Adventure Story: “I Must Die”

Abstract

In Adventure Story, the play Rattigan was most proud of despite its relative lack of success with critics, he ventures into competition with Shakespeare, having already struggled with his inheritance from Shaw and Wilde. Not only does Rattigan as closely follow Plutarch’s account of Alexander the Great as Shakespeare followed Plutarch in his Roman tragedies, but Rattigan also models his tragic hero on Shakespeare’s conception of the tragic hero, one who has a fantasy of immortality as shown by the refusal to accept mortality. Rattigan’s play turns on Alexander’s desire to become immortal by doing what it is not possible for a man to do (before Macbeth succumbs to the belief that he cannot be killed, he knows that a man who dares do more than may become a man is not a man at all). When Alexander finally realizes his fantasy is just that (“I must die”), his dream of imposing universal peace and order on the world likewise vanishes. Alexander’s adventure ends (as the play began) with his epitomizing Rattigan’s wounded and defeated male characters: he can hardly speak while lying on his death bier and can hardly manage raising his arm: all he desires now is sleep. The desire for such peace will mark many of Rattigan’s subsequent protagonists.