The Rock; A Pageant Play Written for Performance on Behalf of the Forty-Five Churches Fund of the Diocese of London

London: Faber and Faber, 1934. First Edition, Third impression. Near fine/Near fine. Small 8vo, 7 1/2 x 5 inches (190 x 125 mm); 86 pp. Original grey paper-covered boards, blue lettering on spin; original grey dust jacket with white and red lettering, unclipped (price of 2s. 6d. net) with minimal toning and only one small tear in the rear flap panel, else very fresh interior pages evenly toned but clean and binding tight.
[Gallup A26a]. This pageant play with words by T. S. Eliot and music by Martin Shaw was first performed at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London on 28 May 1934. In a prefatory note Eliot disclaimed full responsibility for the text, saying "I cannot consider myself the author of the "play", but only of the words which are printed here." By Eliot's account, the text was written in collaboration with director E. Martin Browne and R. Webb-Odell. It was part of a massive project to fund the construction of forty-five new churches in the Anglican diocese of London. The director E. Martin Browne had been commissioned to stage the pageant and had asked Eliot to write the words for his scenario and provide the choral segments that would unify the sprawling production, which featured some 330 characters played by amateur actors in more than 20 different scenes, each presented as a moment in the construction of the historical church. Eliot's work with Browne on this project led to another successful collaboration, "Murder in the Cathedral," which was commissioned for the Canterbury Festival by the Bishop of Chichester.
From the estate of Robert Cecil Bald (1901 - 1965), an Australian scholar of English Literature, who moved to the US to teach at Cornell University in 1937 and was then a professor at the University of Chicago from 1952 to 1965.