The Performing Word: Sayers’s Unorthodox Orthodoxy

Abstract

When The Zeal of Thy House went on tour in 1938, Sayers became the focus of increased media attention. In response to one interview, she composed “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” which the Sunday Times published on April 3. As she told one correspondent, “That did it. Apparently the spectacle of a middle-aged female detective-novelist admitting publicly that the judicial murder of God might compete in interest with the Corpse in the Coal-Hole was the sensation for which the Christian world was waiting” (Ltrs 4. 139). The performance of Zeal, then, radically changed Sayers’ s life. Asked to write a second Canterbury work, The Devil to Pay, and a radio play about the birth of Jesus, He That Should Come (both published in 1939), she received an increasing number of invitations to speak and write on theological topics.

Now, in all myth-founded religions—and Christianity is no exception—the act of worship tends to issue in a ritual drama: a rite, that is, in which the events of the myth are dramatically re-enacted. The central drama of Christian worship is the rite of the Mass.

—Savers, “Sacred Plays”