An Ideal Husband | The Action of the Comedies
In the following excerpt, San Juan Jr. explores the themes of the past and social adaptation in An Ideal Husband.
Wilde’s least successful play on the stage and his third comedy, An Ideal Husband, was written between October 1893 and March 1894. It was produced at the Haymarket Theatre on January 3, 1895. When Wilde in 1899 corrected the proofs of the play for publication, he said that it ‘‘reads rather well, and some of its passages seem prophetic of tragedy to come.’’ But Sir Robert Chiltern’s predicament, though it bears a tenuous resemblance to Wilde’s, has distinctive melodramatic overtones.
The play concerns itself primarily with Sir Robert Chiltern’s past...
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