‘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.