The Cocktail Party is not a straightforward transposition of the Divine Comedy into a drawing-room comedy. Mediating between the play and the epic, there is an as-yet unidentified source informing Eliot’s Dantean designs: the Henry James short story “The Great Good Place,” first published in 1900. . . . As will be seen, Dane’s quasi-spiritual pilgrimage to this Great Good Place is patterned after the Divine Comedy, which explains why the Jamesian influence on The Cocktail Party has gone almost undetected, obscured by the story and the play’s shared Dantean details. Readers of the play have, understandably, jumped straight from Eliot to Dante and missed the ways in which Eliot’s tribute to Dante involves a rejoinder to James's own engagement with the poet. Although The Cocktail Party also makes allusions to The Divine Comedy without simultaneously alluding to “The Great Good Place,” Eliot is essentially adapting Dante via James's adaptation.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS.