The Winslow Boy: Let Right Be Done

Abstract

In The Winslow Boy Rattigan gathers some of his core themes—the wounded or physically deteriorating male, the mismatch in degree of sexuality and emotional affinity between men and women, and the victory so costly it feels equally like a defeat. To these themes Rattigan adds two new preoccupations: the intensity of father–son relations (Arthur Winslow ruins his health and his family’s status and comfort in order to exonerate his son of a false charge of theft) and a reckoning with Oscar Wilde, as Rattigan for unclear reasons makes a dandy figure out of the play’s hero, Sir Robert Morton, the man who successfully defends the Winslow boy, with Morton being based on Sir Edward Carson, the man who successfully defended the Marquis of Queensberry against Wilde’s charge of libel. As a close companion of her father, Kate Winslow almost replaces her mother in the father’s agony in defending his son. Kate’s psychology is carefully crafted by Rattigan to show that she is drawn to men who are weakened by age, loss of physical prowess, or illness.