"Quand [un sanglier] se retourne et qu'il charge, il y a une minute de tête à tête délicieuse où l'on se sent enfin responsable de soi."
("When [a boar] turns and charges, there's a delicious moment head to head where one finally feels responsible for oneself.")
                                        - Becket in a symbolic conversation about hunting with Henry, Act I

The play begins with Henry at Becket's tomb, about to do penance for the murder.  He remembers their days of friendship, and the shade of Becket appears to exchange a few words with him.

Flashback to their youth.  The king and Thomas are great friends.  Thomas is a bon vivant, sharing the king's pleasures (drinking and wenching, etc.), taking life lightly.  Then, at a council where he tries to extract money from the church for his wars, Henry appoints Thomas his chancellor.  He'd already been following his advice and this just makes it official.

The two go hunting and become separated from the rest of the party.  It starts to rain and they take shelter in a Saxon hut in the forest, where Henry takes a liking to the daughter of the house.  Thomas, uncomfortably caught between his friend and people of his own ethnic background, offers to go get the king a drink from a flask on his saddle.  He takes the girl's older brother with him and wrestles a knife away from him, receiving a slight wound in the process.  He tells Henry his horse bit him when he notices the bandage, and the king offers him a boon for being wounded in his service.  Thomas asks for the girl.  Henry is displeased, having wanted her himself, but he holds to the bargain, only saying that Thomas will have to give him something back someday in exchange (so much for this being a gift!).  As they leave the hut, Thomas tells the girl's father that no one will come for her.

Back at home, Thomas leaves a banquet to visit his Welsh mistress, Gwendoline, who is playing the viol.  Henry joins them and makes Gwendoline sing a ballad about Thomas's parents, the legend in which his father, Gilbert, was a Crusader captured by the Saracens.  His mother was the captor's daughter, who fell in love with Gilbert and followed him back to London.  After the song, Henry reminds Thomas of their bargain and asks for Gwendoline in exchange.  He grants Thomas and Gwendoline a few minutes' grace before he takes her.  Gwendoline would have loved Thomas even if he hadn't captured her, but he feels incapable of love and is uncomfortable with the idea of being loved.  He says that if the king sends Gwendoline away the next day, he won't take her back.  She goes out, and the king brings in the Saxon girl, teasing Thomas for forgetting her, but he (Henry) had remembered and sent for her.  He leaves again and then returns, distraught.  Gwendoline has killed herself, and she could just as easily have killed him.  Frightened, Henry wants to stay with Thomas that night.

The next scene opens in France, where Thomas has arranged for the capitulation of the town the English troops have been fighting.  Some soldiers bring him a monk who was prowling around camp with a knife.  The monk is a young Saxon who wants to strike back at the Normans.  Thomas sends him back to England unharmed.  He and the king enter the captured town and wait in the sacristy of the cathedral while Thomas sees to the evacuation of the building to prevent an incident that he'd had warning of.  Henry receives a message from England telling of the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury and has the brilliant idea of replacing him with Thomas.  Thomas tells him he won't be able to serve both him and God, but Henry won't take no for an answer.

Back in England, the queen and the queen-mother discuss reports that Thomas has given away all his riches upon becoming archbishop.  A messenger - William FitzStephen - comes from the archbishop and returns the seal of England to Henry.  Thomas has renounced the chancellorship.  Henry begins to realize that things aren't working out as he'd planned and goes to visit Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, to enlist his help against Thomas.  (He chooses Foliot because he'd opposed the election of Thomas to the primacy.)

Thomas has the Saxon monk brought to him to serve in his household.  He needs his prickliness around him because otherwise everything is too easy and he's enjoying himself too much.  Even hair shirts have ceased to irritate him.  Some bishops come and tell Thomas that the king is accusing him of embezzlement during his time as chancellor.  They also discuss criminous clerks and Thomas's excommunication of various people.

The king is tormented to see his old friend on the brink of destruction, and is secretly delighted that Thomas eludes the accusatory proceedings by appealing to the pope.  Thomas escapes across the Channel, first to the court of Louis VII, then to the pope, who is more interested in his own political maneuverings than in Thomas's plight.

Thomas and Henry meet again for negotiations.  Henry is still tormented, both hating and loving Thomas.  Thomas has found only one thing to care about: the honor of God.  Henry agrees to give him safe-conduct back to England, and Thomas and the monk travel back, prepared for death.

At a dinner, Henry announces his plans to have his son crowned in his lifetime.  He plans to get back at Thomas by having the Archbishop of York officiate at the coronation.  His mother tells him he has an unhealthy attachment to Thomas, and if he had been a wronged lover he wouldn't be acting any differently.  Furious at his family, Henry makes them all leave.  Calmer, he begins to drink with his barons, but talk turns back to the archbishop's movements.  Henry's fury bursts forth again.  Thomas seems to have turned against him, but his love for his old friend makes him powerless against him.  Can't anyone do anything?  The barons go out while Henry cries on his bed.

At the cathedral, the monk is helping Thomas vest.  William FitzStephen warns them that four armed men are trying to get in and they should lock themselves in the choir.  Thomas refuses to do so because it's time for vespers and closing the choir grille during a service just isn't done.  The knights come in and kill first the monk and then Thomas.

Back from the flashback, Henry receives his penance.  Thomas has now been canonized.  Henry declares that his justice will seek out the murderers "so that no one is ignorant of our royal will to defend henceforth the honor of God and the memory of our friend."

First I'd like to say a few things about history as presented in this play, because historical inaccuracies are the kind of thing I notice.  These aren't meant as criticisms, just as remarks.

The most obvious thing, of course, is that Becket is a Saxon in the play, which causes dramatic tension but is historically inaccurate.  Another fairly major thing is Becket's early debauchery.  Henry sums it up at their final meeting, saying he's known Thomas "in the hunt, at the brothel, in war; both of us spending whole nights behind pots of wine; in the bed of the same girl sometimes..."  Hunting and war are all right, but the rest is stretching it a bit.  Thomas may not have been as perfectly virtuous in his early life as his contemporary biographers would have it (but then again, he may have been), but no one suggests that he was the twelfth-century equivalent of a frat boy.

The queens are never named, but they must be Eleanor of Aquitaine and Matilda (or Maude, if you prefer).  Matilda is always called the queen-mother in the play, but she couldn't really be, never having been queen of England in the first place.  (When her brother drowned in a shipwreck, she was supposed to be the next ruler, but when her father died Stephen of Blois took over instead, causing years of civil war.)  This is why I'm amused by references to "the king, your [Henry's] father" (Geoffrey was never more than count of Anjou, which is why the Young King remarked at his coronation banquet that it was only right for the son of a king (himself) to be served by the son of a count (Henry II).)  At one point Matilda cries, "If I were a man!" and Henry thanks God she isn't - but if she had been it would have saved England a lot of trouble.

Eleanor threatens to complain to the duke of Aquitaine, her father - but he'd been dead for years.  In fact, earlier in the play Henry had sent a message to Louis calling himself king of England, duke of Normandy, duke of Aquitaine, and count of Anjou.  Surely there can't be two dukes at once.

Thomas introduces forks at the banquet.  Forks weren't really used much at table till the sixteenth century, but it's not an impossibility for them to be present here.  I just thought I'd mention it.

People often call Thomas by his surname.  He even calls himself Becket a few times.  So much for him being touchy about his middle-class origins and calling himself Thomas of London.

Henry's message to Louis starts off "To my lord and friend Louis, king of the French; Henry, king of England..."  Interesting that Louis isn't King of France but King of the French - a change wrought in the Revolution.

The pope is in Rome here - and he and the cardinals have horrible stereotypical Italian accents - but at the time he was actually in exile.

On the boat trip back to England, Thomas remarks upon one of the mariners having "his quid that he'll never spit out."  The only problem with this is that tobacco won't be introduced to Europe for several more centuries.  Like maize and potatoes, it's a New World plant.

Henry announces his plans for young Henry's coronation at the fatal dinner where his remarks instigate the knights' actions.  He also says he'll be crowned the next day, which doesn't leave much time for preparation.

Near the end the monk picks up Thomas's silver cross and notes that he could strike a good blow with it because of its weight.  He's not the only one to have thought so.  When the knights visited Thomas at home earlier in the day (in real life, not in the play), they thought of beating him to death with his own cross, but were prevented by the presence of other people.

Thomas dies in front of the main altar, which fits with popular conceptions and is more dramatic, but is historically inaccurate.

I don't really want to get into literary criticism here, because I'm sure plenty of other people have already done it better and more thoroughly.  (It's already giving me flashbacks to my own youth looking at the study questions included in the library's copy of the play, including "What role did women play in the Middle Ages?" - talk about an essay question!  Oh, if I'd only studied in my foolish youth.)  I'll just touch on a few things, and anyone who wants to pursue them further can take this as a starting point.

The theme of collaboration.  Thomas's parents collaborated with the last king in order to better their lot, and Thomas continues to do so because he likes living well, and the Normans live better than the Saxons.  There's always the question of whether he's betraying his people and/or himself, and everyone's reactions to a Saxon among the Normans.  I read somewhere that the situation in the play was supposed to refer to the Vichy government collaborating with the Germans in World War II.  In that vein I suppose it could be applied to many situations in many times.

The characters of Thomas and Henry.  Thomas is almost incapable of love, while Henry loves too well.  And Henry's decidedly unregal in some respects.  He's weak, easily frightened, and needy.  Also, you have to wonder about his feelings for Thomas sometimes.  When he comes to sleep in Thomas's room after Gwendoline's suicide, Thomas offers to sleep on the floor, and Henry says, "No, come against me.  I don't want to be alone tonight."  Not that anything improper is ever suggested, but Matilda's assessment of Henry's love for his friend seems pretty accurate.

The themes of love and honor, partly covered above.  What is honor and who has it?

Warmth and cold.  Henry is constantly complaining of being cold (kind of amusing when you reflect that in real life Thomas was always cold.  He was wearing about seven layers when he died).  At the very beginning, Henry tells the tomb of his friend, "It's always been cold in our story.  Except at the beginning, when we were friends."  He especially complains of the cold at his final meeting with Thomas, saying, "We've finished.  I'm cold."  And Thomas says, "Me too, now.  I'm cold."   Apparently there's a link between friendship and warmth, and to lack one is to lack the other. The only mention of warmth instead of cold is near the end, when Henry's drinking with the barons and tells them, "It's warm with you, like in a stable."

One last thing that doesn't fit anywhere, but I wanted to mention it anyway.  In one scene Henry is lounging around, amusing himself with a cup-and-ball kind of toy (actually, a stick and ring).  Charles VII does the exact same thing in Anouilh's play L'Alouette, about Joan of Arc.  It must be a popular royal amusement.