Essays on The History Boys

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”- Aristotle. In their works, Alan Bennett and Charles Dickens explore how a narrow purely rational education based upon facts or just passing exams is actually ‘no education at all’. Both writers celebrate the...

Alan Bennett presents the attitudes towards women in The History Boys in a variety of different ways. One way that Bennett does this is by highlighting the lack of female characters in the play. There are only two female characters in the whole of the...

The complex exploration of homosexual relations that break the boundaries between pupils and teachers should be typically identified as scandalous, and as a form of paedophilia in a school. However, Alan Bennett presents the issue at a modest grammar school in Sheffield in a radically...

The headmaster is used by Bennett as a source of comedy in the play. He is used to provide different types of comedic elements; through his hypocritical nature where he strives for his school to do academically well, yet he himself is not academically sound....

Joyce’s and Bennett’s writing have become synonymous with the arduous process of becoming an adult, and, despite the large gulf in time between their works’ publication, use some similar techniques to describe the process. However, Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’ focuses primarily on educational and partially...

Crispin: The Cross Of Lead, by AVI, is an interesting tale about a young boy who flees his village after his mother dies. The text describes the boy, Asta’s son, or Crispin as he is later called, on his journey fleeing his home village and...

Carol Ann Duffy and Alan Bennett present deliberately provocative attitudes towards the matriarchy and patriarchy through their respective uses of storytelling. In ‘The World’s Wife’ Duffy uses a variety of poetic forms to displace and reinsert female mythological and literary figures into roles of dramatic...