PARTICIPACIÓN DEL PERSONAL DE LA ASE POR TIPO DE CURSO

In Rattigan’s 1948 one-act play The Browning Version, the title of which refers to

Browning’s verse translation of the Agamemnon, the playwright follows Wilde’s fairy tales in using Aeschylean tragedy to contrast heterosexual marital infidelity with a more

profound Platonic pedagogical pederastic loyalty. Like Wilde, Rattigan was inestimably inspired by the Agamemnon while at school, and subsequently said that reading Aeschylus’

tragedy in translation at Harrow made him want to become a playwright.¹²³ As in Wilde’s works, there is often a strongly autobiographical, underlying homosexual element in Rattigan’s plays.¹²⁴ The protagonist in Rattigan’s play, the unpopular martinet of a classics

122 See Powell (2013: 139).

123 Palaima (2002: 200).

124 On Rattigan’s (homo)sexuality and its relation to his work, see Darlow (2010).

master Andrew Crocker-Harris, the ‘Himmler of the lower fifth’, is believed to have been modelled on one of Rattigan’s classics teachers at Harrow, J. W. Coke Norris.¹²⁶ John Taplow, the pupil who takes pity on ‘the Crock’ and gives him a thoughtfully inscribed copy of Browning’s eponymous translation of the Agamemnon as a small going-away gift, is believed to represent the young Rattigan.¹²⁷

Although the adult Rattigan was certainly a practising homosexual, his hopelessly repressed schoolmaster in Browning can also be read more broadly as every gay man living in less liberated times, including the playwright himself. As in Stoppard’s Invention, Wilde is an absent presence in Browning, suggesting the road not taken by Crocker-Harris, just as he represents the life that Housman did not lead in Stoppard’s play. The character of Crocker-Harris has had a special significance and resonance for gay actors, especially in the early reception history of Rattigan’s play:¹²⁸ Eric Portman created the role on the London stage in 1948; Maurice Evans played the part on Broadway the following year;

and John Gielgud, with whom in mind Rattigan had originally written Browning,¹²⁹ played the Crock on BBC Radio in 1957 and made his American television début in the role in 1957. However, Michael Redgrave made the role his own in the definitive 1951 film version, written by Rattigan himself and directed by Anthony Asquith, who was also probably a homosexual of the closeted kind.¹³⁰ A son of the former Prime Minister H. H.

Asquith, the director, like Douglas, was educated at Winchester, and read Greats at Balliol, following in the footsteps of his father and three of his brothers.¹³¹ At Oxford, Asquith was a member of the Aesthetes, whose opposing faction was the Athletes,¹³² calling to mind the

125 Rattigan, Browning, in Plays: One: ‘French Without Tears’, ‘The Winslow Boy’, ‘The Browning Version’,

‘Harlequinade’, Methuen Drama World Classics (1981), 206, 208.

126 Palaima (2002: 200).

127 Although Rattigan himself was never taught by Coke-Norris and never gave him a gift, he drew from his experience with another master at Harrow, on whom he had developed a schoolboy crush, as the inspiration for Taplow’s present to Crocker-Harris (Palaima 2002: 200).

128 Bourne (2016: 100).

129 O’Connor (2016: 201).

130 Bourne (2016: 11–3).

131 Minney (1973: 37).

132 Bourne (2016: 10).

University experiences of Wilde and Housman, as dramatized in Stoppard’s Invention.

Asquith also collaborated with Redgrave on the iconic screen production of The

Importance of Being Earnest, released the year after their film adaptation of Browning.

The secret other lives of both Gielgud, who, like Wilde, was arrested and charged with homosexual offences, and the married, theatrical-dynasty-siring Redgrave have informed the critical reception of their performances in the leading roles of Browning and Earnest, a play based around double identities.¹³⁴

Even though Earnest and Browning, as well as Rattigan’s other best-known works French Without Tears and The Deep Blue Sea, revolve around heterosexual relationships and marriage, they are ripe for homosexual readings. The paradigmatic work in this regard is Brief Encounter (1945), the film by Davd Lean based on the one-act play Still Life (1936) by Noël Coward. As Tom Ryall explains, the gay appeal of Brief Encounter lies in

‘the film’s mixture of intensity and restraint, and its analysis of a romance doomed in a climate of social and moral disapproval’.¹³⁵ Schmidgall likewise reads Wilde’s ‘Prince’ as

‘a miniature, and moving, celebration of the Love that dare not speak its name […] a melancholy evocation of gay experience in a frosty, inclement, threatening society’.¹³⁶ Coward’s screenplay for Brief Encounter places the action during the winter of 1938–9.¹³⁷ In the episode that ends with the two main characters admitting their love for each other, the heroine–narrator Laura mentally monologizes to her loving but dull husband Fred in a voice-over, ‘Do you know, I believe we should all behave quite differently if we lived in a warm, sunny climate all the time. We shouldn’t be so withdrawn and shy and difficult’

(294). In one memorable sequence, Laura stares dreamily out of a train window into the darkness and sees herself and her lover in various romantic and exotic locations (all with a homosexual history or resonance), before having her reveries interrupted and walking

133 See Ch. 1 in this thesis.

134 See Bourne (2006: 39–40), (2016: 13, 100); Howes (2006: 63); Morley (2002: 94).

135 Ryall (2005: 164).

136 Schmidgall (1994: 156).

137 Brief Encounter, in Noël Coward Screenplays: ‘In Which We Serve’, ‘Brief Encounter’, ‘The Astonished Heart’, ed. Barry Day, The Coward Collection (2015), 222.

home ‘as usual—quite soberly and without wings—without any wings at all’ (306–8), as if she were a migratory bird such as Wilde’s Swallow in her euphoric, escapist elation and wanderlust.

Rattigan’s Browning is set in an unspecified public school in the South of England, run with a ruthless and cold-blooded WASPish corporate efficiency. The tactless headmaster, Dr Frobisher, informs the retiring, incapacitated classics master Andrew Crocker-Harris that his application for a pension has been rejected by the school governors, even though an exception was made to the rules five years earlier when a popular master, Buller, had sustained an injury playing rugby against the school (199). In order to work up to a suitable climax at the end-of-year prize-giving, the unctuous Frobisher asks the ‘positively

disliked’ (207) classics master to make his farewell speech to the boys before another popular, ‘considerably junior’ colleague, the cricketer Fletcher (201). The condescending headmaster’s unflattering comparison of Andrew with Buller and Fletcher replays the agon between the humanities and sport embodied by Wilde and the Marquess of Queensberry, and by Housman and Moses Jackson in Invention. In Browning, Andrew is also

unfavourably compared with his wife’s lover, the science master Frank Hunter, ‘a rugged young man […] wrapped in all the self-confidence of the popular master’, who gives tips to the Crock’s pupil Taplow, who is practising his golf swing with one of the classics master’s walking-sticks at the beginning of the play (181–2).

The agonistic environment of the public school in Rattigan’s play is stressed by the importance placed on the school’s performance on the rugby and cricket pitch (199, 201), and on its masters’ academic accolades (198), as well as by the social competitiveness among the schoolmasters’ wives and the housemasters’ wives (190, 204). The

confrontation between the Platonically philosophizing pederast Hector and the short-fused Headmaster in Bennett’s The History Boys ironically recalls the maddeningly polite and quintessentially English conversation between the sexually repressed Crocker-Harris and the headmaster in Rattigan’s play, as well as the more colourful and combative clashes

between Wilde and Queensberry, which, as I have discussed in Chapter 1, recapitulated the ancient agon between Euripides/Socrates and Aristophanes.

Like Browning, Wilde’s fairy tales are peopled with insensitive, unfeeling, and self-centred figures who personify a crude and cruel industrial utilitarianism. In Rattigan’s play, the classics master protagonist is being forced into early retirement by his increasing ill health. Although Andrew’s medical condition concerns his heart, Rattigan never reveals his protagonist’s precise complaint, just as Wilde kept the ‘atmosphere of moral

corruption’ surrounding Dorian Gray ‘vague and indeterminate and wonderful’, as the author explained to the editor of the Scots Observer (Complete Letters, 439).¹³⁸ At the end of Dorian Gray, the dead protagonist is found on the floor of the old schoolroom ‘with a knife in his heart’ (164; 357). The idea of homosexuality as a pathology was assumed in the contemporary critical discourse surrounding Dorian Gray at the time of its original, controversial publication in 1890, as evidenced by the anonymous negative review in the Scots Observer, which reduced Wilde’s novel to ‘medico-legal’ interest.¹³⁹ At the end of Fan, the ‘bad woman’ Mrs Erlynne announces that she is going ‘to live abroad again’:

‘The English climate doesn’t suit me. My—heart is affected here, and that I don’t like’

(75). The night before, the ‘fallen’ Mrs Erlynne took the fall for Lady Windermere by allowing herself to be discovered in Lord Darlington’s rooms by the men of the drama, thus enabling her daughter to slip away and avoid scandal. As a result of this

self-sacrificial act of love, the absent mother’s hitherto hardened heart has been ‘affected’, as are those of the Happy Prince and the Nightingale in Wilde’s fairy tales.

Rattigan’s Crocker-Harris speculates that the reason for his pupils no longer laughing at him is ‘[n]ot a sickness of the body, but a sickness of the soul’ (Browning, 208). The sickly classics master not only conforms to the Rattigan type of the wounded or impotent (older) male hero, but also corresponds to the pharmakos or scapegoat in Greek tragedy,

138 See Ch. 1 in this thesis.

139 Unsigned review of Dorian Gray, Scots Observer (5 July 1890), reprinted in Beckson (1970: 75). See Ch.

1 in this thesis.

especially Sophoclean tragedy: the contaminated cripple who must be expelled from the community.¹⁴⁰ Throughout Browning, Rattigan plays on the etymological link between the Greek words pharmakos, scapegoat, and pharmakon, a drug or remedy, just as Wilde does in his 1887 story ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’. The enfeebled Andrew could be said to represent Rattigan not only as a necessarily repressed homosexual but also as an

increasingly unfashionable playwright, who came to be seen as a sort of ‘sick man’ of British theatre and typical of its general malaise.

Andrew teaches Aeschylus’ Agamemon as ‘just a lot of Greek words strung together and fifty lines if you get them wrong’ (183). The classics master’s punitive, passionless,

pedantic, and narrowly philological manner drains the dramatic, rhetorical, and emotional power from the Greek tragedy, which belongs to a genre that, in Hall’s memorable phrase, portrays ‘suffering under the sun’, that is, in the bright Mediterranean light of an open-air theatre.¹⁴¹ The infectious enthusiasm of the schoolboy Taplow, the playwright’s cipher, for the ‘rather more lurid aspects’ of Aeschylean dramaturgy in a one-on-one extra Greek lesson elicits the Crock’s Miss Prism-like confession of his own ‘very free’ translation of the Agamemnon in earlier, younger and happier days (195–6). Taplow plays Wilde’s chirpy and chatty Swallow to Andrew’s disillusioned Student taking refuge in his dusty books. Commenting on the scene in the 1951 screen version of Rattigan’s play, Stephen Glynn writes that ‘the exchange’s shot and counter-shot editing intimates a growing bond inevitably smothered in more public situations’.¹⁴² Like the manuscript of Miss Prism’s three-volume novel, Andrew believes his literary work to be ‘lost—like so many other things. Lost for good’ (196)—a fitting fate for a translation of an ancient work. In the screen adaptation, Andrew finds his translation while clearing out his classroom, just as Miss Prism’s hand-bag and the ‘lost child’ she placed in it are restored to her at the end of Earnest.

140 See Bertolini (2016: 103).

141 Hall (2010).

142 Glynn (2016: 73).

The emotional self-repression of the classics master in Browning is ironic considering that his subject comprises not only the torrid, elemental passions of Greek tragedy but also unselfconsciously homoerotic content. The 1951 film version makes a surprisingly direct reference to classical homoeroticism when the headmaster jokingly refers to the science master Hunter’s subject as a ‘perverted branch of learning’—a jest to which the scientist responds by citing ‘certain perverted passages of the Greek Anthology’.¹⁴³ This display of arcane classical knowledge on the part of Hunter is even more surprising seeing as the science master seems to function as a sort of foil for Crocker-Harris. Hunter later appears to be only vaguely aware of such a canonical work as the Agamemnon (cf. Browning, 183) and shows himself to be as red-blooded a heterosexual as it is possible to be in an English public school by carrying on an ‘intrigue’ with Crocker-Harris’s younger wife Millie (cf.

218).

While Italy and Greece proved to be havens for English homosexuals from the nineteenth century, their ancient literatures provided a homoerotic mental outlet for the mind-travelling classically educated gay man. It was a bitter irony for the English

homophile male classicist that the foundational aspect of ancient Greek life with which he so intensely identified, that is, same-sex desire, was so flatly denied by contemporary British society, which was in many other ways openly philhellenic. Symonds movingly described the terrible dilemma facing the homosexually inclined student of the classics. At almost the midway mark between the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the 1895 Wilde trials, Symonds wrote Jowett a lengthy and troubled letter, in which he questioned the wisdom of elevating Plato’s Socratic dialogues, with their impassioned celebrations of

143 Nisbet (2013: 218) writes:

Oscar the poet, preaching Greek love from the witness stand, was to exercise a dramatic influence on how Greek epigram was subsequently received. Given the author’s carefully crafted persona as the sharp-eyed scrivener of social foibles and comic misunderstandings, it is perversely fitting that his shadow loomed over the Anthology of the early twentieth century only because the receiving culture had put two and two together and made five. Wilde made a show of his endorsement of all things Greek—and he was famed for his facility in epigram.

male-male love, to their privileged position as the most important educational texts for young English schoolboys and male undergraduates:

Put yourself in the place of someone to whom the aspect of Greek life (which you ignore) is personally and intensely interesting, who reads his Plato as you would wish him to read the Bible—

i.e. with a vivid conviction that what he reads is the life record of a masterful creative man-determining race, and the monument of a world-important epoch.

Can you pretend that a sympathetically constituted nature of the sort in question will desire nothing from the panegyric of paiderastic love in the Phaedrus, from the personal grace of Charmides, from the mingled realism and rapture of the Symposium? What you call a figure of speech, is heaven in hell to him—maddening, because it is stimulating to the imagination; wholly out of accord with the world he has to live in; too deeply in accord with his own impossible desires.¹⁴⁴

Although Symonds does not simply repeat the age-old accusation of Socrates as corruptor of youth, he does propose that exposing the homoerotically oriented young to the Platonic dialogues is akin to pouring paraffin on the flames of their forbidden desires. While pederasty was a cornerstone of ancient Greece’s superlative civilization, classical expressions of same-sex desire, Symonds suggests, place the modern homosexual on a collision course with contemporary society, possibly leading to conviction and

imprisonment. In Invention, Stoppard’s Jowett sends up these sentiments: ‘A Platonic enthusiasm as far as Plato was concerned meant an enthusiasm of the kind that would empty the public schools and fill the prisons where it is not nipped in the bud’ (23). While Symonds’s concerns were centred on the young male students, they were also applicable to the men who taught them. Having older males teach younger males pederastic literature en masse in a territory openly hostile to homosexuality was a recipe for private tragedy as well as public disaster.

In Browning, the classics master delivers a Platonic discourse on ‘Two kinds of love.

Hers and mine’, which gets to the heart of his unhappy marriage to his adulterous wife Millie. Andrew tells Frank, his colleague and his wife’s lover:

Both of us needing from the other something that would make life supportable for us, and neither of us able to give it. Two kinds of love. Hers and mine. Worlds apart, as I know now, though when

144 The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, ed. Regis, Genders and Sexualities in History (2016), 154.

love—the love she requires and which I was unable to give her—was so important that its absence would drive out the other kind of love—the kind of love that I require and which I thought, in my folly, was by far the greater part of love. I may have been, you see, Hunter, a brilliant classical scholar, but I was woefully ignorant of the facts of life. I know better now, of course. I know that in both of us, the love that we should have borne each other has turned to bitter hatred. That’s all the problem is. Not a very unusual one, I venture to think—nor nearly as tragic as you seem to imagine. Merely the problem of an unsatisfied wife and a henpecked husband. You’ll find it all over the world. It is usually, I believe, a subject for farce. (220–1)

The classics master’s speech calls to mind not only Plato’s Symposium but also Douglas’s sonnet ‘Two Loves’. Andrew’s weighty circumlocutory phrasing, such as ‘the love that we should have borne each other’, evokes the euphemistic ‘Love that dare not speak its name’.

The headmaster has earlier described Andrew as a ‘brilliant classical scholar’ and alluded to the string of prizes he won at Oxford (Browning, 198). The parallel with Wilde is made clearer in the 1951 screen version as we are told that Crocker-Harris received a Double First and won the Newdigate.

The ailing Andrew’s previous, heroic intellectual achievements have not prevented his present tragic predicament. Sophocles’ swollen-footed Oedipus has solved the riddle of the Sphinx, but, like the Agamemnon of the Iliad, the Theban king has caused a plague

associated with Apollo. In order to discover the cause of the plague, Oedipus solves the mystery of Laius’ murder and must live with the consequences. As Andrew has revealed to Frank before his Platonic speech, the classics master has been aware of the science

master’s affair with his wife since it first began, but has done nothing about it (218–9)—he is a willing cuckold. The classics master’s description of his marriage as that of ‘an

unsatisfied wife and a henpecked husband’ of course calls to mind the Agamemnon. The Crocker-Harrises’ type of marriage is ‘found all over the world’, but the nature of their relationship means that its universality is more farcical than ‘tragic’. Andrew’s repetition of the clause ‘I know […] now’ in his speech conjures up pathei mathos (‘learning through suffering’), the proverbial phrase from the Agamemnon (177)

Andrew’s incompatibility with his shallow and self-centred wife is intellectual as well as physical and emotional. The Crocker-Harrises’ marriage recalls the courtship between the

Swallow and the Reed in ‘Prince’, which was undoubtedly informed by Wilde’s relationship with his wife, as the uncommunicative Constance, for all her evident

attractions and accomplishments, ‘was hardly literary and was intellectually incapable of

attractions and accomplishments, ‘was hardly literary and was intellectually incapable of