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When An Ideal
Husband premiered in the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in London on 3rd January 1895, Oscar Wilde himself became the focus for public attention and comment, just as much attention as was being paid to his new play. In particular, newspaper reports highlighted his elegant, paradoxical curtain-call speech at the end of the first performance. The London Correspondent for The Freeman’s
Journal, writing on 27th
May 1895 after the disastrous conclusion of Wilde’s trial in the Old Bailey, recalled this moment of triumph in the Theatre Royal, ‘Some
months ago I saw Oscar Wilde
at the
first night of ‘An Ideal Husband’.
He
was then
in the
zenith
of his fame…Wilde
himself
was in a stage
box, being
flattered
and lionized
by a party of most distinguished
persons
– men
and women
whose
praise
he
condescendingly
accepted.
He
was dressed
in a last note
of fashion, faultlessly
groomed
and assuming airs of semi-royal
graciousness
to an admiring audience.
He
strutted
in from the
wings with an air of contemptuous
indifference,
one
hand in his trouser
pocket,
an opera
hat in his other….
The
object
of this ovation responded
with a shrug of the
shoulders
suggesting
a feeling
of deprecatory
boredom.
When
silence
had been
restored,
he
drawled
out a few
words of studied
insolence
and retired’.
As a drama, An Ideal
Husband was already being interpreted in light of Wilde’s own public persona, this polished and sardonic observer of Britain’s political and moral climate. His fellow-Irishman and fellow-dramatist George Bernard Shaw shared that sense of shrewd distance that only an outsider could bring to bear on London society. Writing about An Ideal Husband for The
Saturday Review, Shaw called Wilde, ‘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 scandalises the Englishman, who can no more play with wit and philosophy than he can with a football or a cricket bat’. Within months, revelations about Wilde’s hidden sexual life scandalised Englishmen even further. The plot of An Ideal
Husband twists and turns on
dangerous letters, lost and found and then used to threaten blackmail. Wilde’s own conviction was, partly, on the basis of dangerous and revealing letters used for blackmail. As a result of damaging secret letters, Wilde was to lose his home, his family and his liberty and his reputation and, as Neil Bartlett writes in his study of Wilde ‘Who was that
Man’, ‘After 25 May 1895 (“Guilty”) Wilde could no longer pass. Everyone knew that Oscar was a forgery, a fake. He was not what he had appeared to be. It was no defence that he himself had never claimed to be anything other than both forger and forgery.’ In The Freeman’s
Journal account of Wilde, we get this sense of a dramatic fall from grace, this demonising of a once-revered celebrity, ‘I saw Oscar Wilde
on Friday last in the
dock of the
Old Bailey
and a more
shocking contrast could not possibly be
conceived.
The
aspect
of sleek,
well-fed
luxuriousness
had vanished,
the
cheeks
were
lined
and flabby, and wore
a most unearthly
colour. His eyes
were
bloodshot and expressive
of the
last stage
of acute
terror;
the
eyes
of a man who might at any time
get
a fatal seizure
from overstrain.
His hair was all in disorder
and he
crouched
into a corner
of the
dock with his face
turned
towards the
jury and the
witness
box, his head
resting
on his hand so that it was almost hid from the
public….The
general
impression
he
conveyed
was of a man filled
with a vague
hopeless
terror,
not of one
filled
with shame
at the
dreadful
ignominy of his position.’ Wilde
had written
in The Soul of Man under Socialism of
‘that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called
public opinion’ and, furthermore,
had a realistic
insight into the
fickleness
of theatrical
acclaim. In 1894 he wrote to a friend in tones of grim realism, ‘As for ‘success’ on the stage, the public is a monster of strange appetites: it swallows, so it seems to me, honeycake and hellebore with avidity’. Thus, as he might have guessed himself in the wake of his arrest and imprisonment, Wilde became infamous, his writings condemned and his name a by-word for a hidden, criminalised sexuality. It is only in the past half-century or so that we have rehabilitated and reclaimed Wilde so completely that his plays and his writings can be staged in light of our own imaginative preoccupations. In a way, Wilde has now become our contemporary. For example, we can see that An Ideal Husband
debates
and queries
notions of honour and probity in public life
in ways that make
the
play seem
very
immediate.
At an early
point in the
drama, Sir Robert Chiltern tells his wife that, ‘…public and private life are different things. They have different laws, and move on different lines’ but the high-principled, even puritanical, Lady Chiltern is inflexible in her retort that: ‘They should both represent man at his highest. I see no difference between them’. From this point onwards, the play can be seen as a progressive deconstruction of such inflexibility, a plea for compassion and understanding around public scandal. Despite his foppish exterior, Lord Goring is the enlightened and tolerant moral centre of the play. He tells his politically-minded father Lord Caversham that ‘I don’t like principles, Father, I prefer prejudices’. The play deals with tricky negotiations between private scandal and public life and illustrates the differing codes of judgement in behaviour for women and men. The notorious and worldly Mrs Cheveley declares that ‘Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man – Now they crush him’.
No such charm is lent to scandalous women. When political and personal worlds intertwine in this play, and sometimes threaten to collide, the message is that, ultimately, the political must accommodate the personal. Overall, Wilde subverts the word ‘Ideal’ and in this, as in much else, he delights in his own subversion.
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