"To pretend to be happy could only be idiocy"

In 1958, the town of Salford was considered home to the worst slums in England, a reputation vindicated by a 1931 national survey. Located in the county of Great Manchester, on the western border of the city of Manchester, Salford's population decreased steadily and drastically throughout the 20th century, as citizens fled unemployment and poverty. In the years following World War Two, the Salford Docks-once the primary employer of the region-became a ruin of decaying warehouses and desperate laborers, sheltering more rats than people. Shelagh Delaney was 18 years old in 1958, three years before the Salford city council voted to raze its rotted, infested tenements and replace them with high-rise residential blocks. It had been two years since she had quit school, two years filled with aimless labor as a shop assistant and usherette. It was in 1958, during the latter of these occupations, that she watched a tragedy by England's famed playwright, Terence Rattigan. Unmoved by his middle class drama, Delaney declared that she could do better, and in fourteen days set down the text of A Taste of Honey.

A Taste of Honey debuted at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London in the spring of 1958. The play tells the story of Jo, a teenaged girl in Salford; Jo is poor, disillusioned, friendless and pregnant. Her circle is pitiably small, her relations all marked by compromise.

Helen, Jo's mother, is crass, immature and selfish. During their sickeningly steady bickering, she unashamedly defends her behavior by declaring her own irresponsibility: "Have I ever laid claim to being a proper mother?" Helen alternates between criticism and unconcern for her daughter, steadily undermining Jo's sense of self. While their time spent together is harsh, for Jo, their time spent apart is even more bitter. Helen's indifference to her daughter is constant, but it's sharpest when she's simply not there.

It's during this isolation that Jo meets two men that will alter the course of her life. The first is Jimmie, a black sailor exclusively referred to as "the Boy" throughout the text. It's Jimmie that Jo embarks with on her first romance, a mess of bad intentions and charm ("I dreamt about you last night. Fell out of bed twice." Jimmie once tells her), and it's Jimmie who disappears long before Jo realizes he's going to be a father. "He came in with Christmas and went out with the New Year," she explains.

Geoffrey, a gay art student, is nearly the opposite creature; no charm and all sensitivity. Geof provides the first sympathy and affection that Jo has ever known, though it's bound up in his blunt, graceless way. Fiercely honest and untrammeled by any sexual attraction to Jo, Geof offers himself in marriage but ends up as a surrogate mother instead, all mopping and cooking and advising. For Geof, this isn't simply penance or philanthropy, rather he receives a payment for his services. "Before I met you I didn't care one way or the other," he explains to Jo, "I didn't care whether I lived or died. But now..."

When Geof is first introduced in A Taste of Honey, he is penniless, friendless, and homeless. Turned out by his landlady after she discovers that he's gay, Geof is at his most abject, his most persecuted. A month or two later, when he confesses to Jo that she's given him purpose, he's still poor, and sleeping on Jo's sofa, but his spirit has changed at its most fundamental level, his aimlessness reversed. It's telling that his will to live is only activated by purpose; their poverty is immaterial.

Geoffrey is as clearly struck and as fearful of loneliness as Jo. At its highest functioning, the relationship between Geof and Jo is a delicate ritual to ward off this constant threat. Ultimately, it's not hard to see that all the characters in A Taste of Honey are similarly affected: to read Helen's disappearances as an unending search for companionship; to recognize Jimmie's courtship of Jo as the desperation of a sailor on shore leave; even to see Peter, the rich Londoner who takes Helen away from her daughter, as an old man in fear of dying alone.

This curtain thrown back on working class life, revealing all its hopelessness and broken taboo and isolation, was an immediate shock to the nation. Reviews tended to denounce its depravity, but the reviewers themselves were transfixed. There seemed to be a voyeuristic, carnal glee in watching the characters plow through forbidden topics: premarital sex, abortion, relations between black men and white women, homosexuality. Many critics could barely articulate the depth of this perversion, with only the bravest ones referring to Geof as "homosexual" rather than "effeminate." For many, the play represented the downfall of the theater ("does only sordid stuff sell now?") and the shipwrecked morals of the youth ("it is an unhappy thing that a young girl of 20 years should have such a low thought pattern"). Her hometown took it particularly hard, and the Salford City Reporter ran its review of the play under the headline, "A taste of cash for Shelagh, but a kick in the pants for Salford." Because, despite this critical righteousness, A Taste of Honey was a tremendous success.

"I don't have much in my life, but take it-it's yours"

Kenneth Tynan of The Observer was the first to truly celebrate the play, praising its unflinching honesty: "Miss Delaney brings real people on to her stage, joking and flaring and scuffling and eventually, out of the zest for life she gives them, surviving." While other reviews resisted the idea that any 19 year old could honestly speak to reality ("this young author knows as much about adult behavior as she does about elephants"), Tynan instead described Delaney as a portent, a sign of things to come.

There's no question that the nation was experiencing an undercurrent of resistance to the dominant post-war optimism, and many longed to hear expressed the realities of unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Even the simple troubles of Jo and her companions, such as damp apartments and dripping rain, recalled the everyday condition of many English citizens-the same 1931 survey that exposed the slums of Salford noted that over a quarter of the city's homes suffered leaking roofs. For audience members, the play was a welcome acknowledgement of the country's suffering, and a long-overdue platform for otherwise silent voices. But it was also a story told with laughter and sensitivity.

Sometimes this laughter appears as a coping mechanism against their abject conditions. For example, when Jo asked her mother about the bed in their new apartment, Helen replies, "Like a coffin only not half as comfortable." But sometimes it's even simpler; sometimes their laughter is just the joy of companionship. The last uninterrupted dialogue between Jo and Geof strips bare their feelings for each other in an exchange filled with as much humor as honesty:

GEOF: Oh well, you need somebody to love you while you're looking for someone to love.

JO: Oh Geof, you'd make a funny father. You are a funny little man. I mean that. You're unique.

GEOF: Am I?

JO: I always want to have you with me because I know you'll never ask anything from me. Where are you going?

GEOF: To see the cake.

JO: I'll set the cups and we'll have a celebration, then you'll have to study for your exams. It's a bit daft talking about getting married, isn't it? We're already married. We've been married for a thousand years.

GEOF: Here, look at that. What are you going to call it?

JO: What, the cake?

GEOF: [laughing] No, Jo, the baby.

JO: I think I'll give it to you, Geof. You like babies, don't you? I might call it Number One. It'll always be number one to itself.

While Jo is clearly the same girl who moments before said: "We don't ask for life, we have it thrust upon us", she is not surrendering, or moping, or ignoring the facts. She and Geof are clear about their relationship with each other and their stations in life, and despite any shortcomings, the two are generous with the riches that they do have. It's a distinction that reassured viewers who were aware of the realities of working class life in England, and captivated anyone that was unfamiliar with it. As one critic explained this realization: "Although A Taste of Honey is disillusioned, it is not dispiriting."

After a strong run in London, the play came to America, where it enjoyed an even greater success, unhindered by the national pride that divided English audiences. The New York Times reviewed A Taste of Honey the day after its Broadway debut, celebrating the play without restraint: "Miss Delaney's achievement is remarkable. Her play does not seem to be constructed. It unfolds with the naturalness and apparent irrelevancy of daily living. Yet it adds up to a consistent view of the human predicament." A longer, follow-up article in the Times declared in its opening sentence: "The freshest talent revealed on Broadway thus far this season belongs to Shelagh Delaney," and went on to praise the play's "energetic honesty" and "bittersweet humanity."

The following year, a film version of A Taste of Honey was produced, directed by Tony Richardson who co-wrote the script with Shelagh Delaney. The film reached achieved even greater distinction, winning the 1961 British Academy Award for Best Film, with both Rita Tushingham (Jo) and Murray Melvin (Geoffrey) receiving best actor prizes at the Cannes Film Festival.

As even the earliest reviews predicted (in 1960, The Times wrote, "A Taste of Honey will remain impressive"), the play has retained the public's attention and remained in production for half a century. In the early 80s, the play underwent an especially strong revival, during which one reviewer observed was due in part to the fact that, "A Taste of Honey, with essentially no plot and no topical references, has survived the changes in theatre and society in the last twenty years."

"Behind the hatred there lies a murderous desire for love"

A Taste of Honey wasn't the first play to examine the everyday life of struggling people with such intensity. While there are many historic precedents, the moral dramas of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen truly set the standard for brute realism. Ghosts, completed in 1881, tells the story of a woman who suffers a lifetime of infidelity because a pastor advised her that her love, and the love of Christ, would cure her husband of his unfaithfulness. But religion doesn't triumph, and the man never reforms. Rather than offer any of its own morals, Ghosts only criticizes the Victorian morals that forced its situation. Delaney was well aware of this ancestor, as Geof responds to Jo's description of her father ("He lived in a twilight land") with the statement, "I'm not surprised. It sounds like Ibsen's Ghosts."

But there was a much closer historical precedent, birthed two years earlier in London's Royal Court Theater. The 1956 premier of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger heralded a movement immediately termed "the angry young men", which ultimately included Kingsley Amos, William Cooper, and perhaps a dozen others, but never found a better emblem than Osborne.

John Osborne was similarly young (26 years), similarly poor (eating nettles fished from the Thames River), similarly efficient (he wrote Look Back in Anger in 17 days), and above all, similarly contemptuous to Shelagh Delaney, and entirely without precedent. Confrontational, bitter, squalid, and viciously opposed to the middle class, the play was a shock that led fellow angry young man Alan Sillitoe to write, "Osborne didn't contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up."

The play tells the story of Jimmy Porter, who uses scorn as a shield and wickedness as a distraction. He is overwhelmed by his own sensitivity and pain, and compulsively spreads this pain wherever he goes. The small cast that surrounds him-his wife Alison, his friend Cliff, and his mistress Helena-all are targets for his venom, and all find different ways of coping with his behavior.

Look Back in Anger opens on a Sunday afternoon in the Porters' one-room attic flat. In his few moments onstage, Jimmy manages to describe his closest friend Cliff as "ignorant", "a lump of dough", and "sickening". He criticizes every article in the newspaper, and drinks all the tea. Jimmy saves the worst for his wife, however, insulting both her family and her intelligence ("You haven't had a thought in years, have you?"), and reminding her that she's inferior to his previous love ("she had more animation in her little finger than you two put together"). Alison is obviously acclimated to the abuse, and disarms Jimmy at each turn through a combination of disregard and deference. As he details the virtues of his former mistress Madeline ("Just to be with her was an adventure"), rather than rise to the bait, Alison interjects, "He owes just about everything to Madeline." When he accuses her of being a peasant, Alison absently replies, "What's that?"

But when Jimmy ultimately turns his attention to her friends, he finally incites his desired response. "Jimmy, please-don't go on," Alison pleads after Jimmy discovers this weakness in her defenses. With a visible appetite, Jimmy "gathers himself for a new assault" as the stage direction leads. When Cliff attempts to intervene, Jimmy seems both delighted and taken aback at his success: "Don't think I could provoke her. Nothing I could do would provoke her. Not even if I were to drop dead." He then launches into a tirade that pushes Alison into a mute, inert focus. Jimmy's speech is followed by a silence: "There is no sound, only the plod of Alison's iron. Her eyes are fixed on what she is doing."

It's not a clear enough success for Jimmy, and he carries on, shouting out the windows, cursing the entire female population, and pushing the situation to a grappling brawl with Cliff, ending only when Alison is accidentally burned by the hot iron. The reality of this physical pain forces Jimmy to sympathy, and he responds immediately when Alison demands that he "Get out!" In the calmness that follows, Cliff and Alison try to come to terms with Jimmy's behavior, with Cliff ultimately declaring, "After all, he does love you. You don't need me to tell you that." But neither of them know how to weather Jimmy's love.

During the second act, Alison recounts the circumstances that brought the two together. "I met him at a party. I remember it so clearly," she begins her longest uninterrupted monologue of the play. She describes his obvious beauty: "Everything about him seemed to burn... his eyes were so blue and full of the sun," and his vulnerability: "He looked so young and frail, in spite of the tired line of his mouth." and also his temper: "Well, the howl of outrage and astonishment went up from the family, and that did it. Whether or not he was in love with me, that did it. He made up his mind to marry me."

Her speech goes a long way to illustrating her attraction to Jimmy, but it also spells out some of what drew him to Alison. Although the play clearly portrays Jimmy as a man in love, there is a brutal part to him that sees her as a symbol of his bitterest enemy-the middle class-and is prepared to make any sacrifice for his victory. While Alison never doubts Jimmy's love, she has no illusions about her role as a prize in this battle, explaining that he "came to regard me as a sort of hostage from those sections of society [he] had declared war on."

"Young married couple in debt, ever felt had?"

In his worn clothes and dead-end job, Jimmy is well aware of the inequity of life. Everything from newspaper editorials to church bells remind him that he is second class, but nothing is more emblematic of his perceived worthlessness than his treatment by Alison's middle class family. "Mummy had made me sign everything over to her, in trust, when she knew I was really going to marry Jimmy," Alison admits. In the aftermath of their wedding, her parents' attitude towards Jimmy grew even colder, as he explains to Cliff when he discovers a letter from Alison's mother: "Oh I'm such a fool! This is happening every five minutes of the day. She gets letters. Letters from her mother, letters in which I'm not mentioned at all because my name is a dirty word."

For Jimmy, this mistreatment is not just a slight against him; it's indicative of the entire battle between their social classes. And this isn't just a fight, it's an unfair fight. "The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!" he rants at the play's climax. But this is not a new sensation. "You see," Jimmy clarifies, "I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry-angry and helpless. And I can never forget it."

But class is only one part of the injustice. Jimmy also has history against him. Reaching adulthood in an era where the enemy is no longer clearly definable and absolute villains like Hitler and Mussolini have vanished, there seems to be no purpose in life, for rich and poor alike. "I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer," Jimmy explains, "We had all that done for us in the thirties and forties, when we were still kids. There aren't any good, brave causes left."

This isn't to say that Jimmy doesn't have a cause, and it isn't to say that this cause doesn't redeem him. At the play's end, after the couple have survived separation, betrayal, miscarriage, and endless cruelty, Jimmy breaks down to Alison: "I may be a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me, it needn't matter." It's a tenuous sort of resolution, but it's hard not to embrace Jimmy after seeing his heart so unguarded.

Look Back in Anger gave England a shock of indescribable proportions. As a New York Times reviewer described it, "Osborne is not loved in England. Those on the right detest him for his views on royalty and his contempt for their values. Those on the left suspect him for his relentless attacks on their preoccupation with materialism." The sheer transgression of his work ("Within the space of a minute every language taboo of the English stage was flouted") engendered an entirely new set of possibilities for the theater. Look Back in Anger fixed Osborne's place in the canon of British Drama, but it also created opportunities for a whole generation of truth-telling playwrights. Written on the ten-year anniversary of Look Back in Anger's debut, an article reflecting on the play's continuing impact described this trailblazing: "Until Osborne achieved a really big financial success, no one wanted to invest in plays that went against the most hallowed conventions. Once it was demonstrated that such serious drama in such unconventional language about such unconventional people could make money, the other young playwrights were able to come into their own."

The play also made an immediate success out of John Osborne. In 1958, Look Back in Anger was turned into a successful film, which was nominated for four British Academy Awards. The film poster announced: "the audience was jolted as if they'd been sitting for 2 hours in an electric chair!" In a newspaper profile written just five years after the debut of Look Back in Anger, Osborne is described as possessing "the comfortable feel of money and the pleasure of a charming flat in Chelsea and the use of a house in France," later adding: "He has satisfied his desire to wear fashionable clothes." While the success of his work gave Osborne an escape hatch out of poverty, it did nothing to change his politics or vigor. The same profile opens with the lines, "No British writer since World War II has enjoyed controversy more than John Osborne and few of them have caused so much of it."

By the time of his death in 1994, Osborne had written 24 plays for the stage, two screenplays (including Tom Jones, which won him an Oscar), a number of television plays, and two volumes of autobiography. His relationship with controversy continued through to the end of his life, and in 1993, while being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Writer's Guild of Great Britain, Osborne stood up and walked out of his own ceremony. The following day, there wasn't a single English-speaking paper in the world that could resist reporting on his effrontery under the headline "Angry Old Man."

"People like you make me feel so tired, when will you die?"

In the years following the defiance of John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney, the economic and social conditions that inspired their plays did not improve. Unemployment rates continued their steady increase, and increased immigration infected the nation with a dangerous undercurrent of bigotry. Meanwhile, the voices of dissent completely vanished. By 1965 the gloomy streets of Manchester that compelled A Taste of Honey were better known for the cheerful harmonies and smiling pop of The Hollies and Herman's Hermits. The late 60s/early 70s rise of a youth counterculture conditioned by drugs and free love created an escape from monotony for many individuals, but any hopes of widespread change for the poor were obliterated with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Thatcher had been leader of the Conservative Party since 1975, at which point she was best known as the Secretary of Education who cut free milk for schoolchildren, earning herself the nickname "Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher". In the years that led up to her election as Prime Minister, Thatcher made clear her intentions for the country: she aligned herself closely with American anti-Soviet rhetoric; sympathized with British xenophobia ("We are a British nation with British characteristics. Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened."); and, in direct opposition to the ruling Labour party, favored an economic platform that raised taxes, opposed trade unions and welfare, and cut any "unnecessary" spending, including funding for higher education and social services. But throughout the 1970s, the Labour party was unable to abate the downward economic spiral of the nation, andin 1979, with over one million unemployed and the country crippled by months of strike and discontent, English voters elected the Conservative party and Thatcher took charge of the nation.

Effects were felt immediately. In her attempts to combat inflation, Thatcher raised taxes, striking a fatal blow to the struggling manufacturing sector. By the end of Thatcher's first year in office, unemployment had doubled to two million, and by the end of her second year, had risen even more dramatically to 3.6 million. In Manchester alone, 50,000 jobs were lost over a 25-year period, a full third of the employment base. This time, however, the city's artists and musicians had a response.

Now recognized as the three most influential Manchester bands of the 1970s, The Buzzcocks, The Fall and Joy Division all formed during the turmoil that brought Thatcher to power. The Buzzcocks' first single, Spiral Scratch (1977), featured the song "Boredom" ("my future ain't what it was") while The Fall offered: "This is your situation/Continue a blank generation" on their debut, Bingo Master's Breakout (1978). But it was Joy Division who "somehow managed to grimly define what exactly it was to be a Mancunian as the 70s drew to an end." Their music was dark, sparse and not quite secretly melodic, while the lyrics stand among the most mournful and haunted ever sang ("I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through/I'm ashamed of the person I am"). Joy Division's pallid horror infected the city, and gave birth to a genre of expression that thrives and grows even today. Their influence on the city was so acute that it led the singer of a subsequent Manchester band, The Smiths, to describe the local scene only in terms of Joy Division's sway: "When we first began, there was a horrendous sterile cloud over the whole music scene in Manchester. Everybody was anti-human and it was so very cold."

"I'd rather be famous than righteous or holy any day"

In May of 1983, exactly twenty-five years after the debut of A Taste of Honey, this young Manchester band, The Smiths, issued their debut single, "Hand in Glove." While the song only reached #127 on the pop charts, every aspect of the record resisted dismissal. From the surprise of despair that waylays listeners on side A, to the calculating sexual predator that narrates side B, to the naked male body that adorns the cover, the entire single acted as a provocation. Critics were intrigued ("...great promise"), transfixed ("debut affair of the year") and indignant ("tinny, messily produced crap").

"Hand in Glove" tells the commonest love story in pop music, even as the narrator disagrees ("no it's not like any other love, this one is different because it's ours"). By the chorus the infatuation is already tedious, the declarations of true love just cliché. But then the last lines turn the whole thing on its head with such a sudden hopelessness it's cruel: "I know my luck too well, and I'll probably never see you again." This dejection is sung with all the cooing melody of the rest of the verse, but the song has been irreversibly changed.

This sudden and unarguable defeat enlisted countless disciples, down-hearted fans in search of an honesty that they could relate to, a truth unfound in the synthetic pop that dominated the radio. By comparison, the top three U.K. singles of 1983 were Culture Club's nonsensical "Karma Chameleon," Billy Joel's maudlin "Uptown Girl," and UB40's ghastly version of "Red Red Wine". Cast into this wilderness, it's no wonder that the audacity of "Hand in Glove" founded an immediate connection with a similarly desperate host of followers. The shock of this honesty was so fresh that it's easy to forgive listeners for missing the fact that the final line of the song ("I'll probably never see you again") was borrowed from an earlier attempt to reconcile life and love: Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey.

The Smiths quickly developed into a rallying force for disaffected youth. Their songs simultaneously celebrated and lamented the path of the outsider, offering sympathy to lonely teenagers as well as encouragement. While the immensely catchy, lovely and melancholic arrangements had their part in this attraction, it was the singer and lyricist for The Smiths, Steven Morrissey, who was at the heart of their appeal. Morrissey himself represented the same type of contradiction as his songs: on the one hand certain that he was always meant to be famous ("I decided that I was going to be a pop star at a very early age"), and on the other, presenting a suicidal, intensely depressed persona that remained alive only to for the sake of making another record ("The group are like a life support machine to me"). His fans both adored him and worried after him, eagerly encouraging both tendencies. Whether or not "Hand in Glove" was a popular hit, by the end of the year, The Smiths had fostered a cult following unlike any in history. As Morrissey explained in a November, 1983 interview, "The disciples we've accumulated are incredibly charming people. They don't spit or gob, they bring flowers."

While each year brought more flowers to Morrissey's stage, these "disciples" became more known for the depths of their fanaticism. Stories of admirers rushing stages, merchandise stands, tour buses, and hotels became common, but the most legendarily hectic part of the mania came at the end of each concert when Morrissey would throw his shirt into the crowd. Baz Boorer, guitarist for Morrissey since 1991, once described this phenomenon in an interview: "Oh, the fights you used to see over the shirts. Fisticuffs! I remember the very first show we ever did and some kid talking to me through clenched teeth, whispering, 'I've got a bit of his shirt in me mouth.' Otherwise someone would have had it."

These fans, who would buy all five Morrissey t-shirts and a tour program at the live concerts; who would place classified ads in homemade publications like Morri'Zine that pleaded for understanding: "I'm in a desperate search to find words to cover the walls of this cold blank room"; who placed their lives at the whim of their favorite singer; such fans were eager to learn about this hero. What they discovered was that Morrissey was very much like them: a victim of a miserable adolescence ("as a teenager, I could never stress how depressed I was"), poor ("I can simply remember being in very dark streets, penniless"); unable to participate in society ("The fear and anguish of waking up, of having to get dressed, having to walk down the road, having to walk into assembly, having to do those lessons"); and, most tellingly, in search of a sympathetic voice: "The power of the written word really stung me, and I was also entirely immersed in popular music."

This is where The Smiths truly connected to their audience. In 1983, Morrissey declared that "we're really trying to attract the shy sort of person who never goes to gigs, never buys records," and by filling the songs with narratives and fears that such people could relate to, they guaranteed the bond. The stories told on their debut record were nothing like the ones on the radio, which, in 1984, was primarily concerned with Frankie Goes to Hollywood ("Relax") and George Michael ("Careless Whisper"). Amid this glib suggestiveness and infidelity, Morrissey was simply terrified by sex: "she's too rough and I'm too delicate"; while pop songs took place in dimly-lit, modern nightclubs, Morrissey was nearly bed-ridden with shyness and self doubt: "I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a stitch to wear"; while every other singer took pains to describe their own sexual allure, Morrissey was flawed to the point of repetition: "Oh I'm too tired/I'm so sick and tired/and I've feeling very sick and ill today."

But it was not enough that Morrissey could tell the same stories as his fans, he truly was one of them. When Morrissey described "the shy sort of person who never goes to gigs, never buys records," he followed up by saying "believe it or not, I was like that before I joined The Smiths!" And just like his shy fans, he knows there is more to him than people see. When he sang, "people see no worth in you, oh, but I do" the disciples knew that he was singing to them. And when he sings "nobody ever looks at me twice", they understood him completely.

"No reason to talk about the books I read but still I do"

This failure of the world to recognize him became a constant concern for Morrissey. In a 1984 interview, he explains how his background conspired with his appearance to perpetuate this failure: "Because I come from a penniless background-a shack upon a hill-people find it fake that I come bounding down the hill clutching a copy of [Oscar Wilde's] De Profundis. By rights, I should be sitting here talking about Sheffield Wednesday [the football team] or the length of [host of Match of the Day] Jimmy Hill's beard. But I was locked away for years, reading volume after volume."

This notion of Morrissey as an avid reader only furthers the connection. No doubt many of his fans likewise turned to books as an escape from reality and loneliness. As Morrissey once explained about his favorite literary characters, "these people replaced the friends I never had." And his invocation of Oscar Wilde acts as almost a password to other outsiders looking for an ally.

Wilde is often referenced as Morrissey's greatest influence, and the assertion is not unfounded. The song "Cemetry Gates" recounts the singer's friendship with his closest friend, Linder Sterling, to whom he sings, "Keats and Yeats are on your side/but you lose/'Cause Wilde is on mine." Asked about the influence of Wilde in 1984, Morrissey explained, "As I blundered through my late teens, I was quite isolated and Oscar Wilde meant much more to me. In a way he became a companion... As I get older the adoration increases. I'm never without him. It's almost biblical."

Wilde is a perfect hero for Morrissey. He dressed well and in fashion, but with a soft edge and long hair that transgressed masculine convention. He was intelligent and charming, but with a sharp wit that could be funny, provocative, and deadly. His emotional clarity must have been a bracing relief to Morrissey, whose clutched copy of De Profundis contained the kind of revelations that Smiths' lyrics aimed at: "Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask. There are times when Sorrow seems to me to be the only truth." And his ambiguity-personally, sexually, intellectually, and emotionally-this "intriguing uncertainty" that George Orwell once described of Wilde, seems a clear inspiration for Morrissey's double persona. But most of all, Wilde's clear, unabashed success, despite his dandy-isms, despite his criticism of society, despite his two years of hard labor for "gross indecency" with other men, must have had an immense impact on Morrissey. After Shakespeare, Wilde was the most read author in twentieth-century Great Britain, an astonishing success for a convict who died bankrupt and exiled in the year 1900.

For Morrissey to have found a historical precedent for the type of life he was after is of massive import. To know that someone else could have emerged from such sadness (Morrissey once described him as "a creature persistently creased in pain"), to know that someone could embrace beauty with such vigor, to realize that someone could live in opposition to "social decency" and still emerge world famous and eternally relevant must've been a tremendous relief to Morrissey. And his lyrics, record jackets, stage shows, and interviews are dense with references to Wilde. But when Morrissey was asked who drove him to write, which figure had the greatest impact on his work, and whom he admired most, the answer was not Wilde. "I've never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 per cent of my writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney who wrote A Taste of Honey," Morrissey replied in a 1986 interview.

"Oh I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true"

Morrissey went on to explain, "'This Night Has Opened My Eyes' is A Taste Of Honey song–putting the entire play to words." And this slow, ache-y song about the scant, miserable choices available to a scared mother-to-be absolutely captures the descending helplessness of Jo's pregnancy. "And I'm not happy and I'm not sad," Morrissey sings, invoking the emotional dead end that Jo reaches through exhaustion. Paraphrasing a conversation between Geof and Jo, he recalls the depths of this desparation: "wrap her up in the news of the world, dump her on a doorstep, girl." The most poignant line of the song, marking the looming confrontation with reality, the terminal end of innocence-"The dream is gone but the baby is real"-is lifted exactly from the play.

The Smiths' first LP was full of references to Delaney, from "Reel Around the Fountain," which repeated Jimmie's line to Jo: "You're the bees knees, but so am I" to "You've Got Everything Now", which opens with a line from Delaney's second play, The Lion in Love: "As merry as the day is long." As he insists in that 1986 interview, Morrissey made no secret of his love for her. In 1983, while the debut LP was still only two-thirds recorded, the singer provided the NME with lists of his ten favorite movies, books, records, and symbolists. A Taste of Honey appears in the first list, The Lion in Love in the second, and Shelagh Delaney herself in the fourth. Not even Wilde made it into three categories.

In 1984, The Smiths released a single with vocals by one of Morrissey's heroes, Sandie Shaw. The sleeve featured a still of Jo, played by Rita Tushingham, from the film A Taste of Honey. In 1985, the program for the Meat is Murder tour lists Shelagh Delaney as one of Morrissey's heroes alongside Viv Nicholson and Parker Tyler. In a different 1986 interview, Morrissey reaffirmed his allegiance: "A Taste of Honey had a massive influence on me. I mean, it was virtually the only important British film in the 1960s, as far as I'm concerned." This from the same devoted moviegoer who once declared, "As my education virtually amounted to nothing-we were instilled with the fact that everything was hopeless-I completely immersed myself in films." And in 1987, the same year that The Smiths disbanded, he made his boldest references yet to Delaney.

First, in March of 1987, the 70 minute, 24-song singles collection Louder Than Bombs appeared, arguably the definitive Smiths release (Spin Magazine described it as "the ultimate Smiths statement" and "24 reasons to go on living"). The cover featured a candid photograph of Shelagh Delaney, taken from a 1961 Saturday Evening Post article about the writer. In August of 1987, two weeks after the band announced their split, they released the 12" for "Girlfriend in a Coma", which featured the same photo of Delaney as the front cover of the paperback edition of A Taste of Honey. The former stands as the commonest entry point for new Smiths fans, while the latter carries the often-mourned distinction of presenting the final Smiths recording session. The fact that Delaney graces two such immortal releases signals her importance to both casual and committed listeners. It was, in fact, during the same radio session that debuted "Girlfriend in a Coma" that The Smiths announced their end, on August 1, 1987.

"I've read well and I've heard them said a hundred times"

Morrissey immediately commenced a solo career, issuing ten albums in ten years. Morrissey's earliest records reference the kind of stripped down, buzzing guitar rock that he always mentioned in interviews: Billy Fury, Cliff Richard, even David Bowie and the New York Dolls. This razor-edge rocknroll era peaked in 1992 with the release of Your Arsenal, produced by the legendary Bowie-collaborator Mick Ronson. However, the follow-up LP Vauxhall and I, released two years later, was a majestic, orchestral LP that drifted away from this glam-tinged swagger. Morrissey immediately declared it "the best record I've ever made." Critics and fans, enamored with the grand pop sweep of the LP, tended to agree.

The LP opened with "Now My Heart Is Full," a massive sounding ballad, all melodrama and despair and lost friendship. Morrissey was asked about the song by Select Magazine, who were perplexed by the rush of individuals named in the lyrics: "Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie, Cubitt"; characters from Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. During the song, Morrissey describes Greene's mob of working-class villains as his "friends" with absolute sincerity. He explained to the interviewer that the song was intended to clear out his obsession with history once and for all: "I have realized that the past is actually over, and it is a great relief to me." He referenced his "vast" record and video collection, and suggested that his lifelong impulse to carry around history had finally become a burden.

Vauxhall and I is often considered the breakthrough LP where Morrissey finally acknowledges that he's no longer a sore-lipped teenager with unsympathetic parents: "you might even be tempted to say he's aged" suggested Q Magazine. Not only does Morrissey confront his years, but he uses the songs to make this clean break with history. In his interview with Select, Morrissey signals the first track as a key location of this break, specifically marking his relationship with Delaney. "'Now My Heart is Full' has a sense of jubilant exhaustion with looking over one's shoulder all the time and draining one's reference points. I mean, even I-even I-went a little bit too far with A Taste of Honey. I have perhaps overtapped my sources and now all that is over."

"Such things I do just to make myself more attractive to you"

And so in 1994, just a decade after his initial invocation of her name, Morrissey made his final public reference to Shelagh Delaney. It's a tremendously elegant goodbye, placing all of the blame on himself for going too far, rather than crassly announcing that he'd outgrown her works or become disenchanted with them. But a curiosity remains; for all of Morrissey's adoration of Delaney, for all of his public declarations of devotion, he always manages to state that he loves her, and never why he loves her. It's not that her works don't deserve the attention. But if Morrissey truly wanted an ancestor to give him a blueprint for the hybrid of wit, sadness and honesty that made up his character, it seems obvious that John Osborne is more appropriate choice.

Morrissey was certainly aware of Osborne's work. Images from Look Back in Anger were considered twice for Smiths' record sleeves, and both times rejected. First for the single "William it Was Really Nothing" in 1984, and then again in 1992 for the collections Best I and Best II. But while Morrissey borrowed lyrics from a vast field of writers beyond Delaney-Elizabeth Smart, Keith Waterhouse, Victoria Woods, and Jack Kerouac, to name just a few-he never took from the plays of Osborne. It seems a willful omission, considering their paralleled temperaments.

In the character notes for Look Back in Anger, the description of Jimmy Porter is a concise, contradictory portrait of a unique creature. "He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty… a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike. Blistering honesty, or apparent honesty, like his, makes few friends. To many he may seem sensitive to the point of vulgarity. To others, he is simply a loudmouth."

This sort of in-between existence, inviting contradictory criticism from every angle, is exactly the sort of crossfire that Morrissey thrives in. As he boasted in 1984: "There are people out there, I know, who would like to disembowel me just as there are people who would race towards me and smother me with kisses." His repeated denial of extremes-neither straight nor gay; neither strong nor weak; neither cocky nor humble; neither happy nor sad-has kept critics and fans off balance and perplexed for 25 years now, but it has also kept them captivated, just as Jimmy's constant dance between tenderness and cruelty has somehow kept his friends and wife at his side since their first encounters.

Of course Morrissey is never interested in addressing these questions, he's merely content to stand at the center of the maelstrom and evade any classification. This polarizing energy can easily be traced back to Wilde, but Jimmy's working class intellect speaks more to Morrissey's own origins. As Morrissey describes the revulsion that the world showed this boy from "a penniless background... bounding down the hill clutching a copy of De Profundis" it's not hard to recognize the tone of glee lurking underneath the anger. Morrissey's pride at resisting the middle class monopoly on learning, and his joy in violating this barrier, is no different than Jimmy's party crashing. As Alison describes the night she met her husband, it's easy to imagine him soaking in all the astonishment and indignation: "The men there all looked as though they distrusted him, and as for the women, they were all intent on showing their contempt for this rather odd creature, but no one seemed quite sure how to do it. He'd come to the party on a bicycle, he told me, and there was oil all over his dinner jacket." While his mere presence is enough to unsettle the crowd, Jimmy is happy to take things even further, parodying their dignity with his oil-dripped jacket and daring to live more vividly than any of them ("everything about him seemed to burn").

"A crack on the head is what you get for not asking and a crack on the head is what you get for asking"

Beyond their working class origins, their hatred for the bourgeoisie, and their ambiguous identities, the one quality that the Morrissey and Jimmy Osborne share most closely, and most abominably, is their delight in cruelty. The smile that accompanies the bloodletting: the flash in Jimmy's eyes that appears when he realizes he's hurt Alison or Cliff; the flush that Morrissey allows himself to enjoy just before he skewers a journalist. Jimmy's own sadism is laid bare in Look Back in Anger, but the most vivid examples of Morrissey's darkness are closely guarded secrets, covered by his victims' embarrassment and pain.

Geoff Travis, founder of the Rough Trade record label and target of The Smiths' song "Frankly Mr Shankly" ("you are a flatulent pain in the arse"), has always dismissed his own shame at being so publicly humiliated by the singer. "Occasionally, it gave me a bit of disquiet," he explains. "I laughed as well-it was a mixture. I suppose it made me a little sad. If I hadn't known Morrissey as well as I did during that period, it might have really upset me." His explanation is a tidy bit of self-denial, dismissing the attack as a joke. By insisting that that his own closeness with Morrissey excused the viciousness, Travis sneaks in a self-congratulatory note as well, declaring an understanding of the song that outsiders couldn't share. According to Smiths' bassist Andy Rourke, however, "he went mad about it."

At the end of "Frankly Mr Shankly", Morrissey recalls an instance when Travis wrote him a poem, prompting one of the most savage lines in the song. "Oh I didn't realize that you wrote poetry," Morrissey begins, with a note of curiosity, almost sounding impressed. Then he drops the blade: "I didn't realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry."

This sort of misdirection preceding an attack is one of Jimmy's most savage weapons. In the second half of Look Back In Anger, he begins an affair with Alison's friend Helena, who falls completely for Jimmy's violent charm. During his Sunday morning ritual of tearing through the newspapers and insulting everyone's intelligence, Jimmy casually asks Helena if she's going to church that day. "No. I don't think so. Unless you want to," she replies. Assured that her guard is down, Jimmy strikes: "Do I detect a growing, satanic glint in her eyes lately... Do you feel very sinful my dear? Well? Do you? Do you feel sin crawling out of your ears... are you wondering whether I'm joking or not?" The stage direction reinforces her discomposure during this assault: "She can hardly believe that this is an attack, and she can only look at him, uncertain of herself." In just these few sentences, Helena is shattered, made helpless and confused. The direction continues: "She is shaken by the sudden coldness in his eyes, but before she has time to fully realize how hurt she is, he is smiling at her."

In both situations, the lesson is that no one is safe, and no kindness should be trusted. It's the sort of awful bind that traps victims of abuse, and it guarantees that both Morrissey and Jimmy remain in control. This sort of destabilization is especially treacherous because it requires a constant escalation of threat to maintain its power. In 1986, with the usual combination of cruelty and glee that accompanied such evil, Morrissey proved how unsafe everyone was. Citing an extended heroin addiction that was impeding the bass player's performance, Morrissey decided that Andy Rourke would be expelled from The Smiths. "Morrissey left a little postcard on the windscreen of my car," Rourke explained, "like a parking ticket. It said, 'Andy-you have left The Smiths. Goodbye and good luck, Morrissey.'"

"That's why you're on your own tonight, with your triumphs and your charms"

The comparisons between Morrissey and Jimmy Porter are striking, but more remarkable are the connections between Morrissey and Osborne himself. As the most vivid example of the angry young men, the playwright's actions and beliefs clearly offer an undeniable standard for the singer's behavior.

There is a certain flair, a roguish charm shared by the two that's uncannily similar. Both Morrissey and Osborne present this asocial sort of charisma, a standoffish poise that's irresistible to their fans. An often-retold anecdote from the playwright's childhood has a headmaster slapping the 16-year old Osborne over an unfriendly facial expression, to which the boy responded by slapping the man back. Osborne was of course expelled, and a certain kind of quick-breathing, vicarious joy always swirls around the retelling, as his biographers and admirers celebrate as if they had struck the blow themselves.

Morrissey's description of his own teenage years carries a similar outsider's glee. He remembers his own secondary school days as "a willful isolation", an active choice made against participation: "Most of the teenagers that surrounded me, and the things that pleased them and interested them, well, they bored me stiff."

The cheer that accompanies this memory seems at odds with his more recurrent descriptions of Manchester youth: "They were the most vicious people. They would smack you in the mouth and ask you what you were looking at after," Morrissey once explained. That he chose his isolation is certainly a comforting thought, but given the overwhelming weight of memories that describe his adolescence of persecution and depression, it seems more likely that he had no other option. His choice, or the notion of it anyway, has certainly been vindicated by history, but like Osborne, had he been a failure and led an anonymous life of poverty and ruin, the swagger of opting-out or striking a teacher would seem a lost gamble, a poor choice.

This audacity and this successful insolence fed both men, driving each of them to a very specific combination of vanity, self-righteousness, and agitation. Kenneth Tynan, the theater critic who was the first to praise Look Back in Anger, famously described Osborne as "a dandy with a machine gun." Every review of his work, every profile of his character describes this balance between the elegantly dressed, sleek figured man, and the "compulsive rebel": dangerous, fierce, and upsetting.

In his concerts, Morrissey has perfected his own synthesis of vanity and lawlessness. Countless photos and videos (including Morrissey's music video for "Will Never Marry") document the arresting phenomenon of fans rushing onstage for a chance to kiss the face or touch the hand of the singer. Half of the spectacle is the determination and thrall of the fans, but just as important is the grace and fearlessness with which Morrissey greets his disciples. He never flinches, never calls for security; regardless of their vigor, which often knocks him off his feet, Morrissey always replies to his assailants with understanding, gentleness, and patience. This fearlessless is perhaps less notable, however, when regarded in light of Morrissey's steady invitations. "It only takes one," he's coyly reminded audiences around the world, enticing undecided fans by promising: "I will forgive you." He's even gone as far as leaving the stage until the security force is subdued, guaranteeing subsequent invasions.

And of course it must be noted that in 2006, Morrissey released You Are the Quarry, his first solo LP in seven years. On the cover is a photograph of Morrissey, dressed in a pinstripe suit and a purple necktie, directing both his gaze and the barrel of a tommy gun across the record's face. It's almost crass in its literal translation of a dandy with a machine gun.

This anti-establishment, lurid-yet-well-dressed charm has run through generations of rebellion, but rarely found such notable proponents as Osborne and Morrissey. Given Morrissey's penchant for taking up the traits of his idols, it's difficult to believe that this alignment is unintentional. But it's still not the strongest similarity between the two. Their hearts were closest when it came to their hatred.

The rage that both men have expressed towards England and toward the crown is savage, disappointed and final. In 1961, Osborne announced his feelings for his homeland in an open letter titled "Damn You, England." Osborne's letter, published in The Observer, stands among the most poisonous venom spat in the last fifty years on any topic; a clawing, kicking promise of violence. "This is a letter of hate," he begins, "It is for you those men of my country who have defiled it... there is murder in my brain and I carry a knife in my heart for every one of you." Osborne saw this contamination as complete and inevitable, and he concludes the letter with a declaration: "Damn you, England. You're rotting now, and quite soon you'll disappear."

Three decades later, from a self-imposed exile in Hollywood, California, Morrissey expressed his relationship to his nation with the exact same imagery of death and decay: "The England that I have loved, and I have sung about, and whose death I had sung about, I felt had just finally slipped away. And so I was no longer saying, 'England is dying', I was beginning to say, 'Well, yes, it has died and here's the carcass'-so why hang around?" For all of Morrissey's ambiguity, his reluctance to deal in absolutes, the choice of words like "carcass" and "death" is particularly telling.

Even in their everyday interactions, the two share an aversion to people and conversation. A profile of Osborne in The New York Times said that "by nature he is a reluctant joiner and a poor belonger," while Morrissey echoed the sentiment in a 1984 interview: "I don't trust a living human being. I find most people totally repugnant." By the start of the 90s, Morrissey's seclusion was infamous, with dumbfounded reporters recounting his preferred method of communication: the fax machine.

It's important to recognize that despite this alienation, the two men ultimately sought to improve the human condition. A critic described Osborne's "furious attempt to penetrate indifference and apathy in order to get others to see and feel as he does", while Morrissey himself very earnestly declared, "I really feel that we do have an obligation and I know that people respect it and they want it and it's working to great effect."

"Others sang your life, but now is a chance to shine"

By singing, by following the paths of his idols David Johansen and Cilla Black and Billy Fury, Morrissey chose a much different path than Osborne to fulfilling this obligation. Morrissey is very clear about how deliberate this decision was. In 1985, an interviewer pressed him on the legitimacy of a singer's right to make political statements. Morrissey didn't allow the reporter to even complete the question before he burst out in sincerity: "I feel that, if popular singers don't say these things, who does? We can't have any faith in playwrights any more, we can't have any faith in filmstars, young people don't care about those things, they're dying out." It's telling that Morrissey even suggested looking to playwrights in the 1980s, a decade that saw more VCRs sold than theater tickets. But the message is definite: the stages for voicing dissent are endangered, and pop songs could very well be the last stand.

Morrissey had a second explanation for the value of the pop song. In 1984, he explained the unique platform that music gives to a population largely passed over: "To me, popular music is still the voice of the working class... it does really seem like the one sole opportunity for someone from a working-class background to step forward and have their say. It's really the last refuge for articulate but penniless humans." And Morrissey, constantly self-identified as penniless and so clearly articulate, seemingly had no choice but to sing, to have his own say.

This opportunity to step forward from a working class background is something Morrissey could share with only a few of his large host of idols. As the son of a surgeon and a poet, Wilde never felt the muffling oppression of the poor. Sandie Shaw, employed by the Dagenham Ford auto plant when she began her recording career, was closer to the type of working class truth-teller that Morrissey imaged, but Shelagh Delaney is the ideal model. In the Saturday Evening Post photo used for the sleeve of Louder Than Bombs, Delaney's character is plainly visible. Resting her head upon her hand, the playwright carelessly holds a cigarette between her fingers and stares directly into the camera. In the original photo, a ragged row of clotheslines stretches out behind her. On the LP's jacket, the drying laundry frames the track listing on the back cover. The gray Manchester sky, the candid, underwhelmed cast to Delaney's expression, and the domestic drudgery of wet laundry fully conjures the impression of Delaney as working class playwright.

A large part of the press frenzy that accompanied A Taste of Honey revolved around Delaney's origins. There's an obvious glee to reports of the young woman "wolfing down a meal of sausage, cabbage, beetroot and weak tea" (Daily Mail) as if she were a construction worker, and writers clung to the rumor that she started smoking at the age of six. This portrait of the working class playwright was both celebrated and derided, depending on the critic's political stance. Regardless of these differing opinions, every critic seemed to agree that Delaney's roots have everything to do with her work, and that these roots are the force that drives her to write such truths.

But Osborne's roots are the same, and again the question presents itself, why Delaney? Why not Osborne? One of the more disapproving reviews of A Taste of Honey said of Delaney, "if there is anything worse than an Angry Young Man it's an Angry Young Woman," reminding readers of one of the key distinctions between the two playwrights: gender. Joan Littlewood, who produced the original staging of A Taste of Honey, responded to this slight by describing Delaney as "the antithesis of London's Angry Young Men. She knows what she is angry about," suggesting an even stronger distinction.

"The story is old-I KNOW-but it goes on"

This distinction is something that Morrissey was well aware of. Known for sporting a "Women's Liberation" badge while still a teenager, Morrissey was keenly aware of sexism and his own role in changing this inequity. At age nineteen, he scrawled in a letter, "Society is sick and the world is in a mess thanks to men." An aspect of his own celibacy is an underlying criticism of the predatory nature of male sexuality, a theme that's stretched the length of his career. The debut Smiths' single was backed with the song "Handsome Devil", which relied on a literal description of this predatory nature to betray its crassness: "let me get my hands on your mammary glands." It turned out to be only the first in a long line of songs concerning this topic, from "Spring-Heeled Jim" ("So many women, his head should be spinning") to "Dagenham Dave" ("Head in a blouse, everybody loves him") to "The Boy Racer" ("He's got too many girlfriends, he thinks he owns this city... stood at the urinal he thinks he's got the whole world in his hands").

As always, Morrissey was not satisfied simply inserting his politics into his songs. Interviews, tour programs and record sleeves all served as platforms to communicate his concerns. The 1984 NME list that included Morrissey's ten favorite books demonstrates his dedication to feminism, or more sharply, his aversion to heterosexual maleness. Of the ten books, six were written by women (Susan Brownmiller, Shelagh Delaney, Molly Haskell, Marjorie Rosen, Esther Rothman, Kate Swift and Casey Miller), two by gay men (Oscar Wilde and Emlyn Williams), and the other two are Men's Liberation by Jack Nichols and the prurient compendium The Murderers' Who's Who by J.H.H. Gaute and Robin O'Dell. It shows a particular dedication to the cause that Morrissey, who often described books as his best friends, chose a dry reference guide, The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing, as one of his ten favorites.

While Morrissey's lyrical references are overwhelmingly drawn from novels and plays, it's important to note that almost none of the books named by this list fall into either category. Instead, his favorites are heavily theoretical and historical, confronting gender, politics, and cultural hierarchy. Best exemplified by Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, the list demonstrates a vivid concern for feminism, and just as importantly, the necessary direct involvement of men in the struggle. It's also remarkable that Morrissey's other favorite pastime, film, is not exempt from feminist criticism, and two of his chosen texts deal with sexism on screen: Popcorn Venus and From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies.

This list was only the beginning of Morrissey's public proclamations of an affinity for feminism. As cover stars of Smiths' records, he chose photos of Viv Nicholson, the football pool winner who represented the liberated Northern woman of the 1970s, and Pat Phoenix and Yootha Joyce, who both portrayed determined, independent women for television audiences nationwide. And in June of 1983, in one of his earliest published interviews, he very clearly explains the effect of the women's liberation movement in his work: "I just so happen to be completely influenced by feminist writers like Molly Haskell, Marjory Rose and Susan Brownmiller. An endless list of them! I don't want to GO ON about feminism but it is an ideal state."

Morrissey was barely 24 years old when he announced that he was "completely influenced" by feminism, and barely half a year from his birth as a public figure. It had only been 14 months from the first Smiths rehearsals, the "life support system" that brought him out of an eight-year seclusion. To begin his tenure in public life with the provocative statement that feminism "is an integral part of the way I write" demonstrates the importance of this message. And since Morrissey would never be so vulgar as to suggest he could understand this struggle on his own, he turned to books for insight. Books like Esther Rothman's memoir The Angel Inside Went Sour, which described her challenges as the head of a public school for troubled girls. Books like Brownmiller's Against Our Will, which used a combination of clinical study, anonymous recollections, and bracing logic to recast rape not as a crime committed by one man against one woman, but as the violence that mediates all relations between men and women. Books, which Morrissey once described as "positive weapons", offered him clear, sharp-edged facts to inform his sympathy. But again, when it comes to fiction and drama-his most consistently referenced texts-Shelagh Delaney stands alone in his favorites.

Before examining the critical difference between Delaney and Morrissey, it's helpful to clarify their similarities. Born in the same county of Manchester, the two share a lifelong-dismissal at the hands of London, the center of the nation that snickered at the provinciality of the North. As Delaney once observed, "usually North Country people are shown as gormless [stupid], whereas in actual fact they are very alive and cynical." "Alive and cynical" seems an apt description of Morrissey, who revels in such seeming contradiction, and has always presented the unique paradox of singing gleefully about his misery (and the reverse).

This brightness all bound up in gloom was one of the most admired aspects of A Taste of Honey. "There is laughter in it," a New York Times review promised, "some disenchanted and some earthy." Descriptions of John Osborne always invoke violence: "a scathing slash"; "a landmine"; "burning"; "a direct attack". But Delaney work is "filled with wry laughter," making it "all the more moving because it does not tear the emotions to tatters."

Morrissey has likewise ornamented his songs with humor, creating a richness of emotion that's nearly unique in pop music. John Peel, the legendary BBC DJ and arguably the most voracious consumer of new music in the last 50 years, recognized this humor immediately. "On more than one occasion," Peel confessed, "I've actually laughed out loud at Smiths' lyrics, and I don't often do that, I don't often laugh out loud at anything much." Peel's observation that "they're very funny lyrics, and I cannot understand why people assume that what they do is essentially miserable" is distinctly reminiscent of Delaney's insistence: "even if the play is imbued with pessimism, I am not a pessimist." The "wry laughter throughout" was the most immediate distinction between Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey, just as "The Smiths' humour" that Morrissey wove throughout his lyrics separated the band from the "anti-human", "very cold" bands of Manchester.