Structure & Intertextuality
Structure: The Play’s Architecture
The History Boys does not follow a straightforward chronological narrative. Instead, Bennett uses a non-linear structure that shifts between the boys’ sixth-form experiences in the 1980s and their adult lives years later. The play opens with Irwin in a wheelchair, briefing MPs as a government adviser, then jumps back to the classroom; Act 2 opens with him as a television historian. The epilogue returns to the future, revealing each boy’s adult career and fate. This structure means the audience always knows more than the characters — we know Hector will die, we know Irwin will end up in a wheelchair, and this foreknowledge colours every scene with dramatic irony.
The time shifts also reinforce the play’s theme of history itself. History, as the play defines it, is the act of looking back — reinterpreting the past from the present. Bennett’s structure is this act of reinterpretation: we see the boys’ education from the perspective of what they became, and we judge their teachers accordingly. The audience becomes historians, using hindsight to evaluate Hector and Irwin.
Bennett’s non-linear structure creates persistent dramatic irony: the audience sees Irwin in a wheelchair before understanding how he got there, knows Hector will die before watching his final lessons, and judges the boys’ education through the lens of their adult outcomes. The structure mirrors the play’s theme: we understand the past through the present.
Songs and Film Scenes as Teaching
Hector’s lessons are built around intertextuality. He uses songs, film scenes, and poetry not as decoration but as the substance of his teaching. The boys improvise a scene set in a Parisian brothel in French (practising the subjunctive tense). There is a separate scene where they recite dialogue from David Lean’s 1945 film Brief Encounter in English for Irwin, sing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” and recite Thomas Hardy. Each of these performances serves a dual purpose: within the play, they are Hector’s lessons; for the audience, they illuminate character and theme.
When Posner sings “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” the Rodgers and Hart song becomes a vehicle for his unrequited love for Dakin. The lyrics — about being helplessly infatuated — say what Posner cannot say directly. Bennett uses the song as oblique characterisation: Posner’s emotions are channelled through someone else’s words, which is itself a comment on Hector’s teaching method. Hector teaches boys to express themselves through literature; Posner takes this literally, expressing his deepest feelings through a song from Hector’s curriculum.
Posner and Scripps re-enact a scene from David Lean’s 1945 film Brief Encounter in English, with Scripps at the piano. This is simultaneously absurd and moving. They perform with genuine enthusiasm, inhabiting the roles of doomed lovers in a railway station tearoom. To an outsider like the Headmaster, it would look like chaos and irrelevance. But the audience sees something deeper: the boys are practising empathy, inhabiting other people’s emotions, and learning to understand human experience through art.
The Brief Encounter scene also functions as metatheatre: the boys are performing within a performance (the play). This layering reinforces the play’s theme of performance vs authenticity. When does performance become genuine experience? The boys start performing Brief Encounter as a game, but their emotional investment becomes real — just as education, Bennett suggests, begins as instruction but can become transformation.
Literary Allusions: Hardy, Larkin, Auden
Hector’s teaching is saturated with literary allusion. Three poets recur with particular significance. Thomas Hardy’s Drummer Hodge is recited by Posner in Act 1 during a private emotional lesson with Hector — NOT at his Oxbridge interview. The interview scenes are in Act 2. The poem describes a young soldier buried in foreign soil, unknown and forgotten. Hector uses it to teach the boys that literature preserves the memory of ordinary people — that the unnamed drummer boy matters because Hardy wrote about him. For Posner, the poem also reflects his own sense of being overlooked and insignificant.
Philip Larkin’s poetry appears through Hector’s quotations. Larkin was born in Coventry to a middle-class family and spent most of his working life as a librarian in Hull, using understated language to explore loneliness and the passage of time. W.H. Auden’s work also features — Auden, like several characters in the play, was a gay man navigating a society that did not accept his sexuality. Bennett’s choice of poets is deliberate: each one connects to a theme in the play (Hardy = memory; Larkin = loss; Auden = hidden identity).
Hardy (Drummer Hodge), Larkin, and Auden are the play’s three key poetic allusions. Each connects to a central theme: Hardy to the preservation of ordinary memory, Larkin to loss and the passage of time, and Auden to hidden identity and sexuality. Hector’s choice of these poets reveals his own preoccupations and values.
Metatheatre and Self-Awareness
The play is intensely self-conscious. Characters frequently discuss what history is, how stories are told, and how performance shapes reality. Irwin says: “History is a performance. It’s entertainment.” This is a metatheatrical comment: the audience is watching a play about performance, in which characters perform for each other, and the play itself performs history. Bennett creates layers of performance: the boys perform in Hector’s lessons, they perform at Oxbridge interviews, they perform for each other, and the actors perform for the audience.
The epilogue is the play’s most important structural device. By fast-forwarding to the boys’ adult lives, Bennett transforms the audience’s understanding of everything that came before. The education debate is no longer theoretical — it has consequences. Posner’s loneliness, Dakin’s shallow success, Scripps’s journalism, Irwin’s television career: each outcome reflects what each boy absorbed from his teachers.
The epilogue also enacts the play’s central argument about history. Just as Irwin taught the boys that history is shaped by the perspective from which it is told, the epilogue reshapes the play’s own history. We re-evaluate Hector’s teaching in light of the boys’ futures; we re-evaluate Irwin’s method in light of his career. The structure is the argument: how we look back determines what we see.