BRITISH Drama Prof. Berzoug
Aperçu des semaines
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Course contents
The Quem Quaeritis Trope The Cycles
Morality Plays
Course objectives;
This course aims to introduce students to the early beginnings of a dramatic form a British society still ruled by religious Church control.
The empty grave occurs in a tiny performance or play called « trope » by the 9th c AD into some portions of the easter Mass of the Roman Catholic Church and dramatically spoken by the Angels and the three Marys.
This miniature drama was the beginning of a series of liturgical plays performed during religious holidays.
• Who are you looking for in the sepulchre, o Christians?
• The crucified Jesus of Nazareth, o Celestials
• He is not here, he has arisen as he said he would
• Go and announce that he has arisen from the sepulchre
• I have risen
The Christians refer to the three Marys: the Virgin Mary: Mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene: follower of Jesus, and Mary sister of Lazarus.
This form of Liturgical plays had given rise to Mysteries and Morality plays.
• Mystery refers to the spiritual mystery of Christ’s redemption and according to some scholars it has to do with the ministry (meaning handicraft) since these plays were commonly acted out by various crafts (the masons for Noah)
• The attempt at an encyclopeadic dramatization of the Old and New Testament resulted in the creation of cycles, a series of plays acting out biblical stories during corpus Christi festivals
The Cycles:
Chester 25 episodes
York 48 episodes
N. Town 42 episodes
Wakefield 32 episodes
Fall of Lucifer
Creation of Angels
Cain and Abel
Fall of Lucifer
Coming of the Magi Herod
Fall of Man
Noah and the Flood
Creation of Adam and Eve
Purification of the Virgin
Expulsion from Eden
Conception of the Virgin
Raising of Lazarus
Last Judgement
Adoration of the shepherds
Moses (Ten commandments)
Flight into Egypt
Morality Plays
• Morality plays typically contain a protagonist who represents either humanity as a whole or a smaller social structure. Supporting characters are personifications of good and evil. This alignment of characters provides the play’s audience with moral guidance. Morality plays are the result of the dominant belief of the time period, that humans had a certain amount of control over their post-death fate while they were on earth
• In Everyman, perhaps the archetypal morality play, the characters take on the common pattern, representing broader ideas. Some of the characters in Everyman are God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. The personified meanings of these characters are hardly hidden. The premise of Everyman is that God, believing that the people on earth are too focused on wealth and worldly possessions, sends Death to Everyman to remind him of God's power and the importance of upholding values.
Writing activity: Choose personifications of good and evil from your imagination, give them names, and write an intriguing introduction to a morality drama.
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Course Contents
Introduction Important Themes
Humour and the Comedy of Humours Revenge
The Supernatural in Elizabethan Dama
Course objectives:
This course introduces students to the major characteristics of Elizabethan drama so that they can read and analyze plays by Elizabethan dramatists.
Introduction
The simple definition of Elizabethan theatre and drama is that it is drama written during the reign of Elizabeth I, but that is absurdly simplistic: Elizabethan drama is much more than that. Some of the most well-known plays in Western drama date from the Elizabethan period. Although it is widely agreed that the period began in 1558 with the start of Queen Elizabeth I's reign, the end date is less certain. Some historians believe Elizabethan Drama ceased with the queen's death in 1603, while others believe it finished with the shutting of the theaters in 1642.
Elizabeth I was a strong, steadfast monarch who brought England back to Protestantism, put an end to much internal strife, and brought the country together. She was also a strong patron of the arts, which resulted in a spike in theater activities. Some writers were able to make a decent life under her reign.
• Antisemitism: Hatred of Jews prevailed in Elizabethan society and is reflected in plays of the period. Two examples of anti-Semitic plays are Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In Marlowe's play, Barabas, the Jew of Malta, is a cruel, egotistic, and greedy
• Disguise: Disguise is a device that is used frequently by characters in Elizabethan plays. It is a way in which characters gain information that would be otherwise withheld from them. For example, in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Rosalind discovers that her true love, Orlando, is indeed in love with her while she is disguised as a boy.
Humours and the Comedy of Humours
• Humours: Elizabethan psychology was based on the theory of four bodily humours— blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Proper physical and mental health supposedly depended upon a proper balance among these fluids. A particular emotion or mood was associated with each, and it was believed that if a person had too much of one humour in his body, that particular emotion would be emphasized. With the production of Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, a new species of comedy devoted solely to the interplay of these elements was created, known as the "comedy of humours." The humours were prevalent forces in the tragedies as well. Hamlet is described as the "melancholy Dane," thus implying that he has too much black bile, which would make him tend to be depressed.
• Organized around the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire; the four qualities of cold, hot, moist, and dry; and the four humors, these physical qualities determined the behavior of all created things including the human body.
The four humours
“The Human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated in the body and not mixed with others.” On the Nature of Man by Hippocrates
“ The mind’s inclinations follow the body’s temprature” by Galen
• The comedy of humours is a genre of dramatic comedy that focuses on a character or range of characters, each of whom exhibits two or more overriding traits or 'humours' that dominates their personality, desires and conduct. Ben Jonson and George Chapman popularized the genre in the closing years of the sixteenth century.
• The comedy of humours owes something to earlier vernacular comedy but more to a desire to imitate the classical comedy of Plautus and Terence and to combat the vogue of romantic comedy, as developed by William Shakespeare.
• In his Introduction to Every Man out of His Humour (1599) Jonson explains his character-formula thus:
Some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way.
• Revenge is one of the most prevalent themes in Elizabethan drama. In the plays, it is often motivated by the visitation of a ghost who delivers the story of his murder to the character who must now become the avenger. Such is the case in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, as the Ghost of Don Andrea recounts his death, calls for revenge, and then sits onstage to watch his enemies meet their fate. Revenge is also the motivator in Hamlet, as the Prince of Denmark vows to avenge his father's murder.
• “what elizabethans liked in Seneca he represents not only pagan and thus subversive mythological tales in rivalry with christian order but epitomizes everything that was feared in England after the civil war of the roses: chaos, disorder, perverse cruelty for its own sake, butchery and most importantly the ritualistic dissection and dismemebering of the body.”
The supernatural in Elizabethan drama
• In Elizabethan times, people were very superstitious, and many people believed in the supernatural. Queen Elizabeth I had a personal astrologer whom she would consult regularly, and, as Diane Yancey notes, "Almost every village had an old woman who could be persuaded to cast a spell to protect cattle from illness or keep one's lover faithful and true." Given this context, it is not surprising that supernatural elements are found in many Elizabethan plays. Fairies, ghosts, and witches often figure prominently in the action. Ghosts are very important in revenge tragedies and are often used as a catalyst for the action. Several Elizabethan plays contain a ghost who recounts his own murder, thus beginning a cycle of revenge. Such is the case in Shakespeare's Hamlet and in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Sprites and fairies were also popular characters of the time. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is populated with fantastical creatures.
Pair Work activity: Exploring Shakespeare's Hamlet
Read Hamlet by Shakespeare then watch the video performance in the link and answer the following questions
1. Did the production look like what you imagined as you read the play?
2. Which actor/ actress best portrayed his role? why?
3. Write a dialogue that might take place between Hamlet and a psychologist at one of these stages of his psychological turmoil:
a. when he learn of his mother's marriage to his uncle
b. When he first saw his father's ghost for the first time
c. After killing Polonius
d. After Ophelia's funeral
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Course Contents:
Who is Christopher Marlowe? His Major Works
The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus
Course Objectives:
This course will enable students to understand the Elizabethan period and the dramatic structure of this period through the outstanding tragedy of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare's most important forerunner in English play, was born on February 26, 1564, in Canterbury, Kent, England, and died on May 30, 1593, in Deptford, near London. He is best known for establishing theatrical blank verse. John Marlowe, a Canterbury shoemaker, had two children, the elder of whom was Marlowe.
Nothing is known about his early education, but on January 14, 1579, he enrolled as a scholar at Canterbury's King's School. A year later, he enrolled at Cambridge's Corpus Christi College. He continued in residence at Cambridge after receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1584, which could indicate that he intended to take Anglican orders. However, in 1587, the university expressed reservations about awarding him a master's degree; these reservations (based on his frequent absences from the university) were apparently dispelled when the Privy Council sent a letter declaring that he had been employed "on matters touching the benefit of his country"—apparently in Elizabeth I's secret service.
He began writing plays for London theaters in 1587, beginning with Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590), in which he pioneered theatrical blank verse. Dido, Queen of Carthage (published 1594), cowritten with Thomas Nashe; The Massacre at Paris (c. 1594); and Edward II followed Tamburlaine (1594). The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (released 1604) is his most famous play, which tells the story of temptation, fall, and damnation using the dramatic framework of a morality play. His final book, The Jew of Malta (published in 1633), may have been his last.
The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus
The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus is Marlowe's most famous drama, although it has only survived in a mutilated form, and its date of authorship has been hotly debated. It was first
published in 1604, with a second edition following in 1616. Faustus adopts the dramatic framework of morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation, fall, and damnation, as well as its liberal use of morality figures like the good and wicked angels, the seven deadly sins, and the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles.
Dr Faustus includes elements of the Morality play
• the battle over the spirit, waged by a Good Angel and a Bad Angel.
• the parade of the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Covetousness, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth, Lechery.
• the potential for salvation, which exists until Faustus finally succumbs to despair and gives up all hope of being able to repent.
Plot summary
• Prologue: Dr. Faustus, Rhodes, Germany
• Scene 1: Faustus dissatisfies with all the
knowledge he studies and determines to study magic.
• Scene 3: Calls Mephistophilis, Lucifer’s minister
• Scene 5: Faustus surrenders his soul to Satan
and has great power among 24 years
• Scene 7: Amazes the Pope by becoming
invisible
• Scene 9: Calls the spirit of Alexander the
Great
• Scene 11: Brings ripe grapes in January
• Scene 12,13: When 24 years is almost over,
he begins to fear Satan and nearly repents
He is carried off by devils at the end.
Doctor Faustus embodies the conflict between Medieval and Renaissance values
The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and the natural world whereas ,The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, secular matters took center stage.
Pair work activity:
Read the following excerpt from the play, then write a dialogue between two opposing forces that happened to struggle in your mind.
Enter GOOD ANGEL and EVIL ANGEL.
GOOD ANGEL. O, Faustus, lay that damned book aside, And gaze not on it, lest it tempt thy soul,
And heap God’s heavy wrath upon thy head! Read, read the Scriptures:—that is blasphemy.
EVIL ANGEL. Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art Wherein all Nature’s treasure is contain’d:
Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky, Lord and commander of these elements. [Exeunt ANGELS.]
FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this! Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I’ll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy, And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass, And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg; I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk, Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad; I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring, And chase the Prince of Parma from our land, And reign sole king of all the provinces;
Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war, Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp-bridge, I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.
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Course contents:
· Introduction
· Sentimentalism
· Resurgent Love Comedies
· Domestic Tragedies (George lillo The London Merchant)
Course objectives:
By the end of this course, students should be able to distinguish the characteristics of 18th century drama with the different genres that prevailed.
Introduction
The record of British drama in the eighteenth century is one of rapid expansion: in terms of types of entertainment, audience numbers, theatre numbers, and, not least, the size of the theatres themselves. Theatre was mostly an urban and aristocratic activity when the century began; by the time it finished, it had become a truly popular form of entertainment, with barely a British town worthy of the name lacking a playhouse of some kind.
• Restoration comedy, an aristocratic and seemingly amoral form of theatre, declined, at least in part because of the rise of a conservative Protestant (Puritan) middle class.
• Such works as Jeremy Collier’s 1698 A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage helped lead popular sentiment against the Restoration theatre.
“Being convinc'd that nothing has gone farther in Debauching the Age than the Stage Poets, and Play-House, I thought I could not employ my time better than in writing against them. These Men sure, take Vertue and Regularity, for great Enemies, why else is their Disaffection so very Remarkable? It must be said, They have made their Attack with great Courage, and gain'd no inconsiderable Advantage. But it seems Lewdness without Atheism, is but half their Business” (Preface).
• During the 1700’s, the concept of Rationalism (The Age of Reason), faith in reason, began to take over from faith in God – Rationalism begins to lead away from the strict rules of Neoclassicism. This comes from a faith in man.
• Part of this led to the movement of Sentimentalism in the theatre. – asserted that each person was essentially good.
• Sentimentalism is characterized by an over-emphasis on arousing sympathetic responses to misfortune.
• Begins in England, 1690’s to 1730’s.
• The literary work often featured scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot was arranged to advance emotions rather than action. The result was a valorization of "fine feeling," displaying the characters as a model for refined, moral and emotional effect. Sentimentalism in literature was also often used as a medium through which authors could promote their own agendas—imploring readers to empathize with the problems they are dealing with in their books.
• In sentimental comedies middle-class protagonists triumphantly overcome a series of moral trials.
• Sentimental comedies aimed at producing tears rather than laughter.
• They reflected contemporary philosophical conceptions of humans as inherently good but capable of being led astray through bad example
• A good example of this genre is Richard Steel’s The Conscious Lovers (1722) Resurgent Love Comedies
• By the end of the 18th century there was a remarkable return to more conventional
comedies
• In his She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith opens the play with a prologue in which an actor mourns the death of the classical low comedy at the altar of sentimental, "mawkish" comedy. He hopes that Dr. Goldsmith can remedy this problem through the play about to be presented.
• A domestic tragedy is a tragedy in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle- class or lower-class individuals. This subgenre contrasts with classical and Neoclassical tragedy, in which the protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank and their downfall is an affair of state as well as a personal matter.
• The Ancient Greek theorist Aristotle had argued that tragedy should concern only great individuals with great minds and souls, because their catastrophic downfall would be more emotionally powerful to the audience; only comedy should depict middle-class people. Domestic tragedy breaks with Aristotle's precepts, taking as its subjects merchants or citizens whose lives have less consequence in the wider world.
George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731)
Sarah Millwood, a London prostitute, plans to find some innocent young man to seduce and exploit for money. she seduces George Barnwell, apprentice to the merchant Thorowgood who succumbs to her wiles in a way that will give her access to Thorowgood’s money. George feels guilty and remorseful and his guilt is contrasted to his friend Trueman’s loyalty. Millwood visits George at his place of work. When she discovers he no longer wants anything to do with her. She tells him that the man who
provides her with housing found out about their tryst and is now evicting her because of it. This evokes new feelings of guilt in George, and he is prompted to steal a large sum of money from his employer's funds to give to Sarah to amend the situation.
After giving her the money, George feels unworthy of his kind master, Thorowgood, so he runs away and leaves a note for Trueman confessing his crime. Having no place to go, he turns to Millwood for help. She again convinces George that she truly does love him, and concocts a scheme for him to rob his uncle. George objects saying that his uncle will recognize him as his nephew; Millwood answers that the only way, then, will be to murder his uncle which he did
George and Millwood are sentenced to death. George is visited by Thorowgood and Trueman in his prison cell. They console and forgive him. Thorowgood provides for his spiritual needs by arranging a visit from a clergyman. In the end, George is truly repentant for his sins and is at peace with himself, his friends, and God.
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Course contents:
· Introduction
· Characteristics of the Victorian Era
· The Law of Coverture and Gender Roles
Course objectives
This course is dedicated to the exploration of Victorian social rules that would help students understand characterization as it relates to the context of the Victorian social norms
Introduction
Victorian drama was sparse and overshadowed by the major forms of poetry and fiction in the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, poetry, particularly lyric poetry, reigned supreme, while fiction flourished in the second. The theatres, on the other hand, were never empty. Shakespeare's plays were put on stage and drew large audiences to the theaters. Great actors, rather than great dramatists, dominated the nineteenth century.
Characteristics of the Victorian Era
• The Victorian era (1836- 1901) coincides with Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne and her death
• Placed high value on honor, duty and moral seriousness
• Shift from agrarian society to industrial society due to the Industrial Revolution
• This created a middle class that is neither rich nor poor
• Rise of secularism and religious skepticism
• Caused by evidence of the theories of evolution and natural selection in Charles Drawin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)
• Scientist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term agnostic in 1869 meaning a person who neither believes nor disbelieves in the existence of God, holding instead thatit is simply impossible for humans to possess the knowledge of such matters
• Domesticity: home and family are the center of British religious, cultural and emotional life
• Man becomes the breadwinner who deals in the public sphere of the workplace
• Woman becomes the care-taker and spiritual guide for family in the private sphere of the home
• Queen Victoria with her nine children from Prince Albert was Britain’s most revered icon of domestic femininity and motherhood
• A woman’s role in the Victorian era was to be a model of femininity, an Angel in the House to use Coventry Patmore’s words
• The main traits of a Victorian woman are good manners, restraint, moral uprightness, purity, devotion, selflessness
• Women’s rights: women had few legal rights and were not elligible for most employment, for higher education and vote.
The Law of Coverture and Gender Roles
Marriage Law: once a woman is married her legal existence as an individual was suspended under “marital unity,” a legal fiction in which the husband and wife were considered a single entity: the husband. The husband exercised almost exclusive power and responsibility and rarely had to consult his wife to make decisions about property matters. So husband and wife were considered one person: the husband
A Husband’s rights in the Victorian Era include:
• Full control of his wife’s personql property/ income
• Absolute authority over home and children
• Could use force to discipline family
• If deserted by woman, she could not sue for divorce and had no rights to custody of children
The Victorian gentleman was characterized as tender, merciful, prudent, patientand disciplined
The Fallen woman is a category that included women who had any form of sexual experience deemed improper and immoral, prostitutes and rape victims, unmarried mothers, adultresses, homeless women, the insane, rebellious women
The New Woman of the 1880’s and 1890’s became a figure of greater sexual, social, and economic independence (Smoking, riding a bike, debating in public, wearing men’s clothing, refusing marriage)
By the 1890’s women experienced greater access to education, employment, political and legal rights, civic visibility
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Course contents:
Who is Oscar Wilde?
Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement Oscar Wilde and Victorian Morality Course objectives:
This course is devoted to Oscar Wilde and his works as they challenge Victorian social mores. at the end of the lecture, students should be able to discuss Wilde's ideas vis-àvis Victorian morality throughout his characters and plays.
Who is Oscar Wilde?
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian Era. In his lifetime he wrote nine plays, one novel, and numerous poems, short stories, and essays. Wilde was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, which emphasized aesthetic values more than moral or social themes. This doctrine is most clearly summarized in the phrase 'art for art's sake'.
By the age of 40 Oscar Wilde was famous in Europe and the U.S. for penning The Picture of Dorian Gray, his influential political tract ‘The Soul of a Man Under Socialism’ and his theater masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest. At the height of his fame he was publicly accused of being a ‘sodomite’ by John Douglas, the Marquis of Queensberry, with whose son, Lord Alfred, Wilde had been involved. His place in society threatened, Wilde sued Queensberry for libel. Losing the suit, he was indicted on charges of “gross indecency between males.” His first trial, remembered for its defense of “the love that dare not speak its name,” ended without a verdict; but he was tried again, lost, and was sentenced to two years of hard labor. When he was released from prison in 1897 he was a broken man. Bankrupt, bereft of friends, and his place in society, he went into exile. The dissipation that followed took a final toll on what remained of his health. He died on November 30, 1900 and was buried in France.
Besides literary accomplishments, he is also famous, or perhaps infamous, for his wit, flamboyance, and affairs with men. He was tried and imprisoned for his homosexual relationship (then considered a crime) with the son of an aristocrat.
Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement
The Aesthetic Movement was an artistic movement in the late 19th century where artists adopted an attitude of “art for art’s sake” rather than art driven by socio-political themes.
Oscar Wilde is known as the father of the Aesthetic Movement as he was vocally interested only in the literary study of beauty and aesthetics. He was the first major writer to challenge classic literary structure and cause controversy for doing so.
Oscar Wilde famously wrote “all art is quite useless” in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He explained that art only attempts to create a mood and not instruct or inform any type of action or doing.
Oscar Wilde and Victorian Morality The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest introduces a fresh new viewpoint on theatre and society in his time. Wilde makes his personal opinion on Victorian society crystal apparent through a well-structured drama. The playwright exposes how vain, hypocritical, and devoid of any true moral worth society is by basing the plot on the premise of living a double life. Two young guys are leading a parallel life in the country and the city: they know different people, they act differently, and they both go by the name Ernest. The pun between the phrases honest and earnest, as well as the name Ernest, is obviously intended: the primary characters, Algy and John, have both changed their names.
The title's play on words serves as a key to understanding Wilde's goal. His goal is to employ irony and sarcasm to reveal the raw truth, and he accomplishes this excellently by having the characters focus on the most trivial and vain of things rather than the most critical and serious issues. But why are they living a double life if it is their way of escaping society? Why would anyone make fun of Victorian society when the government was doing its job and Britain was at the top of the world? Why would an Irishman like Oscar Wild write a play that openly mocks the society he has been a part of?
For example, one of the virtues mocked by Wilde in the aforementioned play is the centrality of family. John is tormented by his friend's elderly aunt, who is adamantly opposed to a possible marriage between the young man and her daughter simply because he has no family and no method of proving that his parents were wealthy or high-ranking in any way. However, towards the conclusion of the play, John discovers that he is Algy's brother, and everything is suddenly OK, and the wedding can take place. In other words, the opposition to the wedding sprang only from a fear of being judged by society's other members. By criticizing the Victorian idea of family integrity. Wilde manages to ridiculize at the same time the concepts of love and marriage.
An Ideal Husband:
An Ideal Husband premiered in London, England, on January 3, 1895, and was published in 1896. It was the third of Wilde’s four comedic plays to be staged, and it was as big a success with audiences as the previous two. However, critics of the time were not as appreciative as audiences, which was the case for all of Wilde’s social comedies. Critics thought these plays more flippant than substantive; audiences were delighted by the
wonderful wit of the dramas. Numerous choice ‘‘one-liners’’ and other pithy witticisms that Wilde’s dramatic characters deliver are still quoted by people today. An Ideal Husband is often called a ‘‘social comedy’’ because it has both a serious (‘‘social’’) as well comedic plot line. On the one hand, the play is about a prominent politician who is in danger of losing his reputation as a paragon of integrity, owing to a youthful indiscretion that the play’s villain is threatening to expose. Although the politician’s transgression is not exposed, this plot line conveys the idea that there are very few people in the world who are wholly good and to pretend so is hypocritical. This is a message for Wilde’s contemporaries, a late-Victorian group obsessed with purity and goodness but, of course, as imperfect as the people of any other age. On the other hand, the play is supposed to be funny, as it is, thanks to the witty bantering of the characters, especially in moments when the play is not directly concerned with the ‘‘social’’ plot. Wilde and his play are by now firmly established in the English-language canon of literature, and most libraries hold volumes of the individual or collected plays. The Modern Library editions of Wilde’s collected comedies are the most widespread.
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Practice
Choose the characters who best symbolize Wilde's challenge to Victorian morality based on the plays you have read and write an essay comparing the character and the author.
Writing Activity: Read the following descriptions of Mrs Cheveley and Lady Chiltern and write an essay highlighting their Victorian traits.
Mrs. Cheveley
Mrs. Cheveley, the villain of Wilde’s play, enters the society of the Chilterns and Lord Goring determined either to get her own way or to destroy those who will not help her achieve her ends. She comes to London from Vienna, where she has been living for some time, to blackmail Sir Robert Chiltern. She knows Chiltern’s terrible, scandalous secret and has concrete evidence of his transgression (a letter he wrote). She informs Chiltern that she will expose his sinful past unless he praises a South American canal scheme instead of condemning it for the stock market swindle it is as he plans to do in a parliamentary speech. Mrs. Cheveley and her friends have invested heavily in the scheme, and if the respected Chiltern were to advise his government to support it, Mrs. Cheveley and her friends would become much richer than they already are. Since one of Wilde’s points in the play is that large fortunes often have their roots in immorality, he needed to make Mrs. Cheveley’s actions thoroughly unsympathetic to draw a convincing villain. The stock market manipulation had to be something that would not only increase her wealth but also eventually entail the impoverishment of others. Further, she is a blackmailer and habitual thief and liar. Still, this said, Mrs. Cheveley delivers some of the play’s choicest witticisms.
Gertrude Chiltern
Gertrude Chiltern is a sheltered, good woman who worships perfect goodness most especially in the form of her ‘‘ideal husband.’’ The problem with her worship of perfection and of her husband is that her husband is not in fact perfect; indeed, he has an extremely disreputable secret in his past—a secret that could ruin his career. Described as being possessed of ‘‘a grave Greek beauty,’’ Lady Chiltern is appropriately noble in character.
She is involved in all sorts of good works. For example, she is a feminist campaigning for the right of girls and women to have a higher education. She is, in short, a moneyed woman with principles: she believes that she must give something back to society by supporting charities, foundations, and other causes. Lady Chiltern also believes that when women love men they worship them; by doing so, such women require that their men conform to their ideals of what is great. And until Lady Chiltern learns the truth about her
husband’s past, she is certain that he is indeed her ideal. She believes that he is a thoroughly good man committed to doing only good in the world. Lady Chiltern must learn a stern lesson in the play: that nobody is perfect and that to wish this is naive and dangerous. Lady Chiltern, then, is not really perfectly good until she accepts the fact of, and is willing to forgive, imperfection.