INTRODUCTION

Some critics, accounting for the relative neglect of An Ideal Husband, have claimed that the play gives precedence to men's "wider scope and greater ambition" over women's "emotional curves," making it more difficult for contemporary audiences to identify with. Yet it is precisely this masculine ambition that precipitates near-catastrophe in the play, while only the gentler spirit of forgiveness--and a new commitment to the domestic world of the family--offers potential salvation.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde's last work for the stage, embodies the features that have made its author such a beloved figure: the sparkling wit and razor-sharp epigrams; the solemnity and intensity with which his characters pursue the most trivial ideas; the finely honed satire of social pretension, greed, self-interest, folly, and affectation. All the marks of the true comedy of manners. Whereas An Ideal Husband, less filled with consistent comic banter, and relying less on witty epigrams, explores issues not usually associated with the arch, superficial cultivated by the man known in his time as "The Oscar." Yet An Ideal Husband boasts a wealth of delightfully lunatic characters while also offering much on the subject of love, betrayal, and trust. No less a social satire than his other plays, in it Wilde balances a harsh look at ambition and ethical compromise with the melodramatic suspense of a political thriller of the first water.

The threat of personal scandal for the politician, painfully familiar to any audience member in the late twentieth century, makes it clear that Wilde's concerns with publicity and the exposure of dark secrets remain quite relevant. The central conceit of the plot was drawn from a contemporary political scandal, and is still as timely as if it had been ripped from tomorrow's headlines. The play is also striking for the way in which it eerily foretold Wilde's own dizzying fall from grace when his homosexuality was exposed in a very public trial. Written at the peak of Wilde's popular success and artistic acclaim, An Ideal Husband displays a painful sense of the burden of deception that lay behind the public persona of its author. A deep sense of guilt and fear seems to torment the usually flippant Wilde as he uses the complicated mixture of tones in the play to explore his double life, his mortality, and the inevitable consequences of our choices. Unlike the sad results of Wilde's own personal ruin, the play offers too a hopeful picture of redemption and reconciliation.

Few critics since its opening have been able to agree on whether An Ideal Husband functions as a melodrama, as a dark comedy, or as considerably more; since below its "trivial" plot and witty dialogue lies a social satire of substance and insight. Court audiences will have the opportunity to judge for themselves when they watch Wilde's quintessential comedy of political manners.

BIOGRAPHY OF OSCAR WILDE

Few dramatists have ever manipulated the English language as ably as Oscar Wilde. Yet, like many other notable British authors before and since, Wilde was not English at all. In an Anglo-Irish tradition also encompassing Farquhar, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Swift, Shaw, Joyce, and Beckett, Wilde undertook a self-imposed exile to join the literary life outside his native Ireland.

Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, only two years before George Bernard Shaw. Wilde's father, Sir William Wilde, was an eminent Irish physician and an infamous Dublin eccentric. Lady Wilde, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a writer and an ardent Irish Nationalist (known as "Speranza" to her patriotic readers) who had gained notoriety through her newspaper articles. Sir William was as famous for his refusal to wash as for his witty conversation or medical knowledge, and close friends of the family knew that he had fathered three illegitimate children prior to the marriage. Lady Wilde was a notoriously outlandish dresser who claimed to have been an eagle in a previous life. At nearly six feet, Lady Wilde towered over her husband, a fact that meant they were often caricatured as a giantess and a dwarf. However, the couple shared many interests: both were prolific writers who were deeply committed to Irish nationalist politics, and both were committed to their three children, William, Oscar, and Isola.

From this atmosphere of privilege and notoriety, Wilde was sent to the Portora Royal School, distinguishing himself enough to win a gold medal in classics and--at 17--a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin. There he once more won the highest academic honors, a gold medal for classical studies, and a scholarship for further study at Magdalen College, Oxford. Despite the influence of his mother and her involvement in the Young Ireland Movement, in 1874 Wilde sold all his Irish property and left for England.

The move marked a major transition, as Wilde left his Irish roots behind and set out to make a name and place for himself within--and upon--English culture and society. William Butler Yeats recalled later in his life that Wilde consciously chose England over Ireland, literature over politics. Wilde himself told an interviewer that, though proud of his Irish birth, he lived in London for its artistic life: "There is no lack of culture in Ireland, but it is nearly all absorbed in politics. Had I remained there my career would have been a political one."

Instead, the young dandy determined to make his mark artistically and socially. In one play, a character warns "Never speak disrespectfully of Society;...only people who can't get into it do that." She might be speaking for the young Oscar, who had no trouble gaining entry into the society of his time. Though perceived to be as eccentric as he was witty and charming, Wilde was at the heart of the most fashionable groups even as an undergraduate--setting new fashions more often than following anyone else's.

Indeed, it was while at Oxford that Wilde--at the head of a group of like-minded undergraduates--helped found the Aesthetic movement that was to dominate art, culture, and thought at the end of the 19th century. The movement was based on the aesthetic ideals of Wilde's noted tutor Walter Pater, who advocated a love of Art for Art's sake. With this model Wilde's own creed blended the "muscular spirituality" of the art historian John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite movement of Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The notebooks Wilde kept as an undergraduate show him also integrating theories from Georg Hegel, Herbert Spencer, and other political-moral philosophers, evolving a highly individual outlook.

Aestheticism idolized ideals of Beauty for Beauty's sake: "All art is quite useless," Wilde wrote, and must not be used to advance utilitarian goals. Wilde's first piece of published prose, an 1877 review of an art exhibition, articulates his artistic ideals and (in the words of one biographer) demonstrates his "determination to enforce his aesthetic views and his personality upon the general public." Focused on appearance, behavior, style, and artifice, Aestheticism was a way of life as much as a philosophy--a style radically at odds with the dominant, somber modes of the Victorian era.

While pursuing his ideals of pagan beauty and hedonistic pleasure, Wilde made several trips to Italy and Greece in 1875 and 1877. These trips served to influence Wilde's aesthetic outlook as well as to inspire some early poetry based on his experiences, including his earliest poems (published later under the title San Miniato). From one trip the travellers returned ten days into the school term, highlighting the reputation for idleness and carelessness that Wilde had gained at Oxford. Despite this haphazard approach to his education, Wilde ended his time at Oxford in a blaze of glory--much to the surprise of the faculty, whom he described as "astoni[sh]ed beyond words" at "the Bad Boy doing so well in the end." Echoing his early schooldays, Wilde won highest honors for his final examinations. His poem "Ravenna" also won the Newdigate Poetry Prize and was published by the University in 1878.

On the heels of these triumphs, in 1879 Wilde established himself in London as a "Professor of Aesthetics," gave lectures and frequented literary salons. He made himself conspicuous by his eccentric and flamboyant style of clothing, mingling his Aesthetic ideas with the studied excesses of the Dandy. While others dressed conventionally in subdued frock coats and stiff collars, Wilde affected velvet coats, knee breeches, and loose, flowing shirts. Wilde tried his hand as a writer only briefly in this period; he published a collection of poems in 1881 and wrote his first play, Vera, which ran in New York for one week in 1883. For the most part, however, London knew Wilde as a self-described art critic and prophet of Aestheticism. Wilde the wit and dandy was satirized frequently in Punch and other periodicals, and was even parodied in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operetta Patience. For nearly five years, this form of notoriety and self-promotion was his principle achievement and his chief claim to fame.

In 1882, Wilde's reputation (from his outlandish behavior and the public lampoons it encouraged) was such that he was invited to give a lecture-tour of the United States. Though Wilde characteristically informed the customs agent in New York "I have nothing to declare except my genius," he brought with him lectures on art history and aesthetics (particularly condemning the vogue for Gothic architecture) that were enormously successful on his tour. Toning down his extreme eccentricities of dress and manner and graciously giving interviews in each small town, Wilde was well-received from the East Coast through the South and into the rugged wilds of the West. In all, his tour covered nearly eighty cities--including Chicago, where Wilde spoke to thousands of rapt listeners.

On his return to England in 1883, Wilde set out on a lecture series recounting his American experiences. Not long after, in 1884, Wilde married the socially prominent Constance Lloyd, daughter of an Irish barrister. The couple settled in London, in a house bought with Constance's funds. Two sons followed in 1885 and 1886. To support this growing family Wilde became editor of Woman's World in 1887, supplementing that work with reviews and critical pieces on art, literature, and drama.

Now in his thirties, Wilde began to write in earnest, shifting from criticism and poetry to essays and short fiction. His collection of stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, was published in 1888 to praise from many critics, including Wilde's former mentor Walter Pater. In the next several years he published a variety of collected fiction, including The Portrait of Mr. W. H., Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, and A House of Pomegranates. Most important, though, was the appearance in 1890 of the serial version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Published in fourteen installments in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, the success of the story prompted Wilde to turn it into an extended novel in 1891.

The novel concerns a young man, Dorian Gray, who begins a life of indulgence and amorality under the influence of an older nobleman's ideas of self-gratification disguised as aesthetic theories. Dorian poses for a portrait and becomes enamored of his own beauty; he offers to exchange his soul for perpetual youth. While he pursues a life of pleasure--and eventually crime--it is the painting that shows all the ravages of time, hedonism, and depravity, leaving Dorian young and beautiful. Throughout the ensuing betrayals, suicides, blackmails, and murders, Wilde explores the motivations and implications of Dorian's double life.

The Picture of Dorian Gray shocked the critics, who were "almost unanimous in [their] condemnation of the book," as Wilde's son recalled. Despite its conventional moral ending, the press thought that the book celebrated vice and the abnormal, and objected to the undertones of homosexual relationships in the story. One reviewer criticized the book's unreal and immoral characters, while another demanded "Why go grubbing in muck-heaps?...Mr. Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten."

Nevertheless the book was embraced by the public. Having devoured it in serial form, they rushed to buy the novel. Many felt the story, and its didactic Preface, articulated Wilde's own most provocative ideas about Life and Art. In its pronouncements on art and beauty, its celebration of sensations and rejection of convention, readers saw autobiographical reflections of Wilde himself. The success of the novel established Wilde as a significant writer of prose; equally important, it led to a meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas. Beginning in 1891, Wilde and the 21-year old poet began an intimate companionship that became the talk of London society.

Having made a name for himself as a poet, a critic, and a novelist, Wilde turned to the only remaining field of composition and resumed his interrupted career as a playwright. His first dramatic success was Lady Windermere's Fan in 1892, which received mixed reviews but tremendous public acclaim. This was followed by SalomŽ, which Wilde wrote in French for leading actress Sarah Bernhardt. In the drama, Wilde retells the story of John the Baptist by focusing on SalomŽ, the daughter of Herod's chief wife. SalomŽ ends up caught between her lust for the prophet, the manipulations of her mother, and the incestuous desires of Herod. The play is lushly sensual, erotic, mysterious--the pinnacle of aesthetic decadence. When the work was banned in England, ostensibly for representing Biblical figures on stage, Wilde had it published in France and threatened to renounce his British citizenship.

Instead, the dramatist returned to the lucrative genre of society comedies, and produced A Woman of No Importance in 1893. Two years later he followed with An Ideal Husband, in 1895. The premiere was attended by the Prince of Wales, who expressed his admiration effusively to a delighted Wilde. Even the cantankerous critic and rival author George Bernard Shaw--never one of Wilde's more avid fans--praised this new play. Audiences and critics were generally more reserved in their response to An Ideal Husband, puzzled by Wilde's combination of sparkling wit with heartfelt sentiment and political suspense. Taken together, these social melodramas depict conventional moral dilemmas with a unique combination of puns, paradoxes, and playful anticlimax. The overall response proved adequate, and the commercial success of these comedies gave Wilde the security he sought to pursue his extravagant style of life, while their popularity gave him unprecedented influence as a playwright.

At the height of his literary prowess and his public career, Wilde produced The Importance of Being Earnest, generally considered one of the most brilliant comedies in the English language. In it Wilde demonstrates his mastery of the farcical conventions and his own witty wordplay, ably skewering his society and its pretensions. When it was staged in 1895, two of Wilde's other plays were running simultaneously; Earnest completed the trio with a flourish, an impressive accomplishment that promised future successes.

In the meantime, however, the scandal had been growing over Wilde's relationship with Lord Douglas, whom Wilde affectionately termed "Bosy" in rapturous letters. The young lord's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, demanded that the two men separate for good. Infuriated by their amused refusal and the public ridicule he felt he was enduring, the Marquis attempted to interrupt the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest. Stopped by a cordon of police, the irate peer instead left a bouquet of vegetables backstage. He later left a note at Wilde's club accusing him of being a "somdomite"[sic].

Denying that he had seduced Douglas, and goaded on by the young man (who hated his father and wanted to humiliate him publicly), Wilde defended himself by having Queensberry arrested for criminal libel. The case was dismissed after three days and Wilde was himself arrested and brought to trial for violating the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which prohibited "indecent relations."

During the trial, Wilde was shocked to find that his adoring public had turned violently against him. He was denied bail and kept imprisoned for several months. His name was removed from all public displays for his plays, and then the productions themselves were withdrawn (some of the actors had even refused to continue performing in them). In salons, and on the street, Wilde's demeanor and his Irish birth were mocked, his writings criticized for degeneracy, and his books withdrawn from sale. A parade of male prostitutes was brought to testify against him, and his private letters were read publicly in court.

Having once been embraced by the society he craved, Wilde now found himself shunned as an outsider--excluded by birth and behavior. Where he once was gently parodied, Wilde was now openly ridiculed. Finally, after a first mistrial, a second jury found Wilde guilty and he was sentenced to two years of hard labor. In addition to the sentence and the humiliations of the trial, Wilde was bankrupted, his assets seized to pay Queensberry's court costs. The horrible fate Wilde had envisioned in An Ideal Husband, the threatened catastrophe in the face of public scandal, had become a terrible reality.

While in prison, confined in a tiny cell, Wilde was at first kept from reading or writing. Eventually, a sympathetic warden allowed him some books and paper. Provided with only one sheet of paper at a time, prevented from reviewing or revising anything, Wilde wrote his most hauntingly personal work, De Profundis. This long prose piece, in the form of a letter to Alfred Douglas, sets out Wilde's own account of the relationship and bitterly reviews his fall from grace. It was signed not with Wilde's name but with his prison number, C. 3. 3.

After his release in 1897, disgraced and penniless, Wilde sought exile in France. His mother had died in 1896 during his prison term. His wife, who had fled to Europe with the children and taken a new name, died in 1898--though she provided her husband with money to support himself. Wilde never returned to his adopted homeland, nor did he see his family again. He was reconciled with Douglas in 1897, and the two travelled together for several months. With Douglas' help, Wilde composed his final work, the Ballad of Reading Gaol--a long poem thinly disguising his own experience as a prisoner. After great difficulty in finding a publisher for the Ballad, Wilde wrote nothing else. Prevented from receiving any profit from his writings, Wilde remained in France under an assumed name, in worsening health and surrounded by a few trusted friends, a far cry from the flamboyant society darling, the Dandy in velvet and furs.

Fulfilling a gradual trend toward religious mysticism that marked his later life, Wilde converted to Catholicism not long before his death in 1900, and was buried in Paris. Far from his both native and his adopted country, cast out by the society whose approval and approbation he deeply craved, Wilde was given a fitting epitaph from his own Ballad of Reading Gaol:

CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR WORKS

• 1878 "Ravenna" (Newdigate Prize Poem)
• 1880 Vera, or The Nihilists (play)
• 1881 Poems
• 1888 The Happy Prince and Other Tales (short story collection)
• 1889
  • "Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study" (essay)
  • "The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue" (essay)
  • "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." (essay)
• 1891
  • Intentions (essay collection)
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel)
  • Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (short story collection)
  • A House of Pomegranates (short story collection)
  • The Duchess of Padua (play)
• 1892
  • Lady Windermere's Fan (play)
  • SalomŽ (play--banned in England)
• 1893
  • A Woman of No Importance (play)
  • SalomŽ (French version)
• 1894 The Sphinx (poem)
• 1895
  • An Ideal Husband (play)
  • The Importance of Being Earnest (play)
• 1897 De Profundis (apologia)
• 1898 "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (poem)

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Wilde wrote at a supremely transitional moment, as one century ended and another began, as the Victorian era melted away into the modern age. The wireless telegraph and the radio, the Diesel engine, the first Ford auto were all among the innovations that appeared in the few years preceding the opening of An Ideal Husband. Developments in motion pictures and sound recording, including the first public film showings in New York and Paris, further marked the dawning of a new era. George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen explored means for the New Drama to encourage social and political reform. The innovations of naturalistic authors such as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and George Moore had begun to transform the novel, while H.G. Wells originated science fiction with The Time Machine in 1895.

More practical and widespread upheavals took place as well. Among these changes was increasing autonomy for women. Wilde approved of the increasingly public role of Victorian women. In The Woman's World, a magazine that he edited between 1887-1889, Wilde championed women's involvement in politics. He insisted that "The cultivation of separate sorts of virtues and separate ideals in men and women has led to the whole social fabric being weaker and unhealthier than it need be." In many ways, Lady Chiltern in An Ideal Husband reflects the typical Victorian "New Woman." She is both virtuous and involved in public matters, such as her pursuit of suffrage and her involvement with her husband's political career. Yet, while Ibsen and Shaw have often been criticized for representing the New Woman as rigid and masculine in their plays, Wilde softens the figure, allowing her strength to unite with the capacity for forgiveness and values the Victorians associated with femininity.

At the same time, England's empire was being successfully challenged in the Boer War in South Africa. Beginning with the spread of evolutionary theories based on Darwin and Spencer, religious and social convictions were threatened by new scientific principles, rising disbelief or skepticism, and the growth of various nonconformist sects outside the established Church of England--many of them with a focus on the Occult. Anarchists and Nihilists challenged any and all governmental strictures, while the newly formed Labour Party complicated Parliamentary politics. Socialists (including Shaw) and Radicals clamored for change while deep unemployment, grinding poverty, and a lengthy depression generated revolutionary ferment among the lower classes. Recognizing the chasm separating the classes as well as the momentous changes at work, a widespread sense of unrest beset the comfortable bourgeois lives of the Victorian English. Wilde's Lady Bracknell reflects this unease--and its repercussions in art and literature--when she deplores current social laxity as reflecting "the worst excesses of the French Revolution."

Aestheticism and the Dandy

Excess characterized a decade variously known as the "Yellow Nineties," the "Naughty Nineties" and a variety of other epithets reflecting decay and scandal. One of the strongest reactions to the unease of the fin-de-siŽcle Nineties was the growth of the Aesthetic movement, epitomized by Oscar Wilde himself but with its roots in earlier Dandyism and Decadence. It is this figure, a lightly disguised version of himself, that Wilde introduces into An Ideal Husband as the outwardly careless, effortlessly charming Lord Goring.

The figure of the Dandy dated back to the early nineteenth century and the fashionable English playboy Beau Brummel, but it had been kept alive in England and nurtured among bohemian artists in Paris. Celebrated in several essays by the French poet Baudelaire in the 1860s, the Dandy evolved into a subversive symbol of exaggeration, personal and moral liberty, and the art of pretence. Wilde himself defined Dandyism as "the assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty." He wrote that in treating art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction," in living for the pleasures of "senseless and sensual ease," he was "being a fl‰neur, a dandy, a man of fashion."

Decadence grew out of English imitations of French artists' and writers' visions of artistic autonomy from the restrictions of society. Modelled especially on the ideas of Baudelaire and his contemporaries, Decadence emerged in England in the 1860s with the writing of Algernon Swinburne. It flaunted the pursuit of forbidden experiences--from homosexuality to hashish--while asserting the superiority of artifice over Nature. One was expected to be irresponsible, witty, cynical, artificial, and languorous, while always exhibiting astonishing superiority in style and dress.

As symbolized and led by Wilde, Aestheticism was a rebellious vision in conflict with the somber respectability of Victorian ideals and moral strictures. A wide variety of artists, writers, and thinkers contributed to the Aesthetic creed. These included designer William Morris; painter James McNeill Whistler; poets Algernon Swinburne, Ernest Dowson, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; critics Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm; and scholars John Ruskin and Walter Pater. The literary magazine Yellow Book, with its drawings by Aubrey Beardsley (who also caused a stir with licentious illustrations for Wilde's SalomŽ) seemed particularly to capture the movement's beliefs and style. These rejected the conventional belief that art must be morally uplifting or socially useful.

Wilde's own life and writing followed the Aesthetic ideal that "Art must be loved for its own sake, and not criticized by a standard of morality." He insisted that "in art there should be no reference to a standard of good and evil." The only standard was Beauty, and that a beauty of artifice. The movement venerated individual freedoms and modernity, and despite an obsession with social forms seemed compelled to challenge and subvert that same society and its rules.

In order to characterize the players in An Ideal Husband, Wilde often likens them to art works. He describes Mrs. Marchmont and Lady Basildon, two pretty women who attend Lord and Lady Chiltern's party, as "fragile" and having "delicate charm" like women in a Watteau painting. Lord Caversham is like "a portrait by Lawrence" and Mabel Chiltern is "like a Tanagra statuette." In both cases, the character's demeanor--as a stuffy Whig or as an innocent beauty, respectively--is conveyed through Wilde's reference to art. A fitting choice of images for a man whose professional writing career began as an art reviewer.

The Uranians

One of the most profound challenges to the rules and conventions of Victorian society that emerged as part of the "Yellow Nineties" was the visible subculture of homosexuality, in which Wilde would play a leading part--first as a highly visible public figure, then as an articulate apologist for the "love that dare not speak its name", and finally as its best-known martyr. Given the name Uranism by the German writer Karl Ulrichs between 1864 and 1879, the specifically social phenomenon of homosexuality was only gradually gaining recognition in the Nineties. Closely connected with the rise of the Aesthetics and the Decadents, the growth of an established and flourishing homosexual subculture produced a brief period of seeming acceptance--soon followed by a broad repressive reaction. Both events had a profound influence on the writing and eventual reception of An Ideal Husband.

In the early 1890s, Uranians experienced a brief span of openness and apparent assimilation. Respected author Havelock Ellis researched and wrote a sympathetic study of homosexuality defending it from charges of degeneracy. Many leading figures of the Aesthetic movement in England and France openly flaunted convention, among them AndrŽ Gibe, John Addington Symonds, and Robert de Montesquiou. Wilde himself, though married, developed a passionate public relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and frequently took various young men to dinner or cafŽs (this in addition to more secretive encounters with "renters," the male prostitutes and soldiers-for-hire who frequented London's lower depths). At the opening nights of his plays Wilde openly wore a green carnation, the symbol not merely of the Decadents but of Uranians in particular. He layered his final two plays with references obscure and obvious to his bisexual life, as if challenging his peers to accept his life, while also courting disaster.

For, despite any apparent spread of acceptance, such challenges to social conventions--open or veiled--were still not without risk. Though homosexuality had ceased to be a capital offense in England in 1861, it remained a serious crime. When Wilde was arrested in 1895, he was sentenced to jail for "gross indecency," convicted in part by his own writings and his public and private behavior. A simultaneous backlash appeared in society at large. Contemporary accounts claim that as many as 600 gentlemen fled to France in the wake of Wilde's conviction, fearing prosecution or blackmail over their past lifestyles.

Wilde and Victorian Theater

The popular theater of the Nineties consisted of fashionable Society dramas, farces, and romantic melodramas. They all emerged out of the influence of the French dramatists Scribe and Sardou and the tradition of the "well-made play," which emphasized craftsmanship over content, formula over originality. These plays used a few standard elements, stock characters and situations, to present conventional themes emphasizing bourgeois morality. Sentimental heroines, ingenuous young bachelors, scheming servants, harsh parents, foolish aristocrats, and women with a past were the familiar characters. These would struggle against such obstacles as jealous misunderstandings, lost identities, compromising letters, disguises, hopeless love, and betrayal of affections. Audiences could count on the well-made play to offer similar figures in familiar situations. They expected surprising complications and crises to build to a climactic resolution that reaffirmed social and moral values (which included the double standard punishing adultery by women but allowing dalliance by men).

The theater of the Nineties offered considerable financial rewards, social prominence, even a means for intellectual expression. These factors combined to make playwriting particularly attractive to Wilde in 1892, when he produced his first successful play. While his earlier plays absorb and mirror the older conventions, Wilde's final plays began to respond to their contexts in a different way. By outwardly imitating classical farce as well as the endlessly repeated structures and mechanics of the countless Victorian farces, French comedies, and middle-class melodramas that were the staple of the period's stages, Wilde lulled his audience into a feeling of comfortable recognition. He then overturned these with his paradoxes, epigrams, twists of language, and inversions of expectations. In part through reversal and in part by taking ideas and situation to their literal, logical extremes, Wilde mocked and parodied the primary themes of Victorian literature and drama: loyalty, sacrifice, undying love, social status and respectability, manners, and others. As critic Peter Raby notes, Wilde consistently adopts the central standards of his society, "deliberately echoes...the patterns and conventions of romantic comedy" and the craze for the well-made play; then uses farce to make "fundamentally serious explorations in the realm of the irrational."

In this, Wilde acted in concert with other theatrical developments of his time, especially the innovations of Shaw and Ibsen. Less obviously and less aggressively than the works of the revolutionary titans, The An Ideal Husband tears itself away from tradition and sets out in a new direction. At the same time, the play remains firmly linked to the influences and traditions that shaped it. As much as Lord Goring may mock marriage and any serious social institutions, he also emerges as their most ardent defender. The play's suspenseful melodrama works to arouse our support for the conventional romantic structure, employing all the features of the well-made play.

Wilde and the Victorian Marriage

Wilde's background clearly affected his portrait of marriage in An Ideal Husband. His parents seem to have had a relatively happy relationship, in spite of what Dubliners noted as some of the peculiarities of this very public couple. Whatever the state of their married bliss, however, the Wilde's were--like Sir Chiltern and Lady Chiltern--faced with a scandal from Sir William's past that would challenge the strength of their marriage. In 1864, it came to light that years earlier Wilde's father had been accused of drugging and raping a young female patient. When Lady Wilde denied the charges in a letter, the patient sued her for libel. During the trial, Lady Wilde was asked her opinion of her husband's misdeed. She replied, "I really took no interest in the matter. I looked upon the whole thing as a fabrication." The jury upheld the charge of libel, but Sir Wilde's career and reputation were relatively unaffected.

During their youth, Lady Wilde had urged both of her sons to marry heiresses to support their careers as artists and intellectuals. Among Oscar's early candidates for marriage were Florence Balcombe, who eventually married Bram Stoker, and the actress Lillie Langtry. After being refused by two other women, Wilde married Constance Lloyd in 1884. She had a moderate fortune, and the early months of their union appeared to be happy. But soon after they married, Lloyd gave birth to two sons in rapid succession, which repulsed Wilde and contributed to his discontent with the marriage.

Soon after these births, he began once again to become involved with men. In his absence, Constance turned her attention to raising her sons, to writing children's books, and to political causes. Her success as a public speaker was such that the Pall Mall Gazette noted that at the 1889 Women's Liberal Foundation conference, "Mrs. Wilde has become one of the most popular of the 'platform ladies.'" After Wilde's libel trial, Constance was left with a husband in jail, her children abroad to avoid the publicity of the trial, a disgraced family name, and little money. Constance did not divorce her husband; however, she did change her surname and that of her children to 'Holland." Wilde did in fact neglect his wife and children, but after his expulsion from England, he began to fantasize of returning to the life of husband and father. Apparently, the structure of marriage held great appeal for him. Constance died of spinal paralysis in 1898, two years before Wilde.

SYNOPSIS

During the party, Mrs. Cheveley, a former schoolmate of Lady Chiltern, attempts to blackmail Sir Robert in order to drive him to support a fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina, much like the Suez Canal in Egypt. Apparently, Mrs. Cheveley's friend Baron Arnheim had profited when Sir Robert had sold him a Cabinet secret which suggested that he buy stocks in the Suez Canal three days before the British government announced its purchase. Sir Robert made his fortune with that money, and Mrs. Cheveley has the letter to prove his dishonor. In the face of this blackmail, Sir Robert not only fears the loss of his status in the House of Lords, but also fears the loss of his wife. He promises to withdraw his support. When Lady Chiltern discovers this, she insists that he write Mrs. Cheveley and renege on his promise to her.

In the second act, Lord Goring, a close friend of both Lord and Lady Chiltern, urges Sir Robert to fight Mrs. Cheveley. Here, too, Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert's younger sister, and Lord Goring engage in flirtatious banter. After Lord Goring leaves, Mrs. Cheveley returns to ask if Lady Chiltern has found a brooch which she had lost the previous evening. At this moment, Sir Robert enters and is forced to share his misdeed with his wife. Lady Chiltern then denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him.

In the third act, set at Lord Goring's home, Lord Goring receives a letter from Lady Chiltern, a letter that asks for his help and might be read as compromising. Lord Goring's father, Lord Caversham, drops in and demands to know when his son will marry. This visit is followed by one from Sir Robert, who seeks counsel from Lord Goring. Meanwhile, Mrs. Cheveley awaits Lord Goring in his study. While she waits, she finds Lady Chiltern's letter. When she and Lord Goring meet, he offers to exchange the brooch, which she had stolen, for the letter that incriminated Sir Robert. After he obtains the letter, Mrs. Cheveley then steals Lady Chiltern's letter and announces that she will send it to Sir Robert. She then leaves.

In the final act, Lord Goring proposes to and is accepted by Mabel Chiltern. It is announced that Sir Robert has denounced the Argentine canal scheme before the House. Then, Lady Chiltern enters and is told by Lord Goring that Sir Robert's letter has been destroyed, but that Mrs. Cheveley has stolen her letter. At that moment, Sir Robert enters and announces he has received Lady Chiltern's letter, but he has mistaken it for a letter of forgiveness written for him. Lady Chiltern attempts to drive Sir Robert to renounce his career in politics, but Lord Goring dissuades her from doing so. When Sir Robert refuses Lord Goring his sister's hand in marriage, Lady Chiltern is forced to admit that the letter had been from her. Sir Robert forgives her, and they are reunited. And Lord Goring and Mabel can be wed.

SOURCES

Clearly such a strong denial must be ignored. Frank Harris, Wilde's friend and biographer, asserts that he told Wilde the story that inspired An Ideal Husband. Harris claims that an American he knew from Cairo had suggested that Disraeli had made his money by entrusting the Rothchilds with the purchase of the Suez Canal. According to Harris, Wilde admitted this tale, apocryphal or not, had inspired the play.

More likely and directly, several troubling events in his life may have provided Wilde with further inspiration for An Ideal Husband. In the play, Sir Robert Chiltern sells his state secret at age twenty-two and then at age forty is called to account for that behavior. Wilde chronicler Richard Ellman points out that this timing reflects Wilde's own life in that he contracted syphilis at Oxford at age twenty-two and at age forty wrote this play. As Ellman says, "Like murder, disease will out."

Another local source of inspiration for the play may have been an attempt at blackmail aimed at Wilde in 1893. Douglas had given a suit of clothes to his friend Alfred Wood, who discovered a love letter written by Wilde for Douglas in the suit's pocket. Wood presented the letter to Wilde and demanded money for its return, but Wilde brushed the attempted blackmail aside and in fact invited Wood to dinner. But Wood had also given a copy of the letter to two professional blackmailers who then sent another copy of the letter to Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket Theatre. Tree was in the process of staging Wilde's A Woman of No Importance and warned Wilde to be more careful. Ultimately Wilde refused to pay the blackmailers the sum they demanded. In fact, he told them he was delighted that they wanted to publish it because it was "an extremely beautiful letter and I am glad to find there is someone in England willing to pay so large a sum for work of mine." The would-be criminals took a small fee and went on their way.

However, the danger of blackmail reflected the threat of scandal and worse that hung over Wilde for his homosexual affairs--one of which had struck close to home as he worked on An Ideal Husband. In October, 1894, the elder brother of Wilde's lover Alfred Douglas died in an apparent hunting accident in Somerset, killed by his own shotgun. Speculation in the family, however, suggested that the deceased, heir to the Marquis of Queensberry and a junior minister in the government, had been implicated in an affair with his superior, Lord Rosebery, and so took his own life. Wilde commented on the effect the death had on Douglas, and may well have explored the idea further in crafting his play--lending richness and complexity to his usual deft banter.

An Ideal Husband also reworks a number of characters that appear in other Wilde plays, each of whom in turn owed much to theatrical predecessors. Mrs. Cheveley is an adventuress like Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere's Fan; Lady Chiltern behaves in puritanical ways much like Lady Windermere; Lord Goring resembles the clever dandy Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance; and Mabel acts much like Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest.

More than these passing resemblances, however, the play's strongest relationship to source material was structural. Unlike the nearly simultaneous Importance of Being Earnest, whose roots lay in Greek New Comedy and Shakespeare's romantic comedies, An Ideal Husband was written in imitation of the potboiler melodramas so popular on the London stage in Wilde's day. The husband with a guilty secret, the "other" woman who comes between a loving couple, the incriminating piece of evidence: these were all staples of the period and its well-made plays. Both Ibsen and Shaw similarly draw on these sources to provide the framework for a number of plays, and Wilde in this instance does the same. Never unthinkingly and certainly not slavishly, yet the parallels and the debts are evident.

PRODUCTION HISTORY

In the summer of 1893, Wilde originated the idea for An Ideal Husband while staying at a cottage on the Thames at Goring, the locale which obviously provided the name for the play's Lord Goring. On January 3, 1895, An Ideal Husband premiered at London's Haymarket Theatre. Lewis Waller, the manager of the Haymarket, played Sir Chiltern. Lady Chiltern was played by Julia Neilson; Lord Goring, by Charles H. Hawtrey; and Mrs. Cheveley, by Florence West.

The play was an unqualified success; even the staid Punch allowed that it was "an interesting play up to the end of the third act." George Bernard Shaw, who had just become the drama critic for the Saturday Review wrote, "In a certain sense, Mr. Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre. Such a feat scandalizes the Englishman, who can no more play with wit and philosophy than he can with a football or a cricket bat." Henry James, whose play Guy Domville opened that same night in London, irritably pronounced the play "crude, clumsy, feeble and vulgar," but stood alone in his opinion. Two months later, The Importance of Being Earnest would replace James's commercially unsuccessful play at the St. James Theatre.

When a few months later Wilde went on trial for perjury and sexual offenses, his name was removed from the plays' billings. Despite the fact that both An Ideal Husband and Earnest continued to draw large audiences, most of whom came because of Oscar Wilde, the actors and producers decided to close both plays. In the spring of 1895, An Ideal Husband had also opened in New York at the renowned Lyceum Theater, to the usual acclaim and delight. Upon hearing of Wilde's conviction, this theater too removed his name from the bills and programs and soon closed the show. In addition, the actress Rose Coghlan, who had been performing in Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, pronounced that she was removing Wilde's work from her repertoire entirely.

In reaction to the scandal surrounding Wilde, An Ideal Husband was not published until 1899. Even then, according to the terms of his sentence, Wilde could receive no financial benefit from the publication. In the end, An Ideal Husband would prove to be the least commercially successful of the four plays produced during Wilde's lifetime, earning him just enough money to take a long vacation in Algiers with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, where he squandered most of this revenue.

Since its premiere, An Ideal Husband has only rarely been produced. Long tainted by the stigma of having been closed because of the trial, the work was also a perplexing mixture of styles. Neither exclusively the careless banter and witty repartee of Earnest nor so clearly a sentimental well-made melodrama, the piece balances its mannered comedy with a poignant look at marriage, trust, and moral compromise. Noted film-maker Sir Alexander Korda directed a movie of the work in 1947, featuring Glynis Johns, Constance Collier, Michael Wilding, and a host of popular character actors. With costumes by the glamorous Cecil Beaton and Paulette Goddard as the manipulative Mrs. Cheveley, the film focused on the play's sexual maneuvering, with Korda's usual visual extravagance to set its mood. A decade earlier, German director Herbert Selpin had filmed the work, as Ein Idealer Gatte, with a German cast that included "Metropolis" star Brigitte Helm. In a more recent celluloid incarnation, prolific Russian director Viktor Georgiyev put Wilde's play on film again in a 1980 Soviet movie called Idealny muzh. Yet these did little to advance the popularity of the play or to capture the public's imagination.

However, in 1992, Peter Hall staged an immensely successful production of An Ideal Husband at London's Globe Theatre. This same production was revived briefly in 1996 at the Haymarket, the theater where the first run of the play had appeared 101 years earlier. Hall's production, was noted above all for its dark pessimism. Seeing it, for instance, convinced Richard Eyre, who succeeded Hall as the director of the Royal National Theatre, that An Ideal Husband was a better play than Earnest. Eyre said, "He made me feel as if I'd underestimated it," by finding in it a substance not hitherto associated either with this melodrama or with Wilde the playwright.

In particular, Hall focused his direction on "Wilde's scathing though ultimately forgiving critique of hypocrisy, of suave Victorian aristocrats who know the worst crime is to be found out, and who set their hearts on money." (Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard). This idea was reinforced by Carl Toms's set, which stressed the link between money and respectability by hanging a huge golden coin down between act breaks. The audience could then see the huge face of Queen Victoria on this coin, which stressed both the moralistic values of the Victorian age and the link of those values to hard cash. When the play appeared at the Globe, the cast held David Yelland as Lord Chiltern, Hannah Gordon as Lady Chiltern, Martin Shaw as Lord Goring, and Anna Carteret as Mrs. Cheveley. Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, a married couple with a long history in theater, played the Earl of Caversham and Lady Markby. When the play was revived at the Haymarket, Penny Downie took on the role of Lady Chiltern, in a production that was "even better the second time around" (Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph).

Hall's production of An Ideal Husband was restaged in New York in 1996 at Broadway's Barrymore Theater. The New York Times raved that this "gleaming production celebrates not only itself, the genius of Wilde and the strengths of the contemporary English theater but also the potential vitality of Broadway." John Simon insisted that Hall's direction and its "exquisite seamlessness" drew out the play's strengths of wisdom and a "vast, forgiving kindness for the fallible and peccant human race, a wit that--amazingly-- always manages to skirt malice." The often-acerbic New York critics trumpeted their pleasure at the nuanced production, the "flawless" cast, and the suddenly recognizable excellence of the play itself, writing "Peter Hall's staging is delightful, humanizing such parts as need it, and playing volleyball with the rest...I could go on at length but prefer to let you reel for yourselves from enchanting surprise to surprise." (New York Magazine).

Prior to Hall's revival, a "crisp" production was staged in San Diego at Lamb's Theater in 1990 and another at the Park Square Theater in Minneapolis in 1992. Prompted in part by the reception given Hall's revival and the new attention it won for this play, a veritable torrent of productions has poured forth on both sides of the Atlantic. One revival in Houston, mounted in 1996, made the play feel "as timely as today's headlines;" critics felt the audience might marvel that it "was written 100 years ago, not during this year's election," though the production was scrupulously period. Another recent production, at the Washington Stage Guild, offered a "sunny" and "stylish" production of the play, in contrast with the darkness and ambiguity that characterized Hall's production.

Of more significance, An Ideal Husband was presented at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in 1995 in another noted revival. Directed by opera director Stephen Wadsworth, the production was a spectacular triumph and did much to help restore the play's reputation. The overriding response was surprise at how delightful and contemporary the play appeared in production. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Steven Winn noted that the play was both "glittering" and "prescient." The "superb" production gave the play "a voluptuous austerity that penetrates the Victorian era and mindset so completely that" audiences experienced it as their own.

Elegant figures in lavish evening clothes moved about on an opulent setting that reinforced the thematic weight of the staging: two monumental wooden doors gave way to the "opalescent glass of a bachelor's quarters," while the whole stage was dominated not by the image of love Wilde called for but rather by a massive painting of a Napoleonic cavalryman astride his horse. Images of battle, secrecy, and shadowy access pervaded the production, which was carefully scored to selections of the music of Sir Edward Elgar. As the music played, Wadsworth had his actors linger pensively on stage; at other times, witty lines and jokes were tossed off or away entirely--all, as the Examiner critic noted, in order to force the audience to experience the play's exploration of "the essential human need for love and charity."

Quite obviously, Wilde's play has at last been given the recognition it was denied at birth. Revivals have begun to explore a variety of approaches to the work; directors and audiences alike have found in it strikingly topical concerns--from politics to marriage, little has changed in a century--and a surprising depth of feeling beneath the customary crispness of Wilde's wicked wit.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

"Pray do not take out a single word."
H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, upon seeing the premiere, which Wilde considered cutting.

Mr. Wilde's new play...is a dangerous subject, because he has the property of making his critics dull....In a certain sense, Mr. Wilde is to me our thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theater.
George Bernard Shaw, review of An Ideal Husband, The Saturday Review , 1895.

[An Ideal Husband] is brilliant...we doubt not that the play will be successful, it is so smart and so characteristic of its author...when the play was over the applause was hearty...
Review in London Daily Telegraph of the original production, 1895.

The cumulative effect of language and action is to function as a subversive critique of Victorian attitudes and institutions, all the more telling for being so lightly elegant in expression. It is the hypocrisy of society that Wilde aims at, for instance the notion that marriage is an ideal state.
-Peter Raby, Oscar Wilde, 1988.

Wilde's taut, funny and prodigiously smart 1895 comedy of political manners deals with the sort of situation...that might turn up on tomorrow's evening news. Wilde twines parliamentary politics and marital politics together in a glittering, prescient work....An Ideal Husband is the ultimate backroom political play--[in it] Wilde examines political careers and marriages in the same penetrating light. Both...are compounded of accident, deception, and bravery.
-Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 1995.

An ideal husband Oscar Wilde most emphatically was not. So accustomed was this syphilitic bisexual to the best of both worlds that his cautionary comedy An Ideal Husband managed to celebrate family values while simultaneously mocking the moralisers.
Maureen Paton, London Daily Express, 1996.

If this production is a golden treat, it is also a harsh expose of late-Victorian political corruption that can address itself quite without inhibition to the glorious 1990's, the golden decade of sleaze.
John Peter, London Sunday Times, 1996.

OSCARISMS

• To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
• Time is a waste of money.
• There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
• Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
• Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.
• Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.
• Most women are so artificial that they have no sense of Art. Most men are so natural that they have no sense of Beauty.
• Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
• Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious; both are disappointed.
• London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so very unhappy.
• Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
• In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.
• If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
• The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.
• When good Americans die, they go to Paris.
  When bad Americans die, they go to America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY