Wild plays what I was saying last week about wild and sexuality and how far wild opposed to this kind of typing, this kind of limiting and judging of individuals and instead, central to pretty much all of his writing, his methods, his doctrines, his theories, everything he says is individualism, the rights of the individual to develop themselves free from pressures from society, free from expectation's duties and all the rest, and how far sexuality is absolutely central to that.
And if it's about self realisation, then there are very few things that are more central to you, arguably, than your sexuality. So another thing that fits in with this is wild ideas on performance. So essentially Wild doesn't offer a model of the self as essential as Essentialists. In that sense, it's not about one fixed interior true self as a model of identity. Rather, he offers a very performative model of identity.
As, for example, Gilbert says in the critique as artist, what people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities. So to act, to perform, if not the opposite of your identity or your character or interior self, it's simply another manifestation of it, another means of realising yourself so. Similarly, in the picture of Dorian Grey, you get the following. Is insincerity such a terrible thing?
I think not. It is merely the method by which we can multiply our personalities. Such, at any rate, was Dorian Grey, whose opinion he used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple,
permanent, reliable and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion and whose very flesh was tainted with a monstrous maladies of the dead in context. In the novel, when you get the its insincerity. Such a terrible thing.
I think not. That sounds very much like a narrative, an authorial voice until the beginning of the next paragraph suddenly distances and gives you another voice that said so at least so tiny. Right, thought Dorian Grey. So that very kind of multiplicity that is contained is being talked about, is being enacted in the text itself. There's a kind of multiplicity and splitting of voices and indefiniteness and uncertainty happening about who's speaking and how at that point.
And this multiple and mobile self, this mutable, performed self makes performance a mode of self realisation so that to perform is also to be and you can be as multiple as your performance is not fixed and typed. It's one of the primary ways in which world undermines that idea of typing, that either fixing and finding a true self. Because if all the selves you can be are equally valid and equally true, then which one is someone going to fix and judge you by?
How are you meant to read interior from exterior in that sense? And this a lot of self realisation. Well, there is this right to create the self. It goes all the way through to. You know, what I talked about in the first lecture about De Profundis and the autobiography in the biography about the self as a work of art that you yourself are free to mould and to interpret as you choose.
So in one sense, what Wild's doing is rejecting this notion of truth and fixed identity, the one place where he does offer some version of a kind of natural self and organically growing self is in the Solomon Islands socialism, where he envisions a utopian society in which there are no duties, no laws, no constraints upon the individual whatsoever. No property, no marriage, no family. You're absolutely free to develop attitudes.
And then he talks about then the soul of the true soul of man you would see, and it would grow organically, like a tree grows. Now, that's the only point where you see this idea of the organic, in a sense sort of freely developing and almost in that image of something kind of organic, something single in some ways, but it's not realised anywhere outside of that utopian society. And instead, Walt spends a lot of time along with this idea of the the freedom of self creation.
There's also another mode of performance he talks about, which in a sense is the socially enforced performance, either so many of his characters, in a sense, split into those who can control performance, who can play it performance, who can keep society at arm's length with their role playing their control or the rest of it, and the others who are in a sense, unconsciously performing the individual who has imbibed social expectations and so on.
And isn't even conscious of their kind of distortion of self into these roles. So, for example, while talks about even worse than Tyranny's, are those societies in which authority is expressed through kindness and rewards, because people in that case are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them.
And so go through their lives in a sort of course, comfort like petite animals without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's Second-Hand clothes and never being themselves for a single moment. So what you have here are two kinds of performance.
One, self-conscious, self delighting, creative, artistic, the other unconscious and imbibing of social attitudes, social modes, social assumptions, essential, essentially mimicking. And it's a distortion, a deletion of the self and erasure of the self. Now, these ideas of performance have obvious relevance to world place, which are in themselves very obviously performative and about performance in all sorts of intricate and self-conscious ways.
Now, the other important thing to know about Wild's place, I think about as a kind of general context for them are 19th century modes of performance. Now, one of the most influential sort of central Victorian modes of performance is melodrama and melodrama, which he made just now with a sort of set of extravagant plots and the idea of stock types and all the rest of it central to pretty much every melodrama plot is the idea of revelation.
So melodramas are absolutely full of innocent people condemned for crimes and innocent people misjudged and villains who are hiding their villainy for years on stage, even if they're revealing it to the audience. And melodramas don't necessarily end happily. But they do end with the revelation of truth and truth about character. So absolutely central to melodrama is the mode of revelation and recognition, public recognition of the truth.
So the wrongly accused may die, you know, before the curtain comes down, but their innocence will also be recognised. So that becomes a kind of central trope in melodrama. And it's so much so it gets almost religious significance. And Peter Brookes, who's one of the main theorists of our melodrama, so he writes in his book, The Melodramatic Imagination, Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid.
The characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatise through their heightened and polarised words and gestures the whole of their relationship. Life tends in this fiction towards ever more concentrated and totally expressive gestures and statements. So that's idea of the absolute in the revelation, everything expressed, even if expressed without language through gesture.
But think about the very fact that you can express in a truth through gesture suggests something so clearly legible that doesn't even need its absolute kind of instinctive recognition of the truth of a melodrama is clearly still popular. Right through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, there's still huge blockbuster melodramas playing at this point and what's clearly in conversation with melodrama.
So lots of those standard melodrama tropes and characters like the fallen woman, the innocent maidens seduced the illegitimate son and all the rest of it. Those are you can see in his plays where he's using this ideas of blackmail and the dark secret in the past being revealed and so on. So well, it's very clearly in conversation with that. But notably and Walt has plenty of revelation in his place, but notably, they don't happen in the full fact.
In the last act, revelations in Wild's plays tend to happen in the first or second act. So if you see, you know, revelation about who Mrs. it happens by the end of, you know, certainly within the first act you get the first bitten by the second act. She's she's kind of, you know, she's lady into his mother before she goes to the to rescue her and so on. The last act is where it complicates further where she isn't either simply the fallen woman,
nor is she the delinquent mother who's now sacrificing herself. She's something beyond any of those roles and expectations. Similarly, in a woman of no importance, you know who Mrs. Arbuthnot is by the end of the second act, but who who she is in the sense of the revelation of her past and on who she actually is. What lies under all those? Well, how far that revelation is all of her or not, that's complicated by the rest of the play.
So there's a sense in which, well, structures work on revelation and then complication. It's complete opposite to the standard, what's meant to be the well-made play structure, as described by Bernard Shaw, which was a situation complication of the great scene to be made. And then they pneumo and nothing else plays don't unknot. They re not. They get more complicated in that sense of trying to pass judgement and so on.
Now, in contrast to this and this structure of revelation and judgement and very often clear judgement of characters according to clear set social standards and orthodoxy, moral authority and social orthodoxies, that's pretty much the structure that you'll find at the heart of most of Wilde's contemporaries and the place they're writing. So if you look at plays by Arthur Wing, Pineiro, Henry Arthur Jones, Sidney Grundy and so on, they're very popular playwrights of the 90s.
They're all essentially working on that structure, even though they're writing a new kind of within a new kind of naturalism and fast and so on, that pretty much always a clear judgement upon the characters and the need to to conform with social orthodoxy. But a contrary line of influence and context would be Ibsen's plays. So in Ipsen and she describes Ibsen's plays as instead a situation complication centre fair discussion.
So when all this is, then that's a very short version of it, because discussion is what his plays are about. So classically one that absolutely fits with that description. That description would be a doll's house, where it goes through all the mechanisms will we played with letters and blackmail and all the rest of it, and then comes to Nora Helma saying, OK, you're not the man I thought you were. I'm not the woman I thought I was. Let's sit down and talk.
She actually literally says, sit down, we need to talk. And then that last act is discussion. But importantly, also in that actually started as the hit song. But as her husband, Songbird is the little squirrel protected from the outside world. And then she discovers how morally complex the outside world is and that it would judge and indeed criminalise her for what she's done. She then turns around and casts off that role.
She says, I spent my whole life being a doll in your dolls first in my father's doll house, now in yours. But now it's time for me to grow up. Now it's time for me to understand that. So it's a sort of casting off of roles. At the same time as what she becomes, who she now is, is unfixed by the play, so the play ends with her leaving the house, the door slamming behind her.
It ends with who she might become with this possibility that the miracle of miracles will happen and she and her husband will have a real marriage based on genuine knowledge of each other. But that's held off in the distance. So in that sense, again, she's not fixed. Ipsum writes characters that are in conversation with social expectations, characters who are absolutely moulded by and influenced by social issues, by contemporary morality.
And so in many ways, he's interested in this kind of post Darwinist idea of adaptation to environment and the pressures of environment upon the development of the individual. So you can see how close that is to worlds talking about in this idea of being moulded by your society, the pressures of society upon you.
And in that sense, part of what Wild's doing is something that's much closer, perhaps to Ibsen's idea of the multilayered and unstable kind of characters he's writing, which are in conversation with social conventions. He said, well, does anybody, in a sense putting his characters in conversation with melodramatic types? So you think you can judge them according to that, and then they start doing more complicated things?
So very much. Look, there's no it's clear it's very easy to pick out a waltz plays the kind of the performers who are conscious and in control, Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Allenby and a woman of importance, Mrs. chiefly in many ways an ideal husband, Lord Ellingsworth, Lady Plimsoll, Cecil Graham, the loads of those kind of dandies who absolutely know what they're doing. They may or may not be successful in their schemes, but they can see the performance for what it is.
Whereas Mrs. Arbuthnot, in a woman of no importance, she's the fallen woman who by the end of the second act, you've got the whole thing about, you know, her shame and stop Gerald. He is your father and all of that kind of melodramatic language. But actually, when you get to act four and she refuses to marry the man that she who's the father of her son, she despite an offer of doing what, she will not marry him because it's beneath her, but also the language in which that expression get amazing.
When Walt uses melodramatic language and uses that kind of register, it's often it sounds more conventional in the texture of language and often the actual emotions and thoughts being expressed are anything but conventional. So in that speech, there's a wonderful speech in there, Mrs. Arbuthnot, in which she begs Gerald, she calls Gerald the little lamb that God sent me and says ends with child of my shame, this new child of my shame.
But the whole speech is about how she's visited the sick and the poor and she's been to church and all the rest, that she doesn't give a toss about them. She only cares about Gerald, but he didn't want her love, so she had to do something with it. Um, so it's upset. And she says, I would rather I would rather have had you than been innocent.
She doesn't she has never repented a person. In other words, there's a sense in which she's been performing the role of repentant woman, performing the work, the role of the good, repentant Marilyn. But she realises it's kind of doesn't fit with what she's feeling and whether that's a conscious performance or an unconscious performance. There's a sense in which she's imbibed the moral and sexual judgement of society upon her.
And where she is under that is up to, in a sense, performance how the actress performs that role. And your projection, as you're always doing as a theatrical audience, your projection from the exterior into the interior. So remember, unless you've got soliloquy as a kind of supposedly giving you the direct, unmediated voice of the inner self of a character, you are always judging from the outside, you're judging by language and action.
And so world uses that that sense of not just the conscious performance, the characters, but you're always negotiating from the outside. You're always imagining what's inside and the questions of what might be there. So in that sense, this indeterminacy judgement's, this challenge to the audience about how you think about the interior is one of the crucial things as well in ways in which he uses performance.
Now, in my experience of students studying the plays, it's very hard often to get past surface. So Stal not sincerity is the vital thing and manners before morals. There's a sense in which this glittering surface, the way in which so many of the characters talk in epigrams and paradoxes. And it's it's very kind of witty on the top, but it's quite hard to get hold of what it's doing underneath. So what I want to do now is go through an ideal husband to talk about what it's debating,
what's at issue, at stake in it and how it works not to resolve it. So I think it's in many ways the most difficult and unresolved of worlds plays. So hands up. Who's read An Ideal Husband? OK, I'll give you a plot summary, OK? For those who haven't yet read it, he goes. So Sir Robert Chiltern, who is the undersecretary for foreign affairs in the British government, is holding a huge party in his very, very rich house.
And there's an enormous tapestry at the top of the stairs and they're greeting all the guests arriving, all aristocracy. And he's standing there with his wife, Lady Kilton and Mrs chiefly arrives friend of a friend who is a woman hugely interested in politics and investment. And he's heard of her before. And she says to him, I would like you to declare your support for the for my Argentine canal scheme. Anita's can't possibly do so. It's a fraudulent scheme. And she goes he goes, it's a swindle.
And she goes, no, no, no, it's not a swindle. It's a it's a daring investment. And he says, no, it's a swindle. Let us call things by their proper name. And she says, I'll give you money if you back the scheme. And he said, you've forgotten you're speaking to an English gentleman. And she says, I have not forgotten that. I'm speaking to a man who sold a cabinet secret for money. And that was the beginning of his wealth and position.
And I have the letter you wrote to ban on home that sold that secret. I will disgrace you unless you back my scheme and he does hemming and hawing and says, OK, I'll back the scheme. But then when he talks to his extremely moral wife later and he says, oh, I'm I'm going to back the scheme. And she says, no, it's immoral, it's wrong. And you are above such things.
You are noble. You're always terribly complex politics, dear politics, very, very complicated things, you know, but but it's about doing right. So that's in private. Public, very different matter. She does know what is right and private is also right in public, etc. and she gets him to write a letter to Mrs Cheaply saying he won't back the scheme. And at the same time, at the same party, Lord Goring, a dandy about town, finds a brooch, a snake headed brooch.
And while chatting to Mabel Chiltern, who is Sir Robert Chilterns younger sister, and puts it into his wallet and says, Don't tell anyone I found it. That's one, two. So, Robert, turn to Lord Goring and tells him about what's happened and that he's being blackmailed and asked for help and says, does he know of any scandal that he can bring down? This is chiefly through. And Lord Goring says, no, I can't achieve the kind of woman who just carries off any scandal.
She's untouchable. But I will try. And there's a kind of conversation between the going because how could you have done this? And so Robert defends himself as having simply been ambitious and grasp power as he needed to know. And then Mrs chiefly arrives to visit. And Mrs chiefly Lady Chiltern is very contemptuous of her. She was a thief at school, showed her the door, and Mrs chiefly turns around and says.
You're saying, you know, don't be superior with me, this house was built on this secret of your husband's success was a scandal, was a lie he saw. It was it was insider dealing that your house is built on. And Lady Chilterns hugely shocked and goes to her husband, says, is this true? Tell me it's not true. And he says, yes, it's true when you've ruined my career because I would have bought back my past had it not been for you.
WOMAN And it ends with her sobbing on the sofa. And Mrs Chiefly said she'd first come to ask about a broke she'd lost. Says I didn't come to ruin anything at all. I entirely came here because I was asking about brooch next and it gets even more complicated. It's in Lord Goring's rooms in London and Gertrude Chilton has written him a letter. He offered help knowing that those a kind of problems coming and that Britain's Chiltern has written him a letter saying, I need you, I want to.
I'm coming to you, Gertrude. So and then so he's expecting Gertrude Tilton to arrive and then his father arrives. This is about ten o'clock at night. And then his father writes, So obsessed with Butler Phipps if. Lady Chiltern is a lady who's going to arrive, and when this lady arrives, can you not let my father know and so on, but show her into the library so he talks. Lord Lord Caversham, his father and then not Lady Chiltern, but was just chiefly arrives and shunned the library.
And then little Caversham leaves. But and the butler tells him that Mrs chiefly that a lady is in his library. He thinks it's Lady Chiltern. And then so Robert Chilton arrives and says, What am I going to do now? My wife knows all and Robert and Lord Goring talks to him about it'll be OK and trust her and she loves you and all the rest of it.
And then there's a noise in the other room. And then so Robert goes and looks through the door and sees Mrs chiefly there and then denounces his friend Lord Goring for having supposedly being in league with this woman who's blackmailing him, at which point Goring thinking that it's this lady Chiltern. So Robert's wife says, no, no, no, no, no, there's nothing, nothing wrong, nothing immoral. Do not think anything against this woman. She is utterly good and utterly pure.
And so Robert storms out and then mischievously comes out the library with a big grin on her face. And he's totally shocked by that. And she then says, OK, I'll do you a deal. I will swap you so Robert's letter, I'll let him off the blackmail in return for you marrying me, I fancy being married again lots of times, very entertaining. And he says, no, I'm not into self-sacrifice. It's terribly bad, especially for the people you're sacrificing yourself for.
And there's a whole conversation between her and she defends herself from having gone to the house to ruin the Chilterns marriage by saying, no, I went there for a brooch that I lost. And little Göring takes out the brooch found, in fact, and said, is it this brooch? And she says, Oh, yes, how clever of you, how do you go? And then he says, Oh, no such brooch. It's a bracelet, and clasped it on her wrist. At which point he then says, it's a bracelet.
And I gave it to my cousin and it was then stolen. And I'm about to have you arrested a thief and she gets off. Just take it off and offers nothing. You can't accuse me and then you can't get it off. It's got a hidden cash, so the brooch turns into a bracelet and you can't get it off your wrist. And she's panicking. Leo Goring says, OK, give me to Robert's letter and I will take it off you. Otherwise, you're going to the police. And she finally gets in and gives him the letter and he burnt it.
And then he releases the bracelet and just then she says, Oh, I feel terribly faint. Can you get me a glass of water? And was getting lots of water. She spotted Lady Chilton's letter. I want you. I need you. I'm coming, too. And Phoenix that and she says, Nahar, I'm such a friend of Lady Charlton that I'm going to show her husband that her what? His wife is having an affair and she walks out the room with the letter. So final act. So, Robert, I'm not doing all right this last act.
So Robert says so. Lord Goring tells Sir Robert that Lady Chiltern that he has got hold of the letter and burnt it and that Sir Robert is now safe and the children is hugely relieved. But no, Goring also says, but this is chiefly still the letter. And you must tell your husband the truth, and they said, I can't tell my husband I was at your rooms at night on my own. I can't possibly. He says, no, you should tell your husband because I can't.
He says, OK. And in the meanwhile, Sir Robert Chiltern, not knowing about his being off the hook and a letter being shot, has given a speech in the House in the House of Parliament condemning the Argentine Karnofsky. And on the basis of this, the great reports in the Times about his nobility and how he's much better politician and much higher moral standards and these foreign politicians and all the rest of it.
And then you get to Robert meets Lady Chiltern and comes in with a letter in his hand, the letter that had been Mrs chiefly attent, but it's been taken out of the envelope by his secretary. So all he reads is, I need you. I want you. I'm coming to you, Gertrude. And he says, Is it true? Have you forgiven me? And she goes, Oh yes, yes, absolutely. Totally. Forgive me, lovely darling. And they're reconciled.
And then Lord Caversham comes in, who's from the House of Lords, and says the prime minister is offering on the basis that this great speech, nothing else is offering Sir Robert a seat in the cabinet and sort of terribly excited until he looks at his wife and then he goes, oh, I'm not taking it. I resigned. And later, Chilton approves, at which point Lord Goring goes aside with his in the meanwhile, proposed to Mabel Chilton.
So Robert's younger sister and Lord Chiltern Goreng takes Lady Chiltern aside and says, Don't do this, don't destroy Sir Robert. Love you. Don't destroy his ambition. It's so important to him. And your marriage will be destroyed if you prevent him following through with it. And he says it's not German philosophy. That's the heart of things. It's love. And a woman's duty is to forgive her husband and many other things. And a man's life is worth more and more value than a woman's.
So her job is given, at which point she then when her husband comes back and rips up the letter of resignation and he's delighted because he can go into the cabinet, at which point he turns to his friend or Goring says, is there anything I can do for you? And says, yes, you could let me marry your sister. And he goes to Rob says, Oh, no, not that I can't let you marry her because you're having an affair with Mrs Chiefly.
And it would be utterly unfair of my sisters to marry a man who's having an affair with somebody else, at which point Lady Chiltern tells the truth and says that letter was addressed to him, not to you. I was the woman he was expecting. He wasn't having an affair with Mrs chiefly at all. And I'm terribly sorry I'm not having an affair with him myself. And she says, How could you not have trusted me?
You are pure and always will be pure and you are the white pure image of all good things and sin could never touch you. At which point Sir Robert gets to have a seat in the cabinet with his wife alongside and Lord Goring gets to marry Mabel Chiltern Tarar. So what you have there is a fantastic mix of all sorts of different dramatic moves, so you've got the play of politics and intrigue and it's set right in the heart of the British government.
You've got the play of high class society and intrigue over money and so on and marriage and love and all the rest of it. You've got blackmail. You've got a glimpse into the corridors of power. You've also got all of world's verbal wit. So reviews at the time tended to end with a whole list of epigrams and paradoxes and witty sayings from the play as a kind of like a goody bag that you could use in parties yourself after that.
There are discussions of public morality, the discussions of the role of women. There's lots on the nature of men's women's love in the play and lots on the different roles, the divisions of spheres between men and women. Now, this kind of multiplicity was clearly picked up on by reviewers at the time. So, for example, a reviewer in like a JOCO said the story, which was presumably adapted from the Family Herald.
That's what World said of a woman of no importance, is so full of high class virtue and vice that the gallery is kept in a state of subdued enthusiasm while the stalls are puzzling over the paradoxes. But it requires a poet to appreciate the depth of the dramatic talent. And a pit, unfortunately, is one thing at the Haymarket Theatre.
If some accomplished dramatist Mr Simmons, for instance, he was one of the most famous melodrama artists at the time, would only straighten out Mr Wilde's English into robust intelligibility. An audience on the Surrey side might enjoy the familiar flavour of this genteel melodrama. Now this place. So it's playing at the stage. It's playing in the heart of the West End and one of the most aristocratic kind of venues, the higher class venues.
And this commentator is saying it could be playing on the other side of the river, in other words, in the cheap, big melodrama houses. So there's a sense in which this is a play of multilayer as far as they're concerned. And there's a whole issue here about who's wild writing for, what's the audience that thinks said about his using this kind of unstable genre. And that emphasis in so many of his works about what a work means is about who it's written for and how it's read.
So in some ways, that idea of the multiplicity of readers producing a kind of instability, there's a question of who the play's written for. Now, Wilde in interview. So just as in De Profundis, he talks about I made of the drama of Perth. I made the drama as personal as the lyric and the summit. This idea that the theatre is the most public form out there in the world consistently talks about it as though it's a very, very personal thing.
So an interview before the play opened, while it was interviewed and was asked by the journalist, what is your feeling towards your audiences, towards the public and welters? Which public? There are as many publics as there are personalities. Journalist tries again. Are you nervous on the night that you are producing a new play? Oh no, I am exquisitely indifferent. My nervousness ends at the last dress rehearsal. I know.
Then what affect my new play as presented upon the stage has produced upon me. My interest in the play ends there and I feel curiously envious of the public. They have such wonderful fresh emotions in store for them. I laughed, but Mr. Wilde rebuked me with a look of surprise. It is the public not to the play that I desire to make a success, he said.
And he continues. We shall never have a real drama in England until it is recognised that the play is personal and individual, a form of self-expression as a poem or a picture. So what you got? Again, there is this idea of not just the public, but many publics that multiplicity and uncertainty of interpretation and also this idea of the play as something for himself. So he's not offering it with a single meaning for everybody in any sense.
So the reviews of their first performance of an ideal husband reveal a kind of moral confusion amongst critics, a huge uncertainty about how what kind of moral what kind of implication the women to read after the play. So, for example, in Pick Me Up, the the critic commented, Lady Chiltern is depressingly good all the time. Good enough to drive an ordinary husband to drink from a sheer monopoly of the cardinal virtues.
I shall always think kindly of a great public man in the future if I hear he is suddenly found to have been all along a masterpiece of moral error, I shall put his drawbacks down to the fact that he must have an abnormally good wife.
Or, by contrast, maybe Walkley in the Speaker inveighed against Sir Robert Chiltern as basically a sordid rogue, somebody whose morality changed according to the circumstances and what suited him and said the moral of the play seems to be that the great thing is not to be found out. Indeed, the whole place designed to fill us with joy of the escape of a sinner from the penalty of his sin through a trick with a diamond bracelet.
So he feels there is no kind of moral resolution offered by this play whatsoever. I won't read the whole of Bernard Shaw's review of an ideal husband, but it's a wonderful one to read it through in detail. What sure does it say that Wilde is our only thorough playwright and playwright in the sense that he plays with everything, with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with a whole theatre.
And the Englishman can't cope with this because English and English don't play at anything that's serious about everything, including sport and games. Whereas Wilde, as an Irishman plays with everything, even with things that matter hugely to him.
So as a result of which, the Englishman is shocked at the dangers, the foundations of society when seriousness is publicly laughed at and to complete the odyssey of the situation, Mr while touching what he himself references, is absolutely the most sentimental dramatist of the day, she continues. It is useless to describe a play that which has no thesis, which is in the purest integrity, a play and nothing else.
The six worst epigrams are mere arms handed with a kind smile to the average suburban play goer. The three best remain secrets between Mr Wilde and a few choice spirits. The modern note is struck in Sir Robert Chilterns assertion of the individuality and courage of his wrongdoing as against the mechanical stupidity of his stupidly good wife and in his bitter criticism of a love that is only the reward of merit.
It is from the philosophy on which this scene is based that the most pregnant epigrams in the play have been condensed. Indeed, this is the only philosophy that has ever produced epigrams. So these are the moral problems inherent in the play, it's structured around a criminal and sympathy with a criminal, somebody who sold a cabinet secret for money. It's a kind of insider dealing as the foundation of his wealth. Now, Sir Robert Chiltern explicitly does not repent of its crime.
He says, what century values is wealth. Without wealth, you can't do anything. And he says, I fought the century with its own weapons and won. He then says, oh, I gave lots of money to charity, sort of make up for it and all the rest of it. Now he isn't punished within the play, but actually rewarded with a seat in the heart of government.
So the person whose sin is revealed, who's depressed and remember, he's ready, remember, not just that he sold his country wants for money, but he's ready to do it a second time to stave off scandal. So there's no sense at the beginning without the influence of his wife and so on, that he would have changed from that. Then you have all the way through this kind of playing with this idea of criminality.
So if you've got Sir Robert as the one kind of criminal, he's parallelled, actually, and he's the one is rewarded with a seat in the cabinet. He's parallelled with the villain after the play. So Mrs. chiefly first phase of the Argentine Karnofsky, when Sir Robert calls it a swindle that has called things by the proper name, she then when she announces that she knows he first told his cabinet secret for money, he says, Oh, no, no, no.
It's a very complicated transaction. She says it was a swindle. Let us call things by their proper name. So there's a deliberate she's paralleling and she carries on doing it, paralleling the two of them throughout the play that she knows what he's like because they are two of a kind she keeps asserting. So there's a very interesting kind of paralleling what's a play where the hero and the villain or villainous are in a sense being parallel throughout the play.
One gets rewarded, the other gets shown. The door, though importantly, misses, misses chiefly. She doesn't get what she wants, but she doesn't get shown up or anything else. There's no kind of unmasking of her going on in that sense. She leaves scot free in many ways against this idea of this idea of the villain and and corruption and so on. Against that, you have Lord Goring. He's another of wild, the hero.
So very like Lord Illingworth and Lord Darlington and Lord Henry Wertham, except he becomes a force for he sort of sympathises with Africa and tries to bring everything together. Now he offers a kind of the philosophy of being trivial and idle and surface and only worrying about what your buttonhole is and all the rest of it. And he criticises Sir Robert Chiltern for the shallowness of this desire for money and wealth.
He calls that worship of wealth a thoroughly shallow creed. But as the play also emphasises, Little Goreng is born, as Robert points out, is born with birth, aristocratic status and money and has never known ambition. In other words, it's very easy to have a philosophy like that if in a society which worships wealth and is not a meritocracy, easy for you to think like that. He's one of the privileged.
So his condemnation of Robert's values is coming from someone who's mired in this society where wealth is by the end of the plague, absolutely inherently connected with corruption or the very least complacency and not wanting to allow in anybody else who isn't one of the club. Then you have the issue of idealising within the play. So Lady Kilton fits with HESTA Worthley and Woman Unimportance fits with Lady Windemere in late winter with Fan.
As a woman who has a hard and fast rules, a puritan who idealises and condemns, and she has to learn to forgive, to accept flaws in the human being, and in a sense that fits very closely with what society is guilty of. So Sir Robert Chiltern, Mrs Chiefly explicitly says to him, ideally you'd be able to say you'd be able to confess your errors and all the rest of it. But the way that society works is this idea that all of us, that everybody else is pure and good. You scapegoat the individual.
You need scandals as a kind of general whitewashing of everybody else so that there is no way you would be forgiven this error. Instead, it would be another of those scandals that go look at him. He's corrupt. The rest of us aren't. So there's a huge kind of idealising inside, which is what makes it opens up. Sir Robert Chiltern, the blackmail and makes his confession impossible. Public confession and forgiveness.
So with this idea, what do we get with Lady Chiltern? All this thing about who characters all by the end of the play. Lady Chiltern has accepted her husband's error and allowed him a space in the cabinet at the end to accept that seat in the Cabinet. But is that a sense in which she simply is scared of losing his love and is allowing corruption in the heart of government? Or is she a moralising force still standing next to him, making sure he doesn't do that again?
Plate of not that at all. You could indicate it in performance, you could have her as a very strong figure, standing side by side with him, or you can have her body language has a huge amount. You can have her innocence defeated and sidelined with him stepping forward and taking control. It can be a very cynical ending or a much more optimistic ending, purely according to how you're playing the relationship between those two. The script does not answer it very importantly.
And again, another theme that plays all the way through the play is the role of women in politics. So Sir Robert Chiltern, when he's trying to justify all the rest of it, his backing of the canal scheme does a hole. Politics is terribly complicated. You can't understand it there. Now, you've also got the beginning of play, a kind of separation of spheres.
So that basic idea of the man's affair and the woman's sphere, the domestic savers, the public sphere, also the idea that politics is this kind of rough and tumble, much more cynical world as against the idea that women belong to the domestic and the much more idealised world. Now, in one sense, Lady Chiltern is refusing that kind of division at the beginning. So she's a political force. She's a member of the Women's Liberal Federation.
And there's a point when she comes in and actually she's just come back from a meeting of the left in which they have discussed factory X, the eight hours bill and prison reform. Now, those are exactly the kind of humanitarian, much more compassionate politics that were coming in at that point. So the eight hours act is about limiting factory hours and factory acts, those about things like children's working hours and things like that. So in that sense, she's a humanising force in politics.
She's about and love the argument of the suffragists and so on for women's involvement in politics is that women know about children, know about the vulnerable and all the rest of it, and therefore ought to be able to allowed into politics to speak for them. So in that sense, these are exactly the kind of things that Wald's arguing for after he's been to prison is exact things like more humane treatment of children in prison.
Not so. Robert is trying to keep his wife out of public life. And importantly, stage direction that describes him when he first arrives is the firmly chiselled mouth and chin contrasts strikingly with the romantic expression, the deep set eyes. The variance is suggestive of an almost complete separation of passion and intellect, as though thought and emotion were each isolated in its own sphere through some violence of willpower.
Now there there seems to be a separation between feeling and reason, between passion and intellect. When so when Lord Goring persuades Lady Chiltern to step aside and not interfere in her husband's life and ambitions, his speech begins. A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambition. A woman's life revolves and curves of emotion. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses.
In other words, that end of the place seems to reassert a division between intellect and passion, between reason and feeling, which is exactly what led to the problem with Sir Robert Chiltern to start with. So is the play validating or undermining that kind of split? Is it supporting separate spheres? Is it talking about the necessary exclusion of women from public life because they're too moralistic and too idealising?
Or is it talking about the need for them as a moralising force, your decision, their sense in which so many of the speech in the play, in the play come in collision with each other? No. Two speeches line up. So there's a long speech from Sir Robert when he accuses his wife of having ruined his life that says, we men love forever, we love faults, and all of you women idealise. And your love is dependent on our being good all very well.
But for the fact at the end of the play, the one who's doing idealising is Sir Robert Chiltern, who has a great speech calling his wife the pure image of all good things and singing can never touch you. Sounds pretty idealising to me, whereas it's Lady Chiltern who has to forgive her husband or she'll lose his love. In other words, that bit of the play place completely against the speech that's happening earlier in the play.
So what is the difference in men and women's lives? You've got very, very different speeches. No two speeches, no set of speech in the play combined to create a truth. It's deliberately multifocal and unstable in a way that I think about Wald's essays and the way that he uses that kind of dialogue form there, a sense in which there are all sorts of conversations and cross lines happening through the play.
Now, I want to play you just the one crucial scene, which is between Robert Charlton and Al Gore. It's the kind of confessions that you. You have to tell your wife that would be no man, that secret from his own wife. She did let me know how wonderful instinct about this comment. Federation. A of the. From the ethical and moral and ethical will that. Yes, my advice is to go with the people who have a serious talk about it, like they look like used just.
I'm not exactly sure yet, maybe when you get you can't get a bad name. You know, I got a name that's not as most memorable, hateful and dishonourable as most men would call it. Ugly names is not only wrong, but it never just happens to you when you have a man around you right in front of all dominated by the military. I was 22 at the time. I had the double misfortune of being well and poor. Two unforgivable things. I didn't have the funny ones, you know, that I did it.
That like is none of perhaps a good thing for most of us. It is not every man that. But I just want to tell this country what you did with the God of this century. Let's see what must happen at all costs. I must have what you want to make yourself, believe me, felt we would have succeeded just as well. But I would hope that when I was tired, worn out, disappointed, I wanted my success. When I was young, I couldn't wait. Robert, how would you solve this problem?
I do not sell myself on that. I call it success at the breakfast table. Yes, you said that is a great question. What do you think of doing such a thing? That's gone. No, it was a matter of identity and culture and. I a feel anything is more to resent the stupidity of the people of the administration. Stupidity sort of like feeding us. But how do they do it?
Tell me the. What do you think think it has already talking about what's going to decide whether to stop the rest of us to preach the gospel, to go right back to you and say, well, if there's anything you want to put together, the U.S. is doing very well. I'm actually part of the world and really enjoying my time in this country. I mean, the rich for this violation of ethics. Well, so what you got there?
That speech was you got that contrast between a kind of lounging, complacent, however charming, Lord Goring and Sir Robert Chilterns, in one sense, the kind of the serious one, the one is committed who's ready to challenge and analyse this stark difference and played out against the houses of Parliament. Remember, this is the heart of British government.
Now, you can you could try trying to understand the play by linking Sir Robert Chiltern with all those criminal heroes that world has, the countervail ghosts, the criminals, the inmates in Ballad of Reading Gaol, Lord Arthur Saville in Lord of the Savile's Crime and so on. There are lots of those defences and the defence of the criminal in the Solomon Islands socialism.
So you've got wild launching an attack on money worship in Solomon and socialism and the following critique where he says disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty, but to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. Men should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly fed animal.
He should decline to live like that and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing by our current Tory government. As the begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No, a poor man who is ungrateful and thrifty, discontented and rebellious is probably a real personality and has much in him.
He is, at any rate, a healthy protest. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property and admit of its accumulation alone as he himself is able to under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
So you could try and type Sir Robert Chiltern as a rebel in that form a rebel against a society of corruption and control through money.
But the fact is he kind of joins the gang. So if that is a society that is guilty of using wealth and desiring power over others, which is actually what Solomon and Socialism condemns as a creed, Sir Robert Chiltern both critiques it and joins the gang and notably at the end of the play, the idealising that's happening in politics is only shored up by his appointment to the cabinet. So he's got this reputation as a more noble and more moral and less lax politician than everybody else.
And he's now got a seat in the cabinet, which only supports that perpetuates the rottenness of the system that's been displayed in the play. And that's how it goes very closely alongside, say, Bernard Shaw with his houses on the kind of corruption of late 19th century capitalism and the perpetuation of the system there. So in that sense, it's a play. Also, think about the play's reflection of the audience.
So in its first performance and very early performances, cabinet ministers attended, the PM attended Lord Rothschild, head of Rothschild Banking and all the rest of it attended that kind of wealth and richness in the stalls, in the in the boxes and all the rest of it is exactly what's being portrayed and reflected on stage and linked in to corruption and money. So in another set and there's no purging, everybody is involved in that different ways.
It asks about where the money is and the whole system that's being looked at within the play, this idea of the scapegoating of the individual and the way the system works. So Robert Chilton is undersecretary for foreign affairs, now the undersecretary for foreign affairs. Sir Charles Bilk, who was a reforming politician that Walter couldn't exchange letters with an admirer of, was brought down by a divorce scandal and was thrown out.
And his career completely ruined Charles Stewart Parnell, who is the leader of the Irish Party and the main campaigner for Irish home rule, was simply brought down by a divorce case and a scandal where everybody knew what was really happening. But there was this kind of performance of scandal and horror at it and a performance of moral horror, just as Wilde himself the prescient in some ways that the structure that's being offered in an ideal husband.
So in that sense, it's a play that's both high melodrama and in another sense, quite acute, and cutting an almost prescient political analysis so you can have a look at the kind of performance that's about money and wealth and aristocracy and the performance, the morality that perpetuates society in that play performance as a kind of social corruption performance.
As Lady Chiltern imbibing those roles, I just want to end on a much more optimistic and it's wild refuses to say who Sir Robert Chiltern really is. So there are two film versions. This Alex called One and an Oliver Parker film version from Coramba just at the end of the 20th century. And in both of them, you get a speech, you get an extra scene at it in which Sir Robert Chiltern gives a speech in the House in which he affirms his real.
He stands up and says England has got a dangerous past of wanting money and power. But a new era is beginning, and it's shown by all refusing the Argentine canal scheme. And it's all about how he really is a good man and for everything. The play doesn't give that there's no answer to who he is now. And the importance of being earnest is in many ways the absolute Kontum opposite to that.
The importance being honest, I want to end on as the play that is about self-conscious performance, then is a play in which every character, it's a kind of utopian anarchy, every character gets to create and perform themselves. So it's anything but an ideal society in other ways. It's ruled over by Lady Bracknell, who only cares about money and birth does not mean she's the one who famously and wonderfully responds to the news that Jack's an orphan.
But lose one parent might be considered a misfortune. But to lose two looks like carelessness, there's got to be ultimate in callousness. Um, she represents the society. It's a kind of matriarchy of absolute power and completely callous. And despite that, every character spends the entire time creating their own fantasies, which then by the end of the play have miraculously come true.
So Cecily Diary and Jackie's earnest analogy, having a brother and all the rest of it all miraculously come true. So reality in that play distorts around their performances. There's no difference between performance and truth. One becomes the other in it, and there's no sense in which the marriage is at the end of the play are fixing these characters into truth and good behaviour.
So Jack tends to Gwendoline at the end of the play and says, Gwendoline, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? And when Ian says I can feel, I feel you are sure to change. In other words, you're not going to carry on with any of this truth nonsense from now on.
And there's also it's a wonderful play that when it comes to sexual roles and gender roles, they're completely that wonderful kind of play within that play of gender roles and all the rest of it. So it's the women who effectively do the proposing in the plays, the women who are absolutely in command, whereas Algy, for example, arrived to stay for a week with three large three large suitcases, a hat to hatboxes and a luncheon basket.
So he's got about 18 changes, the costumes and lots of hats in there. And they're very. And that said, the men are purely decorative in that play. So Lady Bracknell, when she interviews Jack for his eligibility, it's delighted to hear that he smokes because, too, there are too many idle young men in London attitudes and a man needs an occupation of some kind. Oh, she's also delighted that he's ignorant because ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit.
Touch it and the bloom is gone. So she would much prefer he was ignorant, purely decorative and idle. That's all a man needs to be in his play in that sense. So it's together with that. And again, remember, it's a play in which all those kind of gay puns that it's sewn into the text. It's a play that's multiple in all sorts of ways. Wald's absolutely playing with his audience. So all that stuff about silver cigarette cases as turned up in the trials exchange of silver cigarette cases,
was one of those kind of exchange between world and his various lovers. Just as the whole thing about the importance of being earnest, which is a pun on Euronest Uranus being one of the absolute kind of just coined very, very recently terms for the new type of a homosexual. So this kind of play on that, I have to say the the pun, the supposed pun on Bunbury in the word buns for buttocks is only comes into coinage in the 1960s in America.
But it's also wonderfully Waldy and I think he. I love the fact that there's other and that's kind of come into existence in the play, so it's a fantastic play in which everybody itself creating in which the language itself twists round. So language doesn't fix things. It plays games just the same way.
So when Jack finds out is told by celestially rushes up and says, you'll never guess who's coming to tea, your brother Ernest and Jack says, I haven't got a brother and says, listen, you think he's spoken the truth. At which point he says, OK, don't say that. Whatever he's done, he's still your brother. In other words, it's kind of whatever that each expression turns around to become what it needs to be.
There's this kind of mutual game that all the characters play of absolutely accepting the truths that each other delivers. So in that sense, it's wonderfully anarchic. There are no rules. There are no meanings that are fixed in that play. Just like Canon Chasuble sermon on the meaning of the manner in the wilderness, which can be performed at. He then has wonderful list of everything from christenings to funerals and harvest festivals and all the rest of it.
The same speech. That's all purposes because it's infinitely mutable. And this is what that's what you get in that play. It's that idea of the command of your own performance where performance becomes ultimately liberating. It's a farce in which all these truths come out and nobody's fixed by those truths in which sins or revealed and nobody gets punished for them. They get rewarded for them. There's no fixing happening in there.
And poor old Lady Bracknell, who wishes to do nothing but pass judgement on people, is absolutely impotent in trying to punish anybody. In that sense, it's wild. Guess PEX and all sorts of ways and every meaning of that word. It's a playful, performative, unfixed text that this wonderful celebration of gender freedom, sexual freedom, absolute anarchic freedom to create yourself.
And it's that kind of performance that is in one sense running problematically through wild other plays up against all the power in society. But in the importance of being honest, he let it loose and it's there that I want to end with that fantastic power of performance. I'm also tempted I was tempted to end the last quote I've given you on the handout is wild speech, final curtain of lady. This time it's where turn to the audience.
He came up on stage after ladies to be found and said to the audience, Ladies and gentlemen, I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost of highly of the play as I do myself. So it's that while telling the performances, the audience performing as much as the play is performing.
So I'd like to end by saying thank you enormously for your reputation and that your appreciation had been most intelligent. Thank you.