to expound the significance of righteousness and justice but to limit Jesus's reply to an expression of obedience to God's will, focusing on the narrative rather than the theology. Sayers's choices in translation consistently reflected her view that ‘the history and the theology of Christ are one thing: His life is theology in action’,⁴⁸ so that if the dramatist made the story accessible the theology would inevitably emerge. In the different context of the Beatitudes she translated dikaiosunē as ‘holiness’: ‘Happy are they who long for holiness as a man longs for food, for they shall enjoy God's plenty.’⁴⁹ The familiarity of the Beatitudes was a challenge to Sayers's powers of reformulation, and in ‘[h]appy are they who establish peace, for they share God's very nature’ her skill in translation is seen at its best: the concept of ‘sharing God's nature’ as a rendering of the Authorized Version's ‘they shall be called the children of God’ adds a wider resonance to the literal meaning.⁵⁰

Sayers was prepared for a battle over the decision to use modern speech. Asked for a preview in a press conference of 10 December 1941, she chose to read some dialogue in which the disciple Matthew accuses his colleague Philip of being ‘had for a sucker’ by a market trader.⁵¹ The following day's Daily Mail headline was ‘BBC Life of Christ Play in U.S. Slang’, and a campaign of public protest in advance of the broadcasts ensued, including a question in parliament. The furore was described by Welch in his foreword to the published plays and has been discussed in a number of later studies.⁵² Not only the colloquial speech but also what the Lord's Day Observance Society called the ‘impersonation’ of Christ were the main targets for attack.⁵³ While the objection to Americanisms was short-lived, coming as it did a matter of days before the USA entered the war, anxiety about colloquial language persisted even after reactions to the first broadcasts made it clear that the series would be a popular success. In March 1942 Sayers wrote to the Chairman of the BBC's Central Religious Advisory Committee (CRAC), Cyril Garbett, the archbishop-designate of York, anticipating objections to the crucifixion scenes: ‘How can it honour God to make His enemies seem less cruel, less callous, less evil than they were?’⁵⁴ Garbett, at first full of misgivings, was won over, even though, according to Sayers, Welch himself ‘hadn't ever realised that the crucifixion would have sounded like that’.⁵⁵ Welch, like Sayers, chose to make a virtue of the contemporary idiom, and before the first broadcast wrote in the Radio Times: ‘It is partly this escape from the familiar language which helps us to see Christ as a real human being.’⁵⁶ For both Sayers and Welch the materiality of the Incarnation was central to Christian doctrine and the colloquial style had a theological purpose. The realism of The Man Born to be King invited the listener into a collaboration with the writer and actors in the visualization of a scene based on the life of someone who had really lived.

Sayers believed that the dramatic experience was itself one in which writer, actors and audience were united in a God-given and God-like creative activity. Her Trinitarian analogy for artistic creativity in The Mind of the Maker had its origins in the concluding speech of The Zeal of Thy House and was developed further in a letter to Fr Herbert Kelly of Kelham: God the Father is represented by the Idea, or what Sayers called ‘The Book as You Think It’, God the Son is the Energy, or ‘The Book as You Write It’, and God the Holy Spirit is the Power, or ‘The Book as They and You Read It’.⁵⁷ This analogy has two important implications. Firstly, the reader or audience is involved in the creation of meaning, and in The Man Born to be King the audience is encouraged to engage hermeneutically with the words of Jesus in a continuing process of reception and appropriation. Secondly, Sayers believed that the Trinitarian analogy expressed something real about the way creativity operates, and this locates her within a mid-century Catholic tradition influenced by the French neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who wrote that ‘[a]rtistic creation does not copy God's creation, but continues it.’⁵⁸ Maritain's aesthetics appealed to sacramentalists such as Temple and Sayers for whom God was present in every act of creativity, as also to English Roman Catholics such as Eric Gill and David Jones.

The Trinitarian analogy enabled Sayers to claim that a divine quality was inherent in all creative work, independently of the subject matter. This is important for The Man Born to be King because a theology of creation in which creative activity is in itself Godlike could be used to justify the imaginative approach for which she was criticized in some quarters. In expanding the gospel stories with fictional scenes and character motivation – Sayers invented one major character – she was translating not only the words but the spirit of the original. Sayers believed that if the artistic process is a reflection of the divine, it follows that divine truth will inevitably emerge from work created with integrity. Maritain wrote that ‘[t]he cathedral builders had no sort of thesis in mind . . . Their achievement revealed God's truth, but without doing it on purpose, and because it was not done on purpose.’⁵⁹ Sayers had used this idea in The Zeal of Thy House, where the Archangel Raphael says that in spite of the cathedral architect's irregular life, his ‘unsleeping arches with perpetual voice / Proclaim in Heaven, to labour is to pray.’⁶⁰ For Sayers in The Man Born to be King, ‘[i]t is the business of the dramatist not to subordinate the drama to the theology, but to approach the job of truth-telling from his own end, and trust the theology to emerge undistorted from the dramatic presentation of the story.’⁶¹ In The Mind of the Maker Sayers accepted that a dogma can be skewed by the preoccupations of the artist, but argued that this always issues in an unconvincing scenario.⁶²

Sayers found further support for her imaginative approach to the gospels in William Temple's Readings in St John's Gospel, which emphasizes that the gospel narrative is unavoidably filtered through the mind not only of the gospel writer but also of the contemporary exegete. ‘What reaches us is never a certified record but always a personal impression. Thus our concern is always with the Christ of faith, not with some supposed different Jesus of history.’⁶³ This had a significant consequence for the structure of Sayers's translation of the gospel into drama. A person who believes that the Bible is to be read sacramentally, that is to say, looking for the spiritual truth within a narrative, will find it less important to ask questions concerning the literal historicity of the gospels. A medievalist by training, Sayers took for granted the fourfold method of exegesis in which the literal co-exists with the allegorical, moral and anagogical; paradoxically, this allowed her to present at face value passages that might strain credulity where a literal reading is prioritized. Sayers dramatized the raising of Lazarus, for instance, as it is described in the gospel, but made it an affirmation of the central importance for salvation of Jesus's material existence and a symbol of the conflict between the will to life and the will to death that characterizes the struggle between Jesus and Judas.

In pursuit of a drama that both expressed incarnational theology and invited audience engagement, Sayers built her play round the uncertainties experienced by Jesus and Judas in attempting to ‘read’ each other. To Welch she wrote: ‘what did the man imagine he was doing? . . . If we can get a coherent Judas we can probably get a coherent plot.’⁶⁴ Commentators from the Church Fathers onwards have found problems in a theology which predestines Judas to damnation, and Sayers's own writing consistently emphasized the reality of free will, starting with her first detective novel in which the murderer is the author of a book entitled The Physiological Bases of the Conscience.⁶⁵ In the Introduction to The Man Born to be King Sayers rejected the idea that Judas's betrayal was inevitable: ‘to choose an obvious crook for the purpose of letting him damn himself would be the act of a devil’.⁶⁶ Sayers's insistence on Christ's humanity meant that for most of the story Jesus believes Judas might not betray him, and he offers forgiveness even after the betrayal; one of Sayers's early poems was a ballad in which Jesus accompanies Judas to the gates of Hades.⁶⁷ More recent writers such as Nikos Kazantzakis and Stephen Adly Guirgis have fictionalized Judas as a friend of Jesus complicit in God's plan of salvation,⁶⁸ but Sayers's characterization of Judas is a natural development from her detective novels, and Judas's choice of evil within the context of a human propensity to sin mediates the emergence of a theological point about forgiveness.⁶⁹ The prevailing doctrine of human perfectibility had been revealed by two world wars to be hollow, and a popular explication of the inescapability of sin was felt by contemporary theologians to be urgently necessary. Sayers intended to address this in the Oecumenical Penguin, but her dramatization of Judas's delusional denial was perhaps more effective. A Christ-centred redemption of human ‘solidarity in guilt’ was subsequently central to her Lichfield play of 1946.

In the early twentieth century Judas was frequently assumed to be a disappointed revolutionary, but Sayers gave the story a twist by reversing that. Jesus's gospel of the suffering servant appeals to Judas's sado-masochistic nature, and he betrays Jesus because he believes he is going to renounce suffering and instead engage in a military coup. For Sayers there was a contemporary political resonance: in her notes to actors she compared Judas's masochism with the ‘religious elements’ who encouraged France's armistice with Germany in 1940.⁷⁰ Her wartime listeners would readily supply their own examples of Judas's idealistic vanity, together with instances of Herod's venality and the power games of Pilate and Caiaphas: Sayers compared the latter with Hitler's bishops, adding: ‘we have seen something of Caiaphas lately’.⁷¹ When Judas tells Caiaphas that ‘all my hopes, all my ideals, seemed incarnate in [Jesus]’,⁷² he is constructing his own Jesus rather than letting Jesus transform him, with clear implications for the audience's own reception of the gospel. In the final play the audience is left with the infinite opportunities of continuing the narrative implied in the words of the gospel writer: ‘And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.’⁷³ Like the gospel, Sayers's play leaves the audience at the beginning of a different story: the history of the Church. Playwrights need not be evangelists because the tools are there for audiences to evangelize themselves.

In leaving the story in the hands of the listeners Sayers united her translation of the gospel into drama with the gospel's own appeal to its readers, putting into practice her conviction that artistic integrity demands a refusal to preach:

It was assumed by many pious persons who approved the project that my object in writing The Man Born to be King was ‘to do good’ . . . But that was in fact not my object at all, though it was quite properly the object of those who commissioned the plays in the first place. My object was to tell that story to the best of my ability, within the medium at my disposal – in short, to make as good a work of art as I could.⁷⁴

Sayers's material was the Bible and creeds and she would present them in language that people could understand and make their own. A further opportunity to engage with theology through the translation process might be found, consciously or unconsciously, in the hermeneutical challenge of comparing the old familiar version with its contemporary reformulation. At the same time, Sayers was very clear about the limitations of any one version: ‘just as no translator can escape from his own personality neither can he escape from the habit of mind of his own contemporaries’.⁷⁵The Man Born to be King spoke powerfully in 1941; that it is still sometimes produced in the twenty-first century might have surprised its author.

Sayers did not subscribe fully to the agenda of any religious group of her time, but she was sympathetic to Eric Gill's craft-guild movement inspired by Maritain and to Temple's social ethics. Temple acknowledged the influence of Maritain on his social thinking, and he gave Sayers's apologetics the seal of archiepiscopal approval by inviting her to speak at his Malvern Conference in 1941, the only woman to do so. The ensuing demands on her gifts as an apologist were so great that she attempted to make a partial withdrawal from public life. Sayers was also on the fringes of the Religious Drama Society, whose president was Bell (by now bishop of Chichester) and whose executive was chaired by T. S. Eliot's director, E. Martin Browne. Browne believed that during the performance of a play the actors and audience would share an event with sacramental significance: this was close to the neo-Thomist principle that art of integrity would spontaneously reveal God. Bell was slower than Sayers and Browne to preach a theology of the arts that refused to regard them as tools for evangelization, possibly because he thought that those churchgoers for whom the arts were suspect might be won over by an evangelistic argument. In 1941 Sayers wrote in apparent exasperation: ‘It's not a matter of the Church “getting hold of the Arts”, as the Bishop of Chichester seems to imagine. It's a matter of (a) presenting the artist with a brand of Christianity which can inform and inspire his secular work, and (b) recognising the autonomy of the artist's vocation as such.’⁷⁶

In 1944 Bell called a conference in Chichester on ‘The Church and the Artist’. The emphasis was on painting and sculpture, and those present included Duncan Grant, Henry Moore and Thomas Monnington, who had recently abandoned a Church House commission because he felt he was under too much theological constraint. Eliot was present, but it was Sayers whom Bell invited to introduce a session on ‘The Problem of Translation (Communication)’. According to Bell's memorandum, Sayers argued that familiarity with dogma was an essential background to the artist's search for an accessible contemporary language within a church context, a point reinforced by Eliot in discussion: ‘[theology's] main function (almost unconscious) was negative: it kept the writer right’.⁷⁷ Sayers wrote to Bell before the conference that she wanted in her address to ask what the artist had the right to expect from the Church,⁷⁸ and her words are echoed in Bell's article for The Listener published the day before the conference began: ‘I do not, I hope, forget the artist's own aesthetic approach and what he has a right to expect from the Church.’⁷⁹ In 1941 Sayers believed that Bell had failed fully to grasp the importance of an artist's freedom to serve the work, but he came to accept that it was counter-productive for the Church to put constraints on artists, and I suggest that Sayers's influence can be seen in this development. In 1953 Bell wrote: ‘Unless the Church is to be sterile in the fostering of creative art, it must be prepared to trust its chosen artists to begin their work and carry it through to the end as the fulfilment of a trust.’⁸⁰

Sayers claimed throughout her life that her personal religion stemmed from the intellect. When Temple offered her a Lambeth Doctorate in 1943,⁸¹ Sayers replied:

I should feel better about it if I were a more convincing kind of Christian. I am never quite sure whether I really am one, or whether I have only fallen in love with an intellectual pattern. And when one is able to handle language it is sometimes hard to know how far one is under the spell of one's own words.⁸²

Her friend and biographer Barbara Reynolds has challenged Sayers's self-deprecation, quoting Kay Baxter on the subject of intellect and emotion in Sayers's religious writing: ‘I suspect that by reading the Testament in Greek . . . and slogging many hours a day at compiling the four gospels into one continuous narrative . . . that she actually suffered a conversion . . . caught up in the astounding story she had to tell.’⁸³ According to Sayers's own theology, it hardly mattered whether she herself was a ‘convincing Christian’; the work was itself a God-given and God-centred activity. When the architect William of Sens realises his mortal sin in The Zeal of Thy House, he says: ‘Let me lie deep in hell . . . / But let my work, all that was good in me, / All that was God, stand up and live and grow.’⁸⁴ The translation at the centre of The Man Born to be King was similarly something that would communicate and proliferate beyond the writer's active engagement.

Sayers believed that ‘playwrights are not evangelists’ and that in telling the gospel story to the best of her ability, a task that involved constant reference to the Greek original, she was creating a medium in which the theology would emerge from the action and also be manifest in the nature of the work of art as a whole. When she took on the commission for The Man Born to be King, her considerable experience as a translator included a published version of Tristan in Brittany,⁸⁵ and she brought a scrupulous attention to what the Greek actually says to the creative task of embodying theology in action. Her wide reading provided the necessary scholarly foundation. A good deal has been written on Sayers's work as a translator of Dante, not least by Sayers herself, but the role of translation in The Man Born to be King is a subject which would benefit from further attention, as would the relationship of her plays to contemporary aesthetic theory and culture. The Man Born to be King reached over two million listeners, and Sayers's influence on religious arts from then until her death in 1957 was assured. In the words of Kenneth Wolfe:

Dorothy L. Sayers had decided from the outset that this would not be ‘church’ speaking to 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.⁸⁶

¹ Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to be King (London, 1943).

² Sayers was one of the scriptwriters for a local pageant in 1908 when she was fifteen, and included a short satirical verse play, ‘The Mocking of Christ’, in her second published work, Catholic Tales and Christian Songs (Oxford, 1918).

³ Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon (London, 1937); Dorothy L. Sayers and M. St Clare Byrne, Busman's Honeymoon: A Detective Comedy in Three Acts (London, 1939).

⁴ T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London, 1969), 237 –82.

⁵ Dorothy L. Sayers, The Zeal of Thy House (London, 1937).

⁶ Dorothy L. Sayers, The Devil to Pay (London, 1939).

⁷ The Just Vengeance, for the 1946 Lichfield Festival and The Emperor Constantine for the 1951 Festival of Britain in Colchester. This was followed by a London run in 1952 of a shortened version of the latter, Christ's Emperor, at St Thomas's, Regent Street.

⁸ Dorothy L. Sayers, transl., The Divine Comedy, 1: Hell (Harmondsworth, 1949); 2: Purgatory (Harmondsworth, 1955).

⁹ Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, transl., The Divine Comedy, 3: Paradise (Harmondsworth, 1962).

¹⁰ Published as The Greatest Drama Ever Staged (London, 1938).

¹¹ Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London, 1941).

¹² Other contributions to the debate included G. K. A. Bell, Christianity and World Order (Harmondsworth, 1940); William Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London, 1942). J. S. Whale’s Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, 1941) was admired by Sayers as a benchmark.

¹³ London, LPL, Bell papers 208, fols 256–64, Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘Memorandum for the possible Formulation of a Statement of Oecumenical Doctrine based on the Highest Common Factor of Consent among the Christian Churches’, 1942.

¹⁴ Between 1938 and 1947 several comparable projects were discussed by members of the theological discussion group The Moot, and in January 1939 John Baillie's comment on the draft of a pamphlet presented by its convenor, J. H. Oldham, was that ‘for general distribution it would need to be rewritten by someone, like, e.g. Dorothy Sayers’: Keith Clements, ed., The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938–1944 (London, 2010), 148. In the event, Sayers was not involved, and the pamphlet was published by Oldham as The Resurrection of Christendom (London, 1940).

¹⁵ Sayers, ‘Memorandum’, fol. 257.

¹⁶ LPL, Bell papers 208, fols 254–5.

¹⁷ Giles Watson, ‘Catholicism in Anglican Culture and Theology: Responses to Crisis in England (1937–1949)’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1998), 221–70, at 248; cf. idem, ‘Dorothy L. Sayers and the Oecumenical Penguin’, VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review 14 (1997), 17–32.

¹⁸ Christine M. Fletcher, The Artist and the Trinity: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Theology of Work (Eugene, OR, 2013), 56–69. Fletcher's book includes a comprehensive bibliography.

¹⁹ Laura K. Simmons, Creed without Chaos: Exploring Theology in the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers (Grand Rapids, MI, 2005).

²⁰ John Thurmer, A Detection of the Trinity (Hurstpierpoint, 2008); Michael Hampel, ‘Dorothy L. Sayers: Creative Mind and the Holy Trinity’ (MA dissertation, University of Durham, 2002).

²¹ Suzanne Bray, ed., Dorothy L. Sayers: The Christ of the Creeds and other Broadcast Messages to the British People during World War II (Hurstpierpoint, 2008).

²² Kenneth Pickering, Drama in the Cathedral, rev. edn (Malvern, 2001), 219 –25.

²³ Kenneth M. Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation 1922 –1956: The Politics of Broadcast Religion (London, 1984), 218 –38.

²⁴ Catherine Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers (Kent, OH, 1981); David Coomes, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life (Oxford, 1992).

²⁵ Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (London, 1993), 298–306, 317–30.

²⁶ James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography (London, 1988), 191–205.

²⁷ Frances Clemson's PhD thesis, ‘The Theology of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Dramatic Works: Dramatic Performance and the “continual showing forth of God's act in history”’ (Exeter, 2012), was not available at the time of writing.

²⁸ Crystal Downing, Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers (New York, 2004).

²⁹ Bethany Wood, ‘Incorporation of the Incarnation: Dorothy L. Sayers's The Man Born to be King and the Wartime BBC’ (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2008).

³⁰ Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect (Kent, OH, 1989); Dorothy L. Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante (Eugene, OR, 2006; first publ. 1954); Further Papers on Dante (Eugene, OR, 2006; first publ. 1957).

³¹ Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘The Translation of Verse’, in eadem, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement (London, 1963), 127 –53, at 127.

³² Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘On Translating the Divina Commedia’, ibid. 91–125, at 91.

³³ Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘Poetry, Language and Ambiguity’, ibid. 263–86, at 283.

³⁴ Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘Playwrights Are Not Evangelists’ (1955), reprinted in VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review 7 (1986), 109 –13, at 111.

³⁵ Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters Volume Four: 1951–1957: In the Midst of Life, ed. Barbara Reynolds (Hurstpierpoint, 2000), 141 –2.

³⁶ Fletcher, Artist, xix.

³⁷ Ibid. 63.

³⁸ Radio was not subject to the Lord Chamberlain's jurisdiction, although the scripts were submitted for his approval as a matter of courtesy. He made no objection to the inclusion of Jesus, provided that there was no studio audience and that Jesus's longer speeches were based on his words as recorded in Scripture: James Welch, Foreword to Sayers, Man Born, 15.

³⁹ Henri Ghéon, The Way of the Cross, transl. Frank de Jonge, 2nd edn (London, 1952).

⁴⁰ Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters Volume Two: 1937–1943: From Novelist to Playwright, ed. Barbara Reynolds (Hurstpierpoint, 1997), 147.

⁴¹ Sayers, Man Born, 20.

⁴² Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 147.

⁴³ Sayers, Man Born, 24.

⁴⁴ Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 147.

⁴⁵ Ibid. 343.

⁴⁶ Ibid. 294.

⁴⁷ Sayers, Man Born, 77.

⁴⁸ Ibid. 20.

⁴⁹ Matt. 5: 6; ibid. 143.

⁵⁰ Matt. 5: 9; ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid. 117.

⁵² Welch, Foreword, ibid. 9–16; Wolfe, Churches and the BBC, 218–38; Reynolds, Life and Soul, 317–28; Coomes, Careless Rage, 11–25.

⁵³ The broadcasts were on Sundays.

⁵⁴ Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 357.

⁵⁵ Ibid. 373.

⁵⁶ James Welch, ‘The Man Born to be King’, Radio Times, 19 December 1941, 5.

⁵⁷ Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 45.

⁵⁸ Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism with other Essays, transl. J. F. Scanlan (London, 1947 edn), 49.

⁵⁹ Ibid. 52.

⁶⁰ Dorothy L Sayers, Four Sacred Plays (London, 1948), 38.

⁶¹ Sayers, Man Born, 20.

⁶² Sayers, ‘Scalene Trinities’, in eadem, Mind, 120–44.

⁶³ William Temple, Readings in St John's Gospel (First and Second Series) (London, 1950), xvi. The two parts of this work were first published separately in 1939 and 1940.

⁶⁴ Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 172–3.

⁶⁵ Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (London, 1968 edn), 63.

⁶⁶ Sayers, Man Born, 31.

⁶⁷ Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘The Gates of Paradise’, in Op. 1 (16 March 2000; first publ. 1916), online at: < http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sayers/opi/dls-opi.html >, accessed 11 April 2012.

⁶⁸ Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (Oxford, 1960); Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot: A Play (London, 2006).

⁶⁹ Barbara Reynolds, in a discussion of original sin, has drawn attention to a remark by Sayers in an unpublished letter: ‘The Incarnation is the answer, and the only answer, to the whole problem of free will and suffering’: Barbara Reynolds, ‘The Just Vengeance’, in Proceedings of the 1996 Seminar, ed. Christine R. Simpson (Hurstpierpoint, 1997), 5–16, at 12.

⁷⁰ Sayers, Man Born, 137.

⁷¹ Ibid. 23.

⁷² Ibid. 230.

⁷³ Ibid. 343 (John 21: 25 AV).

⁷⁴ Ibid. 20.

⁷⁵ Sayers, Search and Statement, 130.

⁷⁶ Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 334.

⁷⁷ LPL, Bell papers 151, fols 190–6, at 193.

⁷⁸ Ibid., fol. 169.

⁷⁹ George Bell, ‘Church and Artist’, The Listener, 14 September 1944, 298.

⁸⁰ Quoted in Ronald C. D. Jasper, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (Oxford, 1967), 133.

⁸¹ For a full discussion of the episode of the Lambeth doctorate, see Peter Webster, ‘Archbishop Temple's Offer of a Lambeth Degree to Dorothy L. Sayers’, in Melanie Barber and Stephen Taylor, with Gabriel Sewell, eds, From the Reformation to the Permissive Society, CERS 18 (Woodbridge, 2010), 565 –82.

⁸² Sayers, Letters 2, ed. Reynolds, 429.

⁸³ Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect (Kent, OH, 1989), 213.

⁸⁴ Sayers, Sacred Plays, 99.

⁸⁵ Dorothy L. Sayers, transl., Tristan in Brittany (London, 1929).

⁸⁶ Wolfe, Churches and the BBC, 237–8.