Three Plays by Henry Arthur Jones: ‘Judah’, ‘The Liars’, ‘Mrs Dane’s Defence’

Abstract

The three plays examined in this chapter represent different phases of Jones’s career, and different aspects of his art. Judah, an early play (1890), finds him experimenting with form, characterisation and the presentation of serious ideas. The Liars (1897) is a satirical society comedy, the most successful (though not the funniest) of the comedies which made him such a popular dramatist. Mrs Dane’s Defence (1900) is his most successful foray into that type of play which so fascinated nineteenth-century audiences: the woman with a past struggling to achieve respectability in the face of society’s ‘double standard’.