‘Drink and Become a Legend’: Reading the Alternate History in Frank Higgins’ "The True Death of Socrates"

Document Type : Original Article

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Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Beni-Suef University

Abstract

This paper deals with Frank Higgins’ alternate history play The True Death of Socrates (2013) in terms of history. Higgins poses a hypothetical question to test “What-if” the historical course of Socrates’ execution in 399 B.C. turned out differently and Socrates escaped death. It will be interesting to investigate how Higgins’ philosophical farce integrates history with alternate history, and at a certain point the incidents deviate from reality. The question the research raises is how Higgins formulated an alternate history for real history to discuss the hypothesis of ‘what-if’ Socrates as a moral philosopher does not behave with dignity in the moral sense. This paper seeks to show how the Alternate History approach that is introduced in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (2005) and Kathleen Singles’ Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity. (2013) as a deviation from the actual narrative of history, corresponds to Frank Higgins’ approach to his farcical play The True Death of Socrates. The study has two primary goals: on the one hand, it investigates the term Alternate History as a key concept presented by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Kathleen Singles. On the other hand, it attempts to delineate the features of alternate history through employing such features in Higgins’ play.

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