'An Ideal Husband' Critical Quotes

'I took the drama ... and made it as a personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet'

'Plots are tedious. Anyone an invent them'

'Wilde disdained the notion that public opinion should exercise any shaping power over art'

'Art, Wilde insisted, was to be judged by aesthetic criteria alone'

'A problem play, a society drama engaging with contemporary issues'

'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'

'Indeterminancies are not incidental but crucial to the unsettling effect'

'A deceptive and indeterminate play'

'Wilde resisted characteristics of his plays as stylistically or morally conventional'

'A uniting of heart and head, intellect and emotion'

Mr Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright'

'Wilde's barbed comments on politicians'

'The play's appositeness to the here and now takes your breath away'

'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'

'The plots are creaking old contrivances'

'The plots of his plays were less important to him than the language'