Abstract
“Henry Arthur Jones and the Business of Morality” examines works by Henry Arthur Jones, who is best remembered for fashionable West End dramas, and has often been characterized as a conservative opponent of Ibsen’s iconoclasm. In plays such as The Masqueraders (1894) and The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), he critiques the metatheatrical images of marriage presented by Ibsen by focusing attention on secondary characters who act as onstage spectators and critics of the central marital relationship. These peripheral characters, serving as representatives of the community, uphold normative moral codes by condemning the rebellious marital experiments of the play’s protagonists. Yet Jones, even while endowing these spectator characters with authority, undermine this authority by acknowledging the hypocrisy of their judgments.
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Notes
- 1.
Wilde’s supposed advice was to gather extra irony when Jones’s longest-running play, The Liars , was premiered five months after Wilde’s release from prison. According to Doris Jones, rumor attributed the play to Wilde, who was surmised to have borrowed Jones’s name to avoid the scandal attached to his own.
- 2.
According to Robins, the exchange between Irving and Wyndham took place at a dinner party, and was later repeated to her by Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
- 3.
Michael, however, did find a champion in Shaw, who blamed the play’s failure on manager Johnston Forbes-Robertson and the cast, opining that “the English stage got a good play, and was completely and ignominiously beaten by it” (TN2, 20).
- 4.
In the preface to Great Catherine, Shaw recounted: “I once recommended Miss Kingston professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage, did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero’s Trelawney of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker’s oath? Miss Kingston’s comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of standing up to our joint talents” (BH4, 899–900).
- 5.
Interestingly, Moore was much less insistent than Wyndham regarding Susan’s chastity. In an interview soon after opening night, she remarked, “Mine is rather a naughty part perhaps.” Her interviewer challenged this imputation, offering as acquitting evidence Lucien’s line, “People can never know what never took place.” Unpersuaded, Moore answered: “So you, like most of the men, are of the opinion that that remark whitewashes Lady Susan’s reputation. We women, and I suspect the author too, read a subtler meaning in that phrase” (“‘Rebellious Susan’ at Home,” 226.).
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Christian, M. (2020). Henry Arthur Jones and the Business of Morality. In: Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40639-4_5
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