'An Ideal Husband' Critical Quotes

Question	Answer
'I took the drama ... and made it as a personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet'	Oscar Wilde
'Plots are tedious. Anyone an invent them'	Oscar Wilde
'Wilde disdained the notion that public opinion should exercise any shaping power over art'	Sos Eltis
'Art, Wilde insisted, was to be judged by aesthetic criteria alone'	Sos Eltis
'A problem play, a society drama engaging with contemporary issues'	Sos Eltis
'Lady Chiltern who accepts not only her husband's feet of clay but also that his love is conditional on her continuing support for his political ambition'	Sos Eltis
'Indeterminancies are not incidental but crucial to the unsettling effect'	Sos Eltis
'A deceptive and indeterminate play'	Sos Eltis
'Wilde resisted characteristics of his plays as stylistically or morally conventional'	Sos Eltis
'A uniting of heart and head, intellect and emotion'	Sos Eltis on Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern
Mr Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright'	George Bernard Shaw
'Wilde's barbed comments on politicians'	Plays International
'The play's appositeness to the here and now takes your breath away'	Plays International
'She [Mrs Cheveley] and Lord Goring are, in a sense, exotic birds of a feather, the one corrupted as the other is humanised by a talent for seeing through English hypocrisy'	Paul Taylor
'The plots are creaking old contrivances'	John Russell Taylor
'The plots of his plays were less important to him than the language'	Peter Raby

Resource summary

	Created by Ellie Hope over 7 years ago