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An Ideal Husband

Autor Oscar Wilde
en Limba Engleză Paperback
The play opens during a dinner party at the home of Sir Robert Chiltern in London's fashionable Grosvenor Square. Sir Robert, a prestigious member of the House of Commons, and his wife, Lady Chiltern, are hosting a gathering that includes his friend Lord Goring, a dandified bachelor and close friend to the Chilterns, Mabel Chiltern, and other genteel guests. During the party, Mrs. Cheveley, an enemy of Lady Chiltern's from their school days, attempts to blackmail Sir Robert into supporting a fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. Apparently, Mrs. Cheveley's dead mentor and lover, Baron Arnheim, convinced the young Sir Robert to sell him a Cabinet secret, a secret that suggested he buy stocks in the Suez Canal three days before the British government announced its purchase. Sir Robert made his fortune with that illicit money, and Mrs. Cheveley has the letter to prove his crime. Fearing the ruin of both career and marriage, Sir Robert submits to her demands. When Mrs. Cheveley pointedly informs Lady Chiltern of Sir Robert's change of heart regarding the canal scheme, the morally inflexible Lady Chiltern, unaware of both her husband's past and the blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert renege on his promise. For Lady Chiltern, their marriage is predicated on her having an "ideal husband"-that is, a model spouse in both private and public life that she can worship: thus Sir Robert must remain unimpeachable in all his decisions. Sir Robert complies with the lady's wishes and apparently seals his doom. Also toward the end of Act I, Mabel and Lord Goring come upon a diamond brooch that Lord Goring gave someone many years ago. Goring takes the brooch and asks that Mabel inform him if anyone comes to retrieve it. In the second act, which also takes place at Sir Robert's house, Lord Goring urges Sir Robert to fight Mrs. Cheveley and admit his guilt to his wife. He also reveals that he and Mrs. Cheveley were formerly engaged. After finishing his conversation with Sir Robert, Goring engages in flirtatious banter with Mabel. He also takes Lady Chiltern aside and obliquely urges her to be less morally inflexible and more forgiving. Once Goring leaves, Mrs. Cheveley appears, unexpected, in search of a brooch she lost the previous evening. Incensed at Sir Robert's reneging on his promise, she ultimately exposes Sir Robert to his wife once they are both in the room. Unable to accept a Sir Robert now unmasked, Lady Chiltern then denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781548102906
ISBN-10: 1548102903
Pagini: 88
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 5 mm
Greutate: 0.13 kg

Descriere

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One of the nineteenth century's most successful and most frequently revived plays, An Ideal Husband has divided critics more than any other of Wilde's plays. Treating political intrigue, financial fraud, blackmail, scandal and spin, and the role of women in public life, it is a play which engaged with issues of vital importance to its late-Victorian audience, which continue to resonate today.

Sos Eltis, a specialist in Victorian drama and its relation to women's issues, provides a stimulating new perspective on An Ideal Husband, through an introduction that looks at its relation with contemporary social purity campaigns, women's rights, and political scandals. The introduction also gives a substantial performance history, with particular reference to the play's film versions and the influential Peter Hall theatre production.

Notă biografică

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, also known as Oscar Wilde, was an Irish poet and playwright who lived from 16 October 1854 to 30 November 1900. He wrote in a variety of genres throughout the 1880s before becoming one of London's most well-known playwrights in the early 1890s. The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays and epigrams, as well as the circumstances surrounding his meningitis-related early death at age 46 and criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual activities in "one of the earliest celebrity trials," is what people will remember him for most. Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin, Wilde's parents were. French and German were picked up by young Wilde with ease. While in college, Wilde read the Greats and distinguished himself as an outstanding student of classical literature, first at Trinity College Dublin and then at Oxford. He became involved with the aestheticism movement, which was being spearheaded by two of his professors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Wilde moved to London after finishing college and became a part of rich social and cultural circles. Queensberry intended to publicly humiliate Wilde by tossing a bouquet of decaying vegetables onto the stage, but Wilde was informed and had Queensberry turned away from the theater.