In Praise of Love: Hiding Mortality in Plain Sight

Abstract

In Praise of Love shows Rattigan creating a greater balance between his pessimistic belief that all ends in defeat and death and the consolation that human beings can achieve some kind of connection. Sebastian Cruttwell, in order to spare his wife Lydia the knowledge that she is going to die soon, hides her true medical reports in plain sight (the play explicitly alludes to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”). Her discovery of the reports hidden in plain sight proves to her that her husband does love her, something she has doubted all their life together. Rattigan conjoins the discovery of love and that of mortality in the same action, thereby providing not only an allegory of playwriting that hides its meanings in plain sight through the relationship between text and subtext but also conveying the sense that death is normal because it is in plain sight of all and may be countered by human connection. Throughout the play Rattigan conducts something of an internal argument about whether Shakespeare is a truly great writer, telling human beings the truths they do not want to hear or just “cosy, middle-class, comforting and commercial.” The latter description, Rattigan felt, was just as unjustly applied to himself; hence, he uses his plays to allegorize his own way of writing plays, in this instance hiding mortality in plain sight, with “normal written all over it.”