1 00:00:00,420 --> 00:00:08,640 Wild plays what I was saying last week about wild and sexuality and how far wild opposed to this kind of typing, 2 00:00:08,640 --> 00:00:18,600 this kind of limiting and judging of individuals and instead, central to pretty much all of his writing, his methods, his doctrines, 3 00:00:18,600 --> 00:00:26,850 his theories, everything he says is individualism, the rights of the individual to develop themselves free from pressures from society, 4 00:00:26,850 --> 00:00:34,080 free from expectation's duties and all the rest, and how far sexuality is absolutely central to that. 5 00:00:34,080 --> 00:00:41,040 And if it's about self realisation, then there are very few things that are more central to you, arguably, than your sexuality. 6 00:00:41,040 --> 00:00:45,870 So another thing that fits in with this is wild ideas on performance. 7 00:00:45,870 --> 00:00:53,190 So essentially Wild doesn't offer a model of the self as essential as Essentialists. 8 00:00:53,190 --> 00:01:00,540 In that sense, it's not about one fixed interior true self as a model of identity. 9 00:01:00,540 --> 00:01:04,920 Rather, he offers a very performative model of identity. 10 00:01:04,920 --> 00:01:14,520 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. 11 00:01:14,520 --> 00:01:20,790 So to act, to perform, if not the opposite of your identity or your character or interior self, 12 00:01:20,790 --> 00:01:25,170 it's simply another manifestation of it, another means of realising yourself so. 13 00:01:25,170 --> 00:01:30,630 Similarly, in the picture of Dorian Grey, you get the following. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? 14 00:01:30,630 --> 00:01:35,580 I think not. It is merely the method by which we can multiply our personalities. 15 00:01:35,580 --> 00:01:43,890 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, 16 00:01:43,890 --> 00:01:52,740 permanent, reliable and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, 17 00:01:52,740 --> 00:01:58,290 multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion 18 00:01:58,290 --> 00:02:04,380 and whose very flesh was tainted with a monstrous maladies of the dead in context. 19 00:02:04,380 --> 00:02:07,710 In the novel, when you get the its insincerity. Such a terrible thing. 20 00:02:07,710 --> 00:02:10,920 I think not. That sounds very much like a narrative, 21 00:02:10,920 --> 00:02:17,460 an authorial voice until the beginning of the next paragraph suddenly distances and gives you another voice that said so at least so tiny. 22 00:02:17,460 --> 00:02:26,250 Right, thought Dorian Grey. So that very kind of multiplicity that is contained is being talked about, is being enacted in the text itself. 23 00:02:26,250 --> 00:02:34,230 There's a kind of multiplicity and splitting of voices and indefiniteness and uncertainty happening about who's speaking and how at that point. 24 00:02:34,230 --> 00:02:44,820 And this multiple and mobile self, this mutable, performed self makes performance a mode of self realisation so that to perform is 25 00:02:44,820 --> 00:02:49,890 also to be and you can be as multiple as your performance is not fixed and typed. 26 00:02:49,890 --> 00:02:56,610 It's one of the primary ways in which world undermines that idea of typing, that either fixing and finding a true self. 27 00:02:56,610 --> 00:03:04,530 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? 28 00:03:04,530 --> 00:03:09,510 How are you meant to read interior from exterior in that sense? 29 00:03:09,510 --> 00:03:14,430 And this a lot of self realisation. Well, there is this right to create the self. 30 00:03:14,430 --> 00:03:21,810 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 31 00:03:21,810 --> 00:03:30,600 about the self as a work of art that you yourself are free to mould and to interpret as you choose. 32 00:03:30,600 --> 00:03:37,710 So in one sense, what Wild's doing is rejecting this notion of truth and fixed identity, 33 00:03:37,710 --> 00:03:46,380 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, 34 00:03:46,380 --> 00:03:55,140 where he envisions a utopian society in which there are no duties, no laws, no constraints upon the individual whatsoever. 35 00:03:55,140 --> 00:03:59,430 No property, no marriage, no family. 36 00:03:59,430 --> 00:04:01,350 You're absolutely free to develop attitudes. 37 00:04:01,350 --> 00:04:08,850 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. 38 00:04:08,850 --> 00:04:13,950 Now, that's the only point where you see this idea of the organic, 39 00:04:13,950 --> 00:04:19,470 in a sense sort of freely developing and almost in that image of something kind of organic, 40 00:04:19,470 --> 00:04:26,760 something single in some ways, but it's not realised anywhere outside of that utopian society. 41 00:04:26,760 --> 00:04:33,120 And instead, Walt spends a lot of time along with this idea of the the freedom of self creation. 42 00:04:33,120 --> 00:04:39,510 There's also another mode of performance he talks about, which in a sense is the socially enforced performance, 43 00:04:39,510 --> 00:04:45,990 either so many of his characters, in a sense, split into those who can control performance, who can play it performance, 44 00:04:45,990 --> 00:04:52,140 who can keep society at arm's length with their role playing their control or the rest of it, 45 00:04:52,140 --> 00:04:59,800 and the others who are in a sense, unconsciously performing the individual who has imbibed social expectations and so on. 46 00:04:59,800 --> 00:05:05,530 And isn't even conscious of their kind of distortion of self into these roles. 47 00:05:05,530 --> 00:05:14,620 So, for example, while talks about even worse than Tyranny's, are those societies in which authority is expressed through kindness and rewards, 48 00:05:14,620 --> 00:05:20,050 because people in that case are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them. 49 00:05:20,050 --> 00:05:22,450 And so go through their lives in a sort of course, 50 00:05:22,450 --> 00:05:29,050 comfort like petite animals without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, 51 00:05:29,050 --> 00:05:30,970 living by other people's standards, 52 00:05:30,970 --> 00:05:38,890 wearing practically what one may call other people's Second-Hand clothes and never being themselves for a single moment. 53 00:05:38,890 --> 00:05:42,250 So what you have here are two kinds of performance. 54 00:05:42,250 --> 00:05:50,860 One, self-conscious, self delighting, creative, artistic, the other unconscious and imbibing of social attitudes, 55 00:05:50,860 --> 00:05:55,330 social modes, social assumptions, essential, essentially mimicking. 56 00:05:55,330 --> 00:05:59,980 And it's a distortion, a deletion of the self and erasure of the self. 57 00:05:59,980 --> 00:06:04,510 Now, these ideas of performance have obvious relevance to world place, 58 00:06:04,510 --> 00:06:11,830 which are in themselves very obviously performative and about performance in all sorts of intricate and self-conscious ways. 59 00:06:11,830 --> 00:06:19,450 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. 60 00:06:19,450 --> 00:06:26,890 Now, one of the most influential sort of central Victorian modes of performance is melodrama and melodrama, 61 00:06:26,890 --> 00:06:30,760 which he made just now with a sort of set of extravagant plots and the idea of stock types 62 00:06:30,760 --> 00:06:36,880 and all the rest of it central to pretty much every melodrama plot is the idea of revelation. 63 00:06:36,880 --> 00:06:42,100 So melodramas are absolutely full of innocent people condemned for crimes and innocent 64 00:06:42,100 --> 00:06:46,690 people misjudged and villains who are hiding their villainy for years on stage, 65 00:06:46,690 --> 00:06:52,400 even if they're revealing it to the audience. And melodramas don't necessarily end happily. 66 00:06:52,400 --> 00:06:57,020 But they do end with the revelation of truth and truth about character. 67 00:06:57,020 --> 00:07:04,550 So absolutely central to melodrama is the mode of revelation and recognition, public recognition of the truth. 68 00:07:04,550 --> 00:07:12,230 So the wrongly accused may die, you know, before the curtain comes down, but their innocence will also be recognised. 69 00:07:12,230 --> 00:07:17,870 So that becomes a kind of central trope in melodrama. And it's so much so it gets almost religious significance. 70 00:07:17,870 --> 00:07:22,910 And Peter Brookes, who's one of the main theorists of our melodrama, so he writes in his book, 71 00:07:22,910 --> 00:07:29,340 The Melodramatic Imagination, Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid. 72 00:07:29,340 --> 00:07:35,060 The characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, 73 00:07:35,060 --> 00:07:41,090 dramatise through their heightened and polarised words and gestures the whole of their relationship. 74 00:07:41,090 --> 00:07:47,960 Life tends in this fiction towards ever more concentrated and totally expressive gestures and statements. 75 00:07:47,960 --> 00:07:54,170 So that's idea of the absolute in the revelation, everything expressed, even if expressed without language through gesture. 76 00:07:54,170 --> 00:08:00,980 But think about the very fact that you can express in a truth through gesture suggests something so clearly legible that 77 00:08:00,980 --> 00:08:07,970 doesn't even need its absolute kind of instinctive recognition of the truth of a melodrama is clearly still popular. 78 00:08:07,970 --> 00:08:11,210 Right through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, 79 00:08:11,210 --> 00:08:17,120 there's still huge blockbuster melodramas playing at this point and what's clearly in conversation with melodrama. 80 00:08:17,120 --> 00:08:22,070 So lots of those standard melodrama tropes and characters like the fallen woman, 81 00:08:22,070 --> 00:08:25,820 the innocent maidens seduced the illegitimate son and all the rest of it. 82 00:08:25,820 --> 00:08:32,510 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. 83 00:08:32,510 --> 00:08:35,780 So well, it's very clearly in conversation with that. 84 00:08:35,780 --> 00:08:42,860 But notably and Walt has plenty of revelation in his place, but notably, they don't happen in the full fact. 85 00:08:42,860 --> 00:08:50,410 In the last act, revelations in Wild's plays tend to happen in the first or second act. 86 00:08:50,410 --> 00:08:57,700 So if you see, you know, revelation about who Mrs. it happens by the end of, 87 00:08:57,700 --> 00:09:00,910 you know, certainly within the first act you get the first bitten by the second act. 88 00:09:00,910 --> 00:09:07,960 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. 89 00:09:07,960 --> 00:09:13,210 The last act is where it complicates further where she isn't either simply the fallen woman, 90 00:09:13,210 --> 00:09:20,500 nor is she the delinquent mother who's now sacrificing herself. She's something beyond any of those roles and expectations. 91 00:09:20,500 --> 00:09:28,270 Similarly, in a woman of no importance, you know who Mrs. Arbuthnot is by the end of the second act, 92 00:09:28,270 --> 00:09:32,440 but who who she is in the sense of the revelation of her past and on who she actually is. 93 00:09:32,440 --> 00:09:39,910 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. 94 00:09:39,910 --> 00:09:44,320 So there's a sense in which, well, structures work on revelation and then complication. 95 00:09:44,320 --> 00:09:47,800 It's complete opposite to the standard, what's meant to be the well-made play structure, 96 00:09:47,800 --> 00:09:58,150 as described by Bernard Shaw, which was a situation complication of the great scene to be made. 97 00:09:58,150 --> 00:10:02,620 And then they pneumo and nothing else plays don't unknot. 98 00:10:02,620 --> 00:10:09,010 They re not. They get more complicated in that sense of trying to pass judgement and so on. 99 00:10:09,010 --> 00:10:14,710 Now, in contrast to this and this structure of revelation and judgement and very often 100 00:10:14,710 --> 00:10:19,510 clear judgement of characters according to clear set social standards and orthodoxy, 101 00:10:19,510 --> 00:10:21,910 moral authority and social orthodoxies, 102 00:10:21,910 --> 00:10:28,370 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. 103 00:10:28,370 --> 00:10:37,570 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. 104 00:10:37,570 --> 00:10:44,500 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, 105 00:10:44,500 --> 00:10:52,740 that pretty much always a clear judgement upon the characters and the need to to conform with social orthodoxy. 106 00:10:52,740 --> 00:10:59,250 But a contrary line of influence and context would be Ibsen's plays. 107 00:10:59,250 --> 00:11:09,180 So in Ipsen and she describes Ibsen's plays as instead a situation complication centre fair discussion. 108 00:11:09,180 --> 00:11:15,450 So when all this is, then that's a very short version of it, because discussion is what his plays are about. 109 00:11:15,450 --> 00:11:19,070 So classically one that absolutely fits with that description. 110 00:11:19,070 --> 00:11:26,910 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, 111 00:11:26,910 --> 00:11:31,950 and then comes to Nora Helma saying, OK, you're not the man I thought you were. 112 00:11:31,950 --> 00:11:36,320 I'm not the woman I thought I was. Let's sit down and talk. 113 00:11:36,320 --> 00:11:42,600 She actually literally says, sit down, we need to talk. And then that last act is discussion. 114 00:11:42,600 --> 00:11:46,590 But importantly, also in that actually started as the hit song. 115 00:11:46,590 --> 00:11:51,780 But as her husband, Songbird is the little squirrel protected from the outside world. 116 00:11:51,780 --> 00:11:58,590 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. 117 00:11:58,590 --> 00:12:00,910 She then turns around and casts off that role. 118 00:12:00,910 --> 00:12:06,610 She says, I spent my whole life being a doll in your dolls first in my father's doll house, now in yours. 119 00:12:06,610 --> 00:12:13,150 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. 120 00:12:13,150 --> 00:12:19,150 At the same time as what she becomes, who she now is, is unfixed by the play, 121 00:12:19,150 --> 00:12:22,480 so the play ends with her leaving the house, the door slamming behind her. 122 00:12:22,480 --> 00:12:27,130 It ends with who she might become with this possibility that the miracle of miracles will happen 123 00:12:27,130 --> 00:12:32,020 and she and her husband will have a real marriage based on genuine knowledge of each other. 124 00:12:32,020 --> 00:12:36,070 But that's held off in the distance. So in that sense, again, she's not fixed. 125 00:12:36,070 --> 00:12:41,560 Ipsum writes characters that are in conversation with social expectations, 126 00:12:41,560 --> 00:12:48,010 characters who are absolutely moulded by and influenced by social issues, by contemporary morality. 127 00:12:48,010 --> 00:12:54,970 And so in many ways, he's interested in this kind of post Darwinist idea of adaptation to environment 128 00:12:54,970 --> 00:12:58,300 and the pressures of environment upon the development of the individual. 129 00:12:58,300 --> 00:13:05,410 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. 130 00:13:05,410 --> 00:13:08,260 And in that sense, part of what Wild's doing is something that's much closer, 131 00:13:08,260 --> 00:13:17,560 perhaps to Ibsen's idea of the multilayered and unstable kind of characters he's writing, which are in conversation with social conventions. 132 00:13:17,560 --> 00:13:22,780 He said, well, does anybody, in a sense putting his characters in conversation with melodramatic types? 133 00:13:22,780 --> 00:13:27,040 So you think you can judge them according to that, and then they start doing more complicated things? 134 00:13:27,040 --> 00:13:34,840 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, 135 00:13:34,840 --> 00:13:40,120 Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Allenby and a woman of importance, 136 00:13:40,120 --> 00:13:45,100 Mrs. chiefly in many ways an ideal husband, Lord Ellingsworth, Lady Plimsoll, 137 00:13:45,100 --> 00:13:49,270 Cecil Graham, the loads of those kind of dandies who absolutely know what they're doing. 138 00:13:49,270 --> 00:13:55,450 They may or may not be successful in their schemes, but they can see the performance for what it is. 139 00:13:55,450 --> 00:14:01,750 Whereas Mrs. Arbuthnot, in a woman of no importance, she's the fallen woman who by the end of the second act, 140 00:14:01,750 --> 00:14:05,110 you've got the whole thing about, you know, her shame and stop Gerald. 141 00:14:05,110 --> 00:14:08,560 He is your father and all of that kind of melodramatic language. 142 00:14:08,560 --> 00:14:19,030 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, 143 00:14:19,030 --> 00:14:24,970 she will not marry him because it's beneath her, but also the language in which that expression get amazing. 144 00:14:24,970 --> 00:14:29,980 When Walt uses melodramatic language and uses that kind of register, 145 00:14:29,980 --> 00:14:33,970 it's often it sounds more conventional in the texture of language and often the 146 00:14:33,970 --> 00:14:39,100 actual emotions and thoughts being expressed are anything but conventional. 147 00:14:39,100 --> 00:14:44,590 So in that speech, there's a wonderful speech in there, Mrs. Arbuthnot, in which she begs Gerald, 148 00:14:44,590 --> 00:14:53,350 she calls Gerald the little lamb that God sent me and says ends with child of my shame, this new child of my shame. 149 00:14:53,350 --> 00:14:59,390 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, 150 00:14:59,390 --> 00:15:06,220 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. 151 00:15:06,220 --> 00:15:12,550 Um, so it's upset. And she says, I would rather I would rather have had you than been innocent. 152 00:15:12,550 --> 00:15:20,800 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, 153 00:15:20,800 --> 00:15:26,140 performing the work, the role of the good, repentant Marilyn. 154 00:15:26,140 --> 00:15:33,610 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. 155 00:15:33,610 --> 00:15:39,100 There's a sense in which she's imbibed the moral and sexual judgement of society upon her. 156 00:15:39,100 --> 00:15:45,670 And where she is under that is up to, in a sense, performance how the actress performs that role. 157 00:15:45,670 --> 00:15:53,650 And your projection, as you're always doing as a theatrical audience, your projection from the exterior into the interior. 158 00:15:53,650 --> 00:15:59,380 So remember, unless you've got soliloquy as a kind of supposedly giving you the direct, 159 00:15:59,380 --> 00:16:07,690 unmediated voice of the inner self of a character, you are always judging from the outside, you're judging by language and action. 160 00:16:07,690 --> 00:16:15,100 And so world uses that that sense of not just the conscious performance, the characters, but you're always negotiating from the outside. 161 00:16:15,100 --> 00:16:19,210 You're always imagining what's inside and the questions of what might be there. 162 00:16:19,210 --> 00:16:21,700 So in that sense, this indeterminacy judgement's, 163 00:16:21,700 --> 00:16:31,270 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. 164 00:16:31,270 --> 00:16:38,200 Now, in my experience of students studying the plays, it's very hard often to get past surface. 165 00:16:38,200 --> 00:16:41,470 So Stal not sincerity is the vital thing and manners before morals. 166 00:16:41,470 --> 00:16:47,140 There's a sense in which this glittering surface, the way in which so many of the characters talk in epigrams and paradoxes. 167 00:16:47,140 --> 00:16:53,680 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. 168 00:16:53,680 --> 00:16:59,350 So what I want to do now is go through an ideal husband to talk about what it's debating, 169 00:16:59,350 --> 00:17:06,310 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. 170 00:17:06,310 --> 00:17:12,460 So hands up. Who's read An Ideal Husband? OK, I'll give you a plot summary, OK? 171 00:17:12,460 --> 00:17:16,180 For those who haven't yet read it, he goes. 172 00:17:16,180 --> 00:17:24,340 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. 173 00:17:24,340 --> 00:17:31,120 And there's an enormous tapestry at the top of the stairs and they're greeting all the guests arriving, all aristocracy. 174 00:17:31,120 --> 00:17:32,500 And he's standing there with his wife, 175 00:17:32,500 --> 00:17:41,110 Lady Kilton and Mrs chiefly arrives friend of a friend who is a woman hugely interested in politics and investment. 176 00:17:41,110 --> 00:17:49,000 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. 177 00:17:49,000 --> 00:17:54,190 Anita's can't possibly do so. It's a fraudulent scheme. And she goes he goes, it's a swindle. 178 00:17:54,190 --> 00:17:58,480 And she goes, no, no, no, it's not a swindle. It's a it's a daring investment. 179 00:17:58,480 --> 00:18:02,320 And he says, no, it's a swindle. Let us call things by their proper name. 180 00:18:02,320 --> 00:18:07,840 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. 181 00:18:07,840 --> 00:18:11,740 And she says, I have not forgotten that. 182 00:18:11,740 --> 00:18:19,000 I'm speaking to a man who sold a cabinet secret for money. And that was the beginning of his wealth and position. 183 00:18:19,000 --> 00:18:27,360 And I have the letter you wrote to ban on home that sold that secret. 184 00:18:27,360 --> 00:18:35,640 I will disgrace you unless you back my scheme and he does hemming and hawing and says, OK, I'll back the scheme. 185 00:18:35,640 --> 00:18:41,310 But then when he talks to his extremely moral wife later and he says, oh, I'm I'm going to back the scheme. 186 00:18:41,310 --> 00:18:45,300 And she says, no, it's immoral, it's wrong. And you are above such things. 187 00:18:45,300 --> 00:18:53,360 You are noble. You're always terribly complex politics, dear politics, very, very complicated things, you know, but but it's about doing right. 188 00:18:53,360 --> 00:18:58,860 So that's in private. Public, very different matter. She does know what is right and private is also right in public, 189 00:18:58,860 --> 00:19:04,590 etc. and she gets him to write a letter to Mrs Cheaply saying he won't back the scheme. 190 00:19:04,590 --> 00:19:13,230 And at the same time, at the same party, Lord Goring, a dandy about town, finds a brooch, a snake headed brooch. 191 00:19:13,230 --> 00:19:23,260 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. 192 00:19:23,260 --> 00:19:33,940 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, 193 00:19:33,940 --> 00:19:37,030 does he know of any scandal that he can bring down? This is chiefly through. 194 00:19:37,030 --> 00:19:45,820 And Lord Goring says, no, I can't achieve the kind of woman who just carries off any scandal. 195 00:19:45,820 --> 00:19:52,420 She's untouchable. But I will try. And there's a kind of conversation between the going because how could you have done this? 196 00:19:52,420 --> 00:20:00,430 And so Robert defends himself as having simply been ambitious and grasp power as he needed to know. 197 00:20:00,430 --> 00:20:08,680 And then Mrs chiefly arrives to visit. And Mrs chiefly Lady Chiltern is very contemptuous of her. 198 00:20:08,680 --> 00:20:15,330 She was a thief at school, showed her the door, and Mrs chiefly turns around and says. 199 00:20:15,330 --> 00:20:26,810 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. 200 00:20:26,810 --> 00:20:33,340 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? 201 00:20:33,340 --> 00:20:39,540 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. 202 00:20:39,540 --> 00:20:46,860 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. 203 00:20:46,860 --> 00:20:53,430 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. 204 00:20:53,430 --> 00:20:59,460 It's in Lord Goring's rooms in London and Gertrude Chilton has written him a letter. 205 00:20:59,460 --> 00:21:09,360 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. 206 00:21:09,360 --> 00:21:17,610 I'm coming to you, Gertrude. So and then so he's expecting Gertrude Tilton to arrive and then his father arrives. 207 00:21:17,610 --> 00:21:23,500 This is about ten o'clock at night. And then his father writes, So obsessed with Butler Phipps if. 208 00:21:23,500 --> 00:21:27,520 Lady Chiltern is a lady who's going to arrive, and when this lady arrives, 209 00:21:27,520 --> 00:21:32,110 can you not let my father know and so on, but show her into the library so he talks. 210 00:21:32,110 --> 00:21:40,960 Lord Lord Caversham, his father and then not Lady Chiltern, but was just chiefly arrives and shunned the library. 211 00:21:40,960 --> 00:21:47,980 And then little Caversham leaves. But and the butler tells him that Mrs chiefly that a lady is in his library. 212 00:21:47,980 --> 00:21:54,850 He thinks it's Lady Chiltern. And then so Robert Chilton arrives and says, What am I going to do now? 213 00:21:54,850 --> 00:22:04,250 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. 214 00:22:04,250 --> 00:22:13,480 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 215 00:22:13,480 --> 00:22:17,980 friend Lord Goring for having supposedly being in league with this woman who's blackmailing him, 216 00:22:17,980 --> 00:22:22,510 at which point Goring thinking that it's this lady Chiltern. 217 00:22:22,510 --> 00:22:27,430 So Robert's wife says, no, no, no, no, no, there's nothing, nothing wrong, nothing immoral. 218 00:22:27,430 --> 00:22:31,780 Do not think anything against this woman. She is utterly good and utterly pure. 219 00:22:31,780 --> 00:22:36,520 And so Robert storms out and then mischievously comes out the library with a big grin on her face. 220 00:22:36,520 --> 00:22:43,100 And he's totally shocked by that. And she then says, OK, I'll do you a deal. 221 00:22:43,100 --> 00:22:49,100 I will swap you so Robert's letter, I'll let him off the blackmail in return for you marrying me, 222 00:22:49,100 --> 00:22:55,790 I fancy being married again lots of times, very entertaining. And he says, no, I'm not into self-sacrifice. 223 00:22:55,790 --> 00:23:00,200 It's terribly bad, especially for the people you're sacrificing yourself for. 224 00:23:00,200 --> 00:23:07,100 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, 225 00:23:07,100 --> 00:23:14,150 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? 226 00:23:14,150 --> 00:23:17,750 And she says, Oh, yes, how clever of you, how do you go? And then he says, Oh, no such brooch. 227 00:23:17,750 --> 00:23:23,360 It's a bracelet, and clasped it on her wrist. At which point he then says, it's a bracelet. 228 00:23:23,360 --> 00:23:29,660 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. 229 00:23:29,660 --> 00:23:33,140 Just take it off and offers nothing. You can't accuse me and then you can't get it off. 230 00:23:33,140 --> 00:23:38,270 It's got a hidden cash, so the brooch turns into a bracelet and you can't get it off your wrist. 231 00:23:38,270 --> 00:23:46,220 And she's panicking. Leo Goring says, OK, give me to Robert's letter and I will take it off you. 232 00:23:46,220 --> 00:23:52,070 Otherwise, you're going to the police. And she finally gets in and gives him the letter and he burnt it. 233 00:23:52,070 --> 00:23:57,260 And then he releases the bracelet and just then she says, Oh, I feel terribly faint. 234 00:23:57,260 --> 00:24:02,510 Can you get me a glass of water? And was getting lots of water. She spotted Lady Chilton's letter. 235 00:24:02,510 --> 00:24:03,830 I want you. I need you. I'm coming, too. 236 00:24:03,830 --> 00:24:12,860 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? 237 00:24:12,860 --> 00:24:18,080 His wife is having an affair and she walks out the room with the letter. 238 00:24:18,080 --> 00:24:24,650 So final act. So, Robert, I'm not doing all right this last act. 239 00:24:24,650 --> 00:24:33,590 So Robert says so. Lord Goring tells Sir Robert that Lady Chiltern that he has got hold of the letter 240 00:24:33,590 --> 00:24:37,850 and burnt it and that Sir Robert is now safe and the children is hugely relieved. 241 00:24:37,850 --> 00:24:43,600 But no, Goring also says, but this is chiefly still the letter. 242 00:24:43,600 --> 00:24:49,750 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. 243 00:24:49,750 --> 00:24:53,290 I can't possibly. He says, no, you should tell your husband because I can't. 244 00:24:53,290 --> 00:25:00,640 He says, OK. And in the meanwhile, Sir Robert Chiltern, not knowing about his being off the hook and a letter being shot, 245 00:25:00,640 --> 00:25:06,520 has given a speech in the House in the House of Parliament condemning the Argentine Karnofsky. 246 00:25:06,520 --> 00:25:12,010 And on the basis of this, the great reports in the Times about his nobility and how he's much better politician 247 00:25:12,010 --> 00:25:16,780 and much higher moral standards and these foreign politicians and all the rest of it. 248 00:25:16,780 --> 00:25:24,130 And then you get to Robert meets Lady Chiltern and comes in with a letter in his hand, 249 00:25:24,130 --> 00:25:29,680 the letter that had been Mrs chiefly attent, but it's been taken out of the envelope by his secretary. 250 00:25:29,680 --> 00:25:32,950 So all he reads is, I need you. I want you. 251 00:25:32,950 --> 00:25:36,370 I'm coming to you, Gertrude. And he says, Is it true? 252 00:25:36,370 --> 00:25:41,560 Have you forgiven me? And she goes, Oh yes, yes, absolutely. Totally. Forgive me, lovely darling. 253 00:25:41,560 --> 00:25:42,940 And they're reconciled. 254 00:25:42,940 --> 00:25:49,960 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, 255 00:25:49,960 --> 00:25:57,850 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, 256 00:25:57,850 --> 00:26:01,820 oh, I'm not taking it. I resigned. 257 00:26:01,820 --> 00:26:10,100 And later, Chilton approves, at which point Lord Goring goes aside with his in the meanwhile, proposed to Mabel Chilton. 258 00:26:10,100 --> 00:26:20,000 So Robert's younger sister and Lord Chiltern Goreng takes Lady Chiltern aside and says, Don't do this, don't destroy Sir Robert. 259 00:26:20,000 --> 00:26:27,800 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. 260 00:26:27,800 --> 00:26:31,580 And he says it's not German philosophy. That's the heart of things. 261 00:26:31,580 --> 00:26:36,440 It's love. And a woman's duty is to forgive her husband and many other things. 262 00:26:36,440 --> 00:26:40,550 And a man's life is worth more and more value than a woman's. 263 00:26:40,550 --> 00:26:41,600 So her job is given, 264 00:26:41,600 --> 00:26:49,310 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, 265 00:26:49,310 --> 00:26:53,180 at which point he turns to his friend or Goring says, is there anything I can do for you? 266 00:26:53,180 --> 00:26:57,680 And says, yes, you could let me marry your sister. 267 00:26:57,680 --> 00:27:03,200 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. 268 00:27:03,200 --> 00:27:07,820 And it would be utterly unfair of my sisters to marry a man who's having an affair with somebody else, 269 00:27:07,820 --> 00:27:14,900 at which point Lady Chiltern tells the truth and says that letter was addressed to him, not to you. 270 00:27:14,900 --> 00:27:19,070 I was the woman he was expecting. He wasn't having an affair with Mrs chiefly at all. 271 00:27:19,070 --> 00:27:23,810 And I'm terribly sorry I'm not having an affair with him myself. And she says, How could you not have trusted me? 272 00:27:23,810 --> 00:27:32,810 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. 273 00:27:32,810 --> 00:27:49,060 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. 274 00:27:49,060 --> 00:27:54,610 So what you have there is a fantastic mix of all sorts of different dramatic moves, 275 00:27:54,610 --> 00:28:00,280 so you've got the play of politics and intrigue and it's set right in the heart of the British government. 276 00:28:00,280 --> 00:28:06,400 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. 277 00:28:06,400 --> 00:28:11,830 You've got blackmail. You've got a glimpse into the corridors of power. 278 00:28:11,830 --> 00:28:19,030 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 279 00:28:19,030 --> 00:28:25,870 from the play as a kind of like a goody bag that you could use in parties yourself after that. 280 00:28:25,870 --> 00:28:28,960 There are discussions of public morality, the discussions of the role of women. 281 00:28:28,960 --> 00:28:37,540 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. 282 00:28:37,540 --> 00:28:42,160 Now, this kind of multiplicity was clearly picked up on by reviewers at the time. 283 00:28:42,160 --> 00:28:48,160 So, for example, a reviewer in like a JOCO said the story, which was presumably adapted from the Family Herald. 284 00:28:48,160 --> 00:28:50,560 That's what World said of a woman of no importance, 285 00:28:50,560 --> 00:28:58,720 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. 286 00:28:58,720 --> 00:29:02,440 But it requires a poet to appreciate the depth of the dramatic talent. 287 00:29:02,440 --> 00:29:06,250 And a pit, unfortunately, is one thing at the Haymarket Theatre. 288 00:29:06,250 --> 00:29:12,670 If some accomplished dramatist Mr Simmons, for instance, he was one of the most famous melodrama artists at the time, 289 00:29:12,670 --> 00:29:16,840 would only straighten out Mr Wilde's English into robust intelligibility. 290 00:29:16,840 --> 00:29:22,750 An audience on the Surrey side might enjoy the familiar flavour of this genteel melodrama. 291 00:29:22,750 --> 00:29:25,390 Now this place. So it's playing at the stage. 292 00:29:25,390 --> 00:29:31,090 It's playing in the heart of the West End and one of the most aristocratic kind of venues, the higher class venues. 293 00:29:31,090 --> 00:29:38,380 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. 294 00:29:38,380 --> 00:29:43,240 So there's a sense in which this is a play of multilayer as far as they're concerned. 295 00:29:43,240 --> 00:29:50,680 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. 296 00:29:50,680 --> 00:29:57,520 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. 297 00:29:57,520 --> 00:30:05,770 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. 298 00:30:05,770 --> 00:30:15,130 Now, Wilde in interview. So just as in De Profundis, he talks about I made of the drama of Perth. 299 00:30:15,130 --> 00:30:19,160 I made the drama as personal as the lyric and the summit. 300 00:30:19,160 --> 00:30:27,560 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. 301 00:30:27,560 --> 00:30:32,450 So an interview before the play opened, while it was interviewed and was asked by the journalist, 302 00:30:32,450 --> 00:30:36,260 what is your feeling towards your audiences, towards the public and welters? 303 00:30:36,260 --> 00:30:41,720 Which public? There are as many publics as there are personalities. Journalist tries again. 304 00:30:41,720 --> 00:30:46,880 Are you nervous on the night that you are producing a new play? Oh no, I am exquisitely indifferent. 305 00:30:46,880 --> 00:30:50,210 My nervousness ends at the last dress rehearsal. I know. 306 00:30:50,210 --> 00:30:56,180 Then what affect my new play as presented upon the stage has produced upon me. 307 00:30:56,180 --> 00:31:00,290 My interest in the play ends there and I feel curiously envious of the public. 308 00:31:00,290 --> 00:31:07,220 They have such wonderful fresh emotions in store for them. I laughed, but Mr. Wilde rebuked me with a look of surprise. 309 00:31:07,220 --> 00:31:12,470 It is the public not to the play that I desire to make a success, he said. 310 00:31:12,470 --> 00:31:19,490 And he continues. We shall never have a real drama in England until it is recognised that the play is personal and individual, 311 00:31:19,490 --> 00:31:23,900 a form of self-expression as a poem or a picture. 312 00:31:23,900 --> 00:31:26,630 So what you got? Again, there is this idea of not just the public, 313 00:31:26,630 --> 00:31:36,020 but many publics that multiplicity and uncertainty of interpretation and also this idea of the play as something for himself. 314 00:31:36,020 --> 00:31:40,310 So he's not offering it with a single meaning for everybody in any sense. 315 00:31:40,310 --> 00:31:47,870 So the reviews of their first performance of an ideal husband reveal a kind of moral confusion amongst critics, 316 00:31:47,870 --> 00:31:53,450 a huge uncertainty about how what kind of moral what kind of implication the women to read after the play. 317 00:31:53,450 --> 00:32:00,650 So, for example, in Pick Me Up, the the critic commented, Lady Chiltern is depressingly good all the time. 318 00:32:00,650 --> 00:32:05,690 Good enough to drive an ordinary husband to drink from a sheer monopoly of the cardinal virtues. 319 00:32:05,690 --> 00:32:13,730 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, 320 00:32:13,730 --> 00:32:19,970 I shall put his drawbacks down to the fact that he must have an abnormally good wife. 321 00:32:19,970 --> 00:32:27,950 Or, by contrast, maybe Walkley in the Speaker inveighed against Sir Robert Chiltern as basically a sordid rogue, 322 00:32:27,950 --> 00:32:32,510 somebody whose morality changed according to the circumstances and what suited him and 323 00:32:32,510 --> 00:32:37,130 said the moral of the play seems to be that the great thing is not to be found out. 324 00:32:37,130 --> 00:32:45,260 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. 325 00:32:45,260 --> 00:32:49,940 So he feels there is no kind of moral resolution offered by this play whatsoever. 326 00:32:49,940 --> 00:32:55,640 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. 327 00:32:55,640 --> 00:33:03,320 What sure does it say that Wilde is our only thorough playwright and playwright in the sense that he plays with everything, 328 00:33:03,320 --> 00:33:08,180 with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with a whole theatre. 329 00:33:08,180 --> 00:33:16,400 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. 330 00:33:16,400 --> 00:33:22,880 Whereas Wilde, as an Irishman plays with everything, even with things that matter hugely to him. 331 00:33:22,880 --> 00:33:26,880 So as a result of which, the Englishman is shocked at the dangers, 332 00:33:26,880 --> 00:33:32,450 the foundations of society when seriousness is publicly laughed at and to complete the odyssey of the situation, 333 00:33:32,450 --> 00:33:40,640 Mr while touching what he himself references, is absolutely the most sentimental dramatist of the day, she continues. 334 00:33:40,640 --> 00:33:47,990 It is useless to describe a play that which has no thesis, which is in the purest integrity, a play and nothing else. 335 00:33:47,990 --> 00:33:53,660 The six worst epigrams are mere arms handed with a kind smile to the average suburban play goer. 336 00:33:53,660 --> 00:33:58,040 The three best remain secrets between Mr Wilde and a few choice spirits. 337 00:33:58,040 --> 00:34:04,700 The modern note is struck in Sir Robert Chilterns assertion of the individuality and courage of his wrongdoing as against 338 00:34:04,700 --> 00:34:12,620 the mechanical stupidity of his stupidly good wife and in his bitter criticism of a love that is only the reward of merit. 339 00:34:12,620 --> 00:34:18,860 It is from the philosophy on which this scene is based that the most pregnant epigrams in the play have been condensed. 340 00:34:18,860 --> 00:34:26,920 Indeed, this is the only philosophy that has ever produced epigrams. So these are the moral problems inherent in the play, 341 00:34:26,920 --> 00:34:32,060 it's structured around a criminal and sympathy with a criminal, somebody who sold a cabinet secret for money. 342 00:34:32,060 --> 00:34:39,460 It's a kind of insider dealing as the foundation of his wealth. Now, Sir Robert Chiltern explicitly does not repent of its crime. 343 00:34:39,460 --> 00:34:45,430 He says, what century values is wealth. Without wealth, you can't do anything. 344 00:34:45,430 --> 00:34:49,920 And he says, I fought the century with its own weapons and won. 345 00:34:49,920 --> 00:34:53,520 He then says, oh, I gave lots of money to charity, sort of make up for it and all the rest of it. 346 00:34:53,520 --> 00:35:00,570 Now he isn't punished within the play, but actually rewarded with a seat in the heart of government. 347 00:35:00,570 --> 00:35:06,780 So the person whose sin is revealed, who's depressed and remember, he's ready, remember, 348 00:35:06,780 --> 00:35:13,350 not just that he sold his country wants for money, but he's ready to do it a second time to stave off scandal. 349 00:35:13,350 --> 00:35:19,680 So there's no sense at the beginning without the influence of his wife and so on, that he would have changed from that. 350 00:35:19,680 --> 00:35:24,060 Then you have all the way through this kind of playing with this idea of criminality. 351 00:35:24,060 --> 00:35:31,680 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. 352 00:35:31,680 --> 00:35:34,410 He's parallelled with the villain after the play. 353 00:35:34,410 --> 00:35:42,660 So Mrs. chiefly first phase of the Argentine Karnofsky, when Sir Robert calls it a swindle that has called things by the proper name, 354 00:35:42,660 --> 00:35:47,460 she then when she announces that she knows he first told his cabinet secret for money, he says, Oh, no, no, no. 355 00:35:47,460 --> 00:35:52,710 It's a very complicated transaction. She says it was a swindle. Let us call things by their proper name. 356 00:35:52,710 --> 00:35:55,950 So there's a deliberate she's paralleling and she carries on doing it, 357 00:35:55,950 --> 00:36:03,270 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. 358 00:36:03,270 --> 00:36:07,020 So there's a very interesting kind of paralleling what's a play where the hero 359 00:36:07,020 --> 00:36:11,280 and the villain or villainous are in a sense being parallel throughout the play. 360 00:36:11,280 --> 00:36:16,260 One gets rewarded, the other gets shown. The door, though importantly, misses, misses chiefly. 361 00:36:16,260 --> 00:36:21,720 She doesn't get what she wants, but she doesn't get shown up or anything else. 362 00:36:21,720 --> 00:36:25,200 There's no kind of unmasking of her going on in that sense. 363 00:36:25,200 --> 00:36:33,810 She leaves scot free in many ways against this idea of this idea of the villain and and corruption and so on. 364 00:36:33,810 --> 00:36:37,760 Against that, you have Lord Goring. He's another of wild, the hero. 365 00:36:37,760 --> 00:36:42,120 So very like Lord Illingworth and Lord Darlington and Lord Henry Wertham, 366 00:36:42,120 --> 00:36:48,270 except he becomes a force for he sort of sympathises with Africa and tries to bring everything together. 367 00:36:48,270 --> 00:36:57,570 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. 368 00:36:57,570 --> 00:37:04,470 And he criticises Sir Robert Chiltern for the shallowness of this desire for money and wealth. 369 00:37:04,470 --> 00:37:14,190 He calls that worship of wealth a thoroughly shallow creed. But as the play also emphasises, Little Goreng is born, as Robert points out, 370 00:37:14,190 --> 00:37:21,300 is born with birth, aristocratic status and money and has never known ambition. 371 00:37:21,300 --> 00:37:28,890 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, 372 00:37:28,890 --> 00:37:33,330 easy for you to think like that. He's one of the privileged. 373 00:37:33,330 --> 00:37:41,820 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, 374 00:37:41,820 --> 00:37:51,510 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. 375 00:37:51,510 --> 00:37:55,680 Then you have the issue of idealising within the play. 376 00:37:55,680 --> 00:38:03,360 So Lady Kilton fits with HESTA Worthley and Woman Unimportance fits with Lady Windemere in late winter with Fan. 377 00:38:03,360 --> 00:38:11,130 As a woman who has a hard and fast rules, a puritan who idealises and condemns, and she has to learn to forgive, 378 00:38:11,130 --> 00:38:16,950 to accept flaws in the human being, and in a sense that fits very closely with what society is guilty of. 379 00:38:16,950 --> 00:38:25,140 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. 380 00:38:25,140 --> 00:38:32,190 But the way that society works is this idea that all of us, that everybody else is pure and good. 381 00:38:32,190 --> 00:38:33,840 You scapegoat the individual. 382 00:38:33,840 --> 00:38:40,620 You need scandals as a kind of general whitewashing of everybody else so that there is no way you would be forgiven this error. 383 00:38:40,620 --> 00:38:44,370 Instead, it would be another of those scandals that go look at him. He's corrupt. 384 00:38:44,370 --> 00:38:50,790 The rest of us aren't. So there's a huge kind of idealising inside, which is what makes it opens up. 385 00:38:50,790 --> 00:38:57,120 Sir Robert Chiltern, the blackmail and makes his confession impossible. Public confession and forgiveness. 386 00:38:57,120 --> 00:39:03,120 So with this idea, what do we get with Lady Chiltern? All this thing about who characters all by the end of the play. 387 00:39:03,120 --> 00:39:10,260 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. 388 00:39:10,260 --> 00:39:17,190 But is that a sense in which she simply is scared of losing his love and is allowing corruption in the heart of government? 389 00:39:17,190 --> 00:39:23,530 Or is she a moralising force still standing next to him, making sure he doesn't do that again? 390 00:39:23,530 --> 00:39:31,340 Plate of not that at all. You could indicate it in performance, you could have her as a very strong figure, 391 00:39:31,340 --> 00:39:35,630 standing side by side with him, or you can have her body language has a huge amount. 392 00:39:35,630 --> 00:39:40,430 You can have her innocence defeated and sidelined with him stepping forward and taking control. 393 00:39:40,430 --> 00:39:47,570 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. 394 00:39:47,570 --> 00:39:51,890 The script does not answer it very importantly. 395 00:39:51,890 --> 00:39:57,560 And again, another theme that plays all the way through the play is the role of women in politics. 396 00:39:57,560 --> 00:40:03,920 So Sir Robert Chiltern, when he's trying to justify all the rest of it, his backing of the canal scheme does a hole. 397 00:40:03,920 --> 00:40:12,410 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. 398 00:40:12,410 --> 00:40:16,190 So that basic idea of the man's affair and the woman's sphere, the domestic savers, 399 00:40:16,190 --> 00:40:22,160 the public sphere, also the idea that politics is this kind of rough and tumble, 400 00:40:22,160 --> 00:40:27,620 much more cynical world as against the idea that women belong to the domestic and the much more idealised world. 401 00:40:27,620 --> 00:40:32,890 Now, in one sense, Lady Chiltern is refusing that kind of division at the beginning. 402 00:40:32,890 --> 00:40:37,910 So she's a political force. She's a member of the Women's Liberal Federation. 403 00:40:37,910 --> 00:40:47,090 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, 404 00:40:47,090 --> 00:40:50,120 the eight hours bill and prison reform. 405 00:40:50,120 --> 00:40:58,640 Now, those are exactly the kind of humanitarian, much more compassionate politics that were coming in at that point. 406 00:40:58,640 --> 00:41:05,750 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. 407 00:41:05,750 --> 00:41:08,780 So in that sense, she's a humanising force in politics. 408 00:41:08,780 --> 00:41:14,750 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, 409 00:41:14,750 --> 00:41:20,120 know about the vulnerable and all the rest of it, and therefore ought to be able to allowed into politics to speak for them. 410 00:41:20,120 --> 00:41:24,380 So in that sense, these are exactly the kind of things that Wald's arguing for after he's been 411 00:41:24,380 --> 00:41:29,150 to prison is exact things like more humane treatment of children in prison. 412 00:41:29,150 --> 00:41:33,270 Not so. Robert is trying to keep his wife out of public life. And importantly, 413 00:41:33,270 --> 00:41:40,400 stage direction that describes him when he first arrives is the firmly chiselled mouth and chin contrasts strikingly with the romantic expression, 414 00:41:40,400 --> 00:41:46,730 the deep set eyes. The variance is suggestive of an almost complete separation of passion and intellect, 415 00:41:46,730 --> 00:41:52,880 as though thought and emotion were each isolated in its own sphere through some violence of willpower. 416 00:41:52,880 --> 00:42:01,760 Now there there seems to be a separation between feeling and reason, between passion and intellect. 417 00:42:01,760 --> 00:42:11,030 When so when Lord Goring persuades Lady Chiltern to step aside and not interfere in her husband's life and ambitions, his speech begins. 418 00:42:11,030 --> 00:42:18,230 A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambition. 419 00:42:18,230 --> 00:42:26,690 A woman's life revolves and curves of emotion. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. 420 00:42:26,690 --> 00:42:32,060 In other words, that end of the place seems to reassert a division between intellect and passion, 421 00:42:32,060 --> 00:42:37,580 between reason and feeling, which is exactly what led to the problem with Sir Robert Chiltern to start with. 422 00:42:37,580 --> 00:42:41,330 So is the play validating or undermining that kind of split? 423 00:42:41,330 --> 00:42:42,740 Is it supporting separate spheres? 424 00:42:42,740 --> 00:42:48,950 Is it talking about the necessary exclusion of women from public life because they're too moralistic and too idealising? 425 00:42:48,950 --> 00:42:53,960 Or is it talking about the need for them as a moralising force, your decision, 426 00:42:53,960 --> 00:42:59,480 their sense in which so many of the speech in the play, in the play come in collision with each other? 427 00:42:59,480 --> 00:43:06,890 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, 428 00:43:06,890 --> 00:43:11,450 we men love forever, we love faults, and all of you women idealise. 429 00:43:11,450 --> 00:43:15,740 And your love is dependent on our being good all very well. 430 00:43:15,740 --> 00:43:20,750 But for the fact at the end of the play, the one who's doing idealising is Sir Robert Chiltern, 431 00:43:20,750 --> 00:43:26,400 who has a great speech calling his wife the pure image of all good things and singing can never touch you. 432 00:43:26,400 --> 00:43:33,890 Sounds pretty idealising to me, whereas it's Lady Chiltern who has to forgive her husband or she'll lose his love. 433 00:43:33,890 --> 00:43:38,900 In other words, that bit of the play place completely against the speech that's happening earlier in the play. 434 00:43:38,900 --> 00:43:42,560 So what is the difference in men and women's lives? You've got very, very different speeches. 435 00:43:42,560 --> 00:43:47,780 No two speeches, no set of speech in the play combined to create a truth. 436 00:43:47,780 --> 00:43:55,460 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, 437 00:43:55,460 --> 00:43:59,540 a sense in which there are all sorts of conversations and cross lines happening through the play. 438 00:43:59,540 --> 00:44:06,500 Now, I want to play you just the one crucial scene, which is between Robert Charlton and Al Gore. 439 00:44:06,500 --> 00:44:18,090 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. 440 00:44:18,090 --> 00:44:26,220 She did let me know how wonderful instinct about this comment. 441 00:44:26,220 --> 00:44:32,700 Federation. A of the. 442 00:44:32,700 --> 00:44:38,760 From the ethical and moral and ethical will that. 443 00:44:38,760 --> 00:44:49,650 Yes, my advice is to go with the people who have a serious talk about it, like they look like used just. 444 00:44:49,650 --> 00:44:56,490 I'm not exactly sure yet, maybe when you get you can't get a bad name. 445 00:44:56,490 --> 00:45:01,590 You know, I got a name that's not as most memorable, hateful and dishonourable as most men would call it. 446 00:45:01,590 --> 00:45:12,690 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. 447 00:45:12,690 --> 00:45:18,720 I was 22 at the time. I had the double misfortune of being well and poor. 448 00:45:18,720 --> 00:45:24,980 Two unforgivable things. I didn't have the funny ones, you know, that I did it. 449 00:45:24,980 --> 00:45:29,550 That like is none of perhaps a good thing for most of us. 450 00:45:29,550 --> 00:45:38,170 It is not every man that. But I just want to tell this country what you did with the God of this century. 451 00:45:38,170 --> 00:45:46,110 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. 452 00:45:46,110 --> 00:45:51,390 But I would hope that when I was tired, worn out, disappointed, I wanted my success. 453 00:45:51,390 --> 00:45:57,660 When I was young, I couldn't wait. Robert, how would you solve this problem? 454 00:45:57,660 --> 00:46:02,210 I do not sell myself on that. I call it success at the breakfast table. 455 00:46:02,210 --> 00:46:10,020 Yes, you said that is a great question. What do you think of doing such a thing? 456 00:46:10,020 --> 00:46:17,060 That's gone. No, it was a matter of identity and culture and. 457 00:46:17,060 --> 00:46:23,700 I a feel anything is more to resent the stupidity of the people of the administration. 458 00:46:23,700 --> 00:46:29,520 Stupidity sort of like feeding us. But how do they do it? 459 00:46:29,520 --> 00:46:54,980 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, 460 00:46:54,980 --> 00:47:15,020 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. 461 00:47:15,020 --> 00:47:36,970 I'm actually part of the world and really enjoying my time in this country. 462 00:47:36,970 --> 00:47:42,900 I mean, the rich for this violation of ethics. 463 00:47:42,900 --> 00:47:45,250 Well, so what you got there? 464 00:47:45,250 --> 00:47:54,340 That speech was you got that contrast between a kind of lounging, complacent, however charming, Lord Goring and Sir Robert Chilterns, in one sense, 465 00:47:54,340 --> 00:47:56,140 the kind of the serious one, 466 00:47:56,140 --> 00:48:01,450 the one is committed who's ready to challenge and analyse this stark difference and played out against the houses of Parliament. 467 00:48:01,450 --> 00:48:04,210 Remember, this is the heart of British government. 468 00:48:04,210 --> 00:48:11,860 Now, you can you could try trying to understand the play by linking Sir Robert Chiltern with all those criminal heroes that world has, 469 00:48:11,860 --> 00:48:20,300 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. 470 00:48:20,300 --> 00:48:24,280 There are lots of those defences and the defence of the criminal in the Solomon Islands socialism. 471 00:48:24,280 --> 00:48:30,760 So you've got wild launching an attack on money worship in Solomon and socialism and the following 472 00:48:30,760 --> 00:48:36,400 critique where he says disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man's original virtue. 473 00:48:36,400 --> 00:48:41,230 It is through disobedience that progress has been made through disobedience and through rebellion. 474 00:48:41,230 --> 00:48:47,770 Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty, but to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. 475 00:48:47,770 --> 00:48:51,640 Men should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly fed animal. 476 00:48:51,640 --> 00:48:55,210 He should decline to live like that and should either steal or go on the rates, 477 00:48:55,210 --> 00:49:00,100 which is considered by many to be a form of stealing by our current Tory government. 478 00:49:00,100 --> 00:49:06,130 As the begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. 479 00:49:06,130 --> 00:49:14,200 No, a poor man who is ungrateful and thrifty, discontented and rebellious is probably a real personality and has much in him. 480 00:49:14,200 --> 00:49:22,540 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 481 00:49:22,540 --> 00:49:28,750 as he himself is able to under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. 482 00:49:28,750 --> 00:49:37,390 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. 483 00:49:37,390 --> 00:49:45,040 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. 484 00:49:45,040 --> 00:49:52,270 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, 485 00:49:52,270 --> 00:49:56,770 which is actually what Solomon and Socialism condemns as a creed, 486 00:49:56,770 --> 00:50:01,420 Sir Robert Chiltern both critiques it and joins the gang and notably at the end of the play, 487 00:50:01,420 --> 00:50:06,700 the idealising that's happening in politics is only shored up by his appointment to the cabinet. 488 00:50:06,700 --> 00:50:13,300 So he's got this reputation as a more noble and more moral and less lax politician than everybody else. 489 00:50:13,300 --> 00:50:20,320 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. 490 00:50:20,320 --> 00:50:23,260 And that's how it goes very closely alongside, say, 491 00:50:23,260 --> 00:50:31,060 Bernard Shaw with his houses on the kind of corruption of late 19th century capitalism and the perpetuation of the system there. 492 00:50:31,060 --> 00:50:35,590 So in that sense, it's a play. Also, think about the play's reflection of the audience. 493 00:50:35,590 --> 00:50:45,970 So in its first performance and very early performances, cabinet ministers attended, the PM attended Lord Rothschild, 494 00:50:45,970 --> 00:50:52,270 head of Rothschild Banking and all the rest of it attended that kind of wealth and richness in the stalls, 495 00:50:52,270 --> 00:51:00,280 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. 496 00:51:00,280 --> 00:51:04,700 So in another set and there's no purging, everybody is involved in that different ways. 497 00:51:04,700 --> 00:51:09,730 It asks about where the money is and the whole system that's being looked at within the play, 498 00:51:09,730 --> 00:51:15,190 this idea of the scapegoating of the individual and the way the system works. 499 00:51:15,190 --> 00:51:21,400 So Robert Chilton is undersecretary for foreign affairs, now the undersecretary for foreign affairs. 500 00:51:21,400 --> 00:51:29,110 Sir Charles Bilk, who was a reforming politician that Walter couldn't exchange letters with an admirer of, 501 00:51:29,110 --> 00:51:33,300 was brought down by a divorce scandal and was thrown out. 502 00:51:33,300 --> 00:51:41,700 And his career completely ruined Charles Stewart Parnell, who is the leader of the Irish Party and the main campaigner for Irish home rule, 503 00:51:41,700 --> 00:51:47,130 was simply brought down by a divorce case and a scandal where everybody knew what was really happening. 504 00:51:47,130 --> 00:51:52,500 But there was this kind of performance of scandal and horror at it and a performance of moral horror, 505 00:51:52,500 --> 00:51:58,380 just as Wilde himself the prescient in some ways that the structure that's being offered in an ideal husband. 506 00:51:58,380 --> 00:52:02,820 So in that sense, it's a play that's both high melodrama and in another sense, quite acute, 507 00:52:02,820 --> 00:52:09,000 and cutting an almost prescient political analysis so you can have a look at the kind 508 00:52:09,000 --> 00:52:14,710 of performance that's about money and wealth and aristocracy and the performance, 509 00:52:14,710 --> 00:52:21,270 the morality that perpetuates society in that play performance as a kind of social corruption performance. 510 00:52:21,270 --> 00:52:30,780 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. 511 00:52:30,780 --> 00:52:38,820 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. 512 00:52:38,820 --> 00:52:40,860 And in both of them, you get a speech, 513 00:52:40,860 --> 00:52:45,930 you get an extra scene at it in which Sir Robert Chiltern gives a speech in the House in which he affirms his real. 514 00:52:45,930 --> 00:52:52,440 He stands up and says England has got a dangerous past of wanting money and power. 515 00:52:52,440 --> 00:52:57,030 But a new era is beginning, and it's shown by all refusing the Argentine canal scheme. 516 00:52:57,030 --> 00:53:05,670 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. 517 00:53:05,670 --> 00:53:12,390 And the importance of being earnest is in many ways the absolute Kontum opposite to that. 518 00:53:12,390 --> 00:53:17,550 The importance being honest, I want to end on as the play that is about self-conscious performance, 519 00:53:17,550 --> 00:53:24,870 then is a play in which every character, it's a kind of utopian anarchy, every character gets to create and perform themselves. 520 00:53:24,870 --> 00:53:28,650 So it's anything but an ideal society in other ways. It's ruled over by Lady Bracknell, 521 00:53:28,650 --> 00:53:36,930 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. 522 00:53:36,930 --> 00:53:44,910 But lose one parent might be considered a misfortune. But to lose two looks like carelessness, there's got to be ultimate in callousness. 523 00:53:44,910 --> 00:53:51,360 Um, she represents the society. It's a kind of matriarchy of absolute power and completely callous. 524 00:53:51,360 --> 00:53:58,530 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. 525 00:53:58,530 --> 00:54:07,200 So Cecily Diary and Jackie's earnest analogy, having a brother and all the rest of it all miraculously come true. 526 00:54:07,200 --> 00:54:13,680 So reality in that play distorts around their performances. There's no difference between performance and truth. 527 00:54:13,680 --> 00:54:15,480 One becomes the other in it, 528 00:54:15,480 --> 00:54:20,700 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. 529 00:54:20,700 --> 00:54:24,570 So Jack tends to Gwendoline at the end of the play and says, Gwendoline, 530 00:54:24,570 --> 00:54:30,810 it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. 531 00:54:30,810 --> 00:54:37,620 Can you forgive me? And when Ian says I can feel, I feel you are sure to change. 532 00:54:37,620 --> 00:54:41,220 In other words, you're not going to carry on with any of this truth nonsense from now on. 533 00:54:41,220 --> 00:54:45,420 And there's also it's a wonderful play that when it comes to sexual roles and gender roles, 534 00:54:45,420 --> 00:54:51,540 they're completely that wonderful kind of play within that play of gender roles and all the rest of it. 535 00:54:51,540 --> 00:54:56,760 So it's the women who effectively do the proposing in the plays, the women who are absolutely in command, whereas Algy, 536 00:54:56,760 --> 00:55:07,350 for example, arrived to stay for a week with three large three large suitcases, a hat to hatboxes and a luncheon basket. 537 00:55:07,350 --> 00:55:11,190 So he's got about 18 changes, the costumes and lots of hats in there. 538 00:55:11,190 --> 00:55:15,240 And they're very. And that said, the men are purely decorative in that play. 539 00:55:15,240 --> 00:55:21,090 So Lady Bracknell, when she interviews Jack for his eligibility, it's delighted to hear that he smokes because, 540 00:55:21,090 --> 00:55:27,180 too, there are too many idle young men in London attitudes and a man needs an occupation of some kind. 541 00:55:27,180 --> 00:55:33,900 Oh, she's also delighted that he's ignorant because ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit. 542 00:55:33,900 --> 00:55:41,310 Touch it and the bloom is gone. So she would much prefer he was ignorant, purely decorative and idle. 543 00:55:41,310 --> 00:55:45,520 That's all a man needs to be in his play in that sense. 544 00:55:45,520 --> 00:55:51,780 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. 545 00:55:51,780 --> 00:55:57,060 It's a play that's multiple in all sorts of ways. Wald's absolutely playing with his audience. 546 00:55:57,060 --> 00:56:02,700 So all that stuff about silver cigarette cases as turned up in the trials exchange of silver cigarette cases, 547 00:56:02,700 --> 00:56:09,510 was one of those kind of exchange between world and his various lovers. Just as the whole thing about the importance of being earnest, 548 00:56:09,510 --> 00:56:18,420 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. 549 00:56:18,420 --> 00:56:21,630 So this kind of play on that, I have to say the the pun, 550 00:56:21,630 --> 00:56:30,810 the supposed pun on Bunbury in the word buns for buttocks is only comes into coinage in the 1960s in America. 551 00:56:30,810 --> 00:56:37,230 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, 552 00:56:37,230 --> 00:56:43,800 so it's a fantastic play in which everybody itself creating in which the language itself twists round. 553 00:56:43,800 --> 00:56:47,760 So language doesn't fix things. It plays games just the same way. 554 00:56:47,760 --> 00:56:54,300 So when Jack finds out is told by celestially rushes up and says, you'll never guess who's coming to tea, 555 00:56:54,300 --> 00:57:00,720 your brother Ernest and Jack says, I haven't got a brother and says, listen, you think he's spoken the truth. 556 00:57:00,720 --> 00:57:05,220 At which point he says, OK, don't say that. Whatever he's done, he's still your brother. 557 00:57:05,220 --> 00:57:10,740 In other words, it's kind of whatever that each expression turns around to become what it needs to be. 558 00:57:10,740 --> 00:57:16,260 There's this kind of mutual game that all the characters play of absolutely accepting the truths that each other delivers. 559 00:57:16,260 --> 00:57:20,040 So in that sense, it's wonderfully anarchic. There are no rules. 560 00:57:20,040 --> 00:57:22,680 There are no meanings that are fixed in that play. 561 00:57:22,680 --> 00:57:27,990 Just like Canon Chasuble sermon on the meaning of the manner in the wilderness, which can be performed at. 562 00:57:27,990 --> 00:57:33,210 He then has wonderful list of everything from christenings to funerals and harvest festivals and all the rest of it. 563 00:57:33,210 --> 00:57:39,610 The same speech. That's all purposes because it's infinitely mutable. And this is what that's what you get in that play. 564 00:57:39,610 --> 00:57:45,150 It's that idea of the command of your own performance where performance becomes ultimately liberating. 565 00:57:45,150 --> 00:57:52,830 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. 566 00:57:52,830 --> 00:57:56,220 They get rewarded for them. There's no fixing happening in there. 567 00:57:56,220 --> 00:58:04,020 And poor old Lady Bracknell, who wishes to do nothing but pass judgement on people, is absolutely impotent in trying to punish anybody. 568 00:58:04,020 --> 00:58:08,640 In that sense, it's wild. Guess PEX and all sorts of ways and every meaning of that word. 569 00:58:08,640 --> 00:58:14,580 It's a playful, performative, unfixed text that this wonderful celebration of gender freedom, 570 00:58:14,580 --> 00:58:18,750 sexual freedom, absolute anarchic freedom to create yourself. 571 00:58:18,750 --> 00:58:27,180 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. 572 00:58:27,180 --> 00:58:34,940 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. 573 00:58:34,940 --> 00:58:41,670 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. 574 00:58:41,670 --> 00:58:43,710 This time it's where turn to the audience. 575 00:58:43,710 --> 00:58:50,910 He came up on stage after ladies to be found and said to the audience, Ladies and gentlemen, I have enjoyed this evening immensely. 576 00:58:50,910 --> 00:58:57,990 The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. 577 00:58:57,990 --> 00:59:07,860 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. 578 00:59:07,860 --> 00:59:12,450 So it's that while telling the performances, the audience performing as much as the play is performing. 579 00:59:12,450 --> 00:59:21,150 So I'd like to end by saying thank you enormously for your reputation and that your appreciation had been most intelligent. 580 00:59:21,150 --> 00:59:25,818 Thank you.