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.Footnote 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.Footnote ² Her first full-length play, Busman's Honeymoon, also published as a novel,Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴ Sayers's play The Zeal of Thy House Footnote ⁵ 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,Footnote 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 festivalsFootnote ⁷ and published translations of Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio,Footnote ⁸ leaving the Paradiso partly completed at her death in 1957.Footnote 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,Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote 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.Footnote ¹³ Although the scheme eventually foundered,Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote ¹⁹ studies by John Thurmer and Michael Hampel of Sayers's Trinitarian theological aesthetics,Footnote ²⁰ and Suzanne Bray's edition of and commentary on a collection of wartime broadcasts.Footnote ²¹ There are chapters on Sayers's dramatic writing in Kenneth Pickering's book on the Canterbury Festival plays,Footnote ²² in Kenneth M. Wolfe's book on the Churches and the BBC,Footnote ²³ and in studies by Catherine Kenney and by David Coomes.Footnote ²⁴ Sayers's plays are also discussed in a number of literary biographies, notably those of Barbara ReynoldsFootnote ²⁵ and James Brabazon,Footnote 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:Footnote ²⁷ for example, Crystal Downing's argument that Sayers anticipates a postmodernist sensibilityFootnote ²⁸ and Bethany Wood's MA thesis on The Man Born to be King. Footnote 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.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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’.Footnote ³⁵ Fletcher applies this claim to Sayers's whole ‘perception of her task and method’Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Persuading people that Jesus ‘is the only God who has a date in history’Footnote 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.’Footnote ⁴² The answer she proposed was modern dialogue that could ‘lift itself, without too much of a jolt, into the language of prophecy’.Footnote 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’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Roars of disapproval followed nonetheless.

Sayers believed that the widespread use of the Authorized Version, which she ironically designated the ‘sacred English original’,Footnote 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’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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’,Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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?’Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote ⁷¹ When Judas tells Caiaphas that ‘all my hopes, all my ideals, seemed incarnate in [Jesus]’,Footnote 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.’Footnote 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:

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’.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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’.Footnote 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,Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.’Footnote ⁸⁰

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

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.’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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,Footnote 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: