Good... But Skip It for Better Things — 2 years ago
Well, only one play left in my borrowed copy of The Selected Plays of Oscar Wilde. I’d like to say that reaching the end saddens me more than it does, but most of Wilde’s “non-Earnest” plays seem to have the same plot:
One member of a married couple has a terrible secret he or she may or may not know, often involving an unknown parent. The secret, no matter how tedious, would ruin his or her reputation in the high society Wilde seeks to critique. A series of fortuitous events prevents discovery. The audience sees that the character society would most quickly condemn is in many ways a hero or heroine.
In An Ideal Husband, the husband—ideal because he has been placed on a metaphorical pedestal by his wife—is the one with a terrible secret. His hero is a foppish dandy who is taken seriously by no one. (I tried to explain foppish to my boyfriend last week and couldn’t do so without the word dandy… but then I couldn’t explain dandy without foppish, although dictionary.com seems to have the same problem.)
An entertaining read, but I could have lived happily having never read it.
