An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
One of Oscar Wilde's most interesting and dramatically effective plays which has the
colourful creations of the manipulative Mrs Chevely to the naive and fickle Miss Markby.
It is often called a ‘social comedy’ because it has both a serious as well comedic plot line. On the one hand, the play is about a prominent politician who is in danger of losing his reputation as a paragon of integrity, owing to a youthful indiscretion that the play’s villain is threatening to expose. Although the politician’s transgression is not exposed, this plot line conveys the idea that there are very few people in the world who are wholly good and to pretend so is hypocritical. This is a message for Wilde’s contemporaries, a late-Victorian group obsessed with purity and goodness but, of course, as imperfect as the people of any other age. On the other hand, the play is very funny, thanks to the witty bantering of the characters