The Browning Version: Words Could So Lacerate a Man’s Heart

Abstract

The Browning Version is often called Rattigan’s best play or masterpiece because of its compact and moving portrait of a failed classics teacher who at the end of the play manages a small victory of self-assertion after he has been humiliated over and over again. The play might be said to be an experiment in representing an individual’s suffering of psychic pain, for defeat, failure, humiliation, and suffering spread out over the entire play. Its protagonist Andrew Crocker-Harris, like so many Rattigan males, suffers from some debilitating illness, a wound whether to his body or his soul, whether homosexuality or asexuality, Andrew cannot make his wife feel desired sexually, and she takes a terrible revenge on him with four words meant to destroy him as Clytemnestra destroyed Agamemnon. When a student named Taplow makes a gift to Andrew out of compassion and a recognition that Crocker-Harris does have human feelings, his wife refers to Taplow as “the artful little beast,” implying that the boy was bribing his teacher to get a pass in classics. Her destruction of the meaning of Taplow’s gift puts Andrew painfully back into the state of having to annihilate his emotions. The phrase she uses, however, identifies, not Taplow, but herself.