Currents in the Cross-Legal: Recontextualizing Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy. (28th April 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Feldman, Alex
• Is Part Of: New theatre quarterly. Volume 31:Part 2=Number 122(2015:May)
• Page Start: 99
• Page End: 115
• Publication Date: 2015-04-28
• Subjects: Theater -- Periodicals; 792.05
• DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X15000226
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0266-464X

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="normal"> <title> <x content-type="archive" xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <p>Though Terence Rattigan's reputation as a playwright has successfully been revived in recent years, critical responses to the plays – <italic>The Winslow Boy</italic> (1946) being a case in point – remain limited to the perspectives of British theatre history and British party politics. Paying particular attention to 'cross-legal' parallels between <italic>The Winslow Boy</italic> and a variety of historical and fictional analogues, Alex Feldman restores the play to a broader frame of reference, and to some of its original contexts of production and reception. First considering Rattigan's juvenile dramatic forays into the law, including his adaptation of <italic>A Tale of Two Cities</italic>, he proceeds to explore archival evidence of <italic>The Winslow Boy</italic>'s European reception, pursuing parallels drawn by reviewers with the Nuremberg trials, the Dreyfus case, and Heinrich von Kleist's 1811 novella, <italic>Michael Kohlhaas</italic>, re-positioning <italic>The Winslow Boy</italic> within the transnational and transhistorical legal imaginary to which it properly belongs. Alex Feldman is an Assistant Professor of English at MacEwan University in Alberta. His first book, <italic>Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage: in History's Wings</italic>, was published by Routledge in 2012.</p> </abstract>