The Profligate E-Book

Arthur Wing Pinero

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In Arthur Wing Pinero's "The Profligate," the playwright masterfully delves into the complexities of human relationships through the lens of morality, redemption, and the consequences of one's actions. The narrative centers around a young man, haunted by his past transgressions, who grapples with societal expectations and personal desires. Pinero employs a blend of naturalistic dialogue and well-crafted character development, allowing the audience to immerse themselves in the struggles of the characters while reflecting on the broader societal implications prevalent in late 19th-century England. This play not only exemplifies Pinero's adeptness at blending melodrama with elements of realism but also critiques the moral standards of the era. Arthur Wing Pinero, a prominent figure in the Edwardian theater, was known for his keen observations of Victorian society and its conventions. His experiences as a successful actor and playwright, rich in understanding the dualities of public and private personas, informed his writing. "The Profligate" emerges from his exploration of themes such as guilt, social restraint, and the pursuit of happiness, showcasing his ability to confront the emotional and ethical dilemmas faced by individuals. Readers seeking a profound exploration of the human condition will find "The Profligate" to be both an engaging and thought-provoking work. Pinero's astute observations and compelling narrative drive make this play an essential read for those interested in the evolution of drama and the exploration of moral questions that remain relevant today. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

Leseprobe

Arthur Wing Pinero

The Profligate

Enriched edition. A Play in Four Acts

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Nolan Taylor

Edited and published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4064066169756

Table of Contents

Introduction

Synopsis

Historical Context

The Profligate

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Notes

Introduction

Table of Contents

A single compromised past can test whether love, law, and social respectability are ever truly compatible.

Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Profligate is a late-Victorian English stage play, written for the commercial theatre of its day and shaped by the moral and social pressures that attended public entertainment in the 19th century. It belongs to the tradition of serious society drama that examines private conduct under the gaze of family, friends, and public opinion. Although its world is recognizably that of middle- and upper-class respectability, the play’s concerns reach beyond any one milieu, using the conventions of the well-made play to concentrate attention on cause, consequence, and disclosure.

The premise turns on a marriage shadowed by a husband’s earlier life and the fear that what has been concealed will surface at the worst possible moment. The profligacy of the title is less an isolated act than a pattern whose implications spread outward, affecting trust, reputation, and the stability of the home. Pinero sets in motion a network of relationships in which knowledge is unevenly distributed and judgment is swift, creating an atmosphere where small admissions can carry enormous weight. The initial situation is easy to grasp, yet it opens onto complex questions of responsibility and fairness.

Reading The Profligate offers the characteristic pleasures of tightly organized theatrical writing: scenes built around entrances and exits, conversations that carry multiple meanings, and a steadily tightening sense of pressure as characters attempt to manage what others think of them. Pinero’s style is direct and stage-minded, prioritizing dramatic clarity and confrontational dialogue over lyrical flourish. The tone remains serious and morally alert, but it is not sermonizing; it derives its urgency from the practical dilemmas faced by people who must live with the consequences of choices made before the curtain rises.

At the center is the problem of accountability: what society demands from those who have erred, and what forgiveness can reasonably require from those asked to bear the risk. The play probes the double life that can flourish in a culture obsessed with propriety, where appearances function as a kind of currency and reputation can be destroyed without recourse. It also explores the asymmetries of judgment between men and women in matters of sexual conduct, asking how a supposedly private history becomes public evidence and how moral rules are enforced through social power rather than through compassion.

The Profligate still matters because its mechanism is familiar to modern readers even when the social codes are not: a past that can be searched, shared, or exposed; a relationship tested by incomplete knowledge; a community eager to translate rumor into certainty. It anticipates contemporary conversations about how people are held to account and whether redemption is possible once a narrative has been fixed. The play’s insistence that ethical questions are lived under pressure, not contemplated at leisure, keeps it from feeling merely historical.

Approached today, the work can be read both as a dramatic story and as a document of late-Victorian anxieties about respectability, gender, and the boundaries of acceptable pleasure. It invites readers to attend to how quickly moral language becomes a tool for control, and how easily self-protection can be mistaken for integrity. Without requiring specialized knowledge of theatre history, The Profligate rewards attention to its careful structure and its moral focus, offering a tense, humane examination of what people owe each other when the truth is costly.

Synopsis

Table of Contents

Arthur Wing Pinero’s play The Profligate unfolds as a society drama focused on reputation, moral accountability, and the hidden costs of past indulgence. The narrative centres on a titled gentleman whose earlier life has included conduct he would prefer to leave unexamined, and on the social world that enables such concealment through discretion and class privilege. From the outset, the action frames a tension between public respectability and private history, showing how a single decision to secure status and domestic stability can rest on incomplete truth. The play’s setting and manners highlight how quickly appearances become obligations.

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As the plot advances, the protagonist’s marriage becomes the principal arena in which secrecy and conscience collide. The bride enters the relationship with expectations shaped by conventional ideals of honour and trust, while those around the couple manage information in ways that protect comfort and avoid scandal. Pinero builds suspense through the gradual surfacing of prior associations and the circulation of rumours within an interdependent social circle. Seemingly minor encounters take on weight because they threaten to connect past actions to present commitments. The drama’s forward motion comes from the growing difficulty of keeping separate identities intact.

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The Profligate introduces characters who embody contrasting ethical instincts: some prize social harmony and the preservation of standing, while others insist that wrongdoing carries obligations that cannot be dismissed by time or marriage. These opposing impulses create a shifting pattern of alliances and pressures, with friends and relatives weighing loyalty against principle. The protagonist is shown confronting not only external scrutiny but also an internal reckoning, as earlier choices begin to demand a response rather than evasion. Pinero’s dialogue-driven structure emphasises how social judgments are formed, traded, and weaponised, even when facts remain contested.

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As the marriage is tested, the play examines what each partner believes marriage should guarantee—security, mutual respect, or moral certainty—and what happens when those assurances are undermined. The wife’s position, shaped by limited knowledge and by social expectations of womanly virtue, becomes central to the play’s conflict, as she must interpret partial disclosures and ambiguous signals. Meanwhile, the husband’s attempts to control the narrative reveal how confession and concealment can both function as strategies. The surrounding household and visiting acquaintances act as a chorus of sorts, amplifying stakes through their reactions and interventions while maintaining outward decorum.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Profligate (first produced in London in 1889) belongs to the late-Victorian period, when the commercial theatre in the West End had become a major urban institution and a key forum for debating public morals. London audiences regularly attended new plays at houses such as the Garrick Theatre, and reviewers in influential newspapers and journals could shape a work’s reputation quickly. Pinero had already established himself in popular comedy and was moving toward more serious “problem” drama. The Profligate was written for this stage ecology: actor-managers, fashionable playgoing, and a press attentive to controversy.

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The 1880s and 1890s saw the rise of “society drama” and the English problem play, influenced by European realism and by new attention to social questions. In Britain this movement is associated with writers such as Henry Arthur Jones and later Oscar Wilde, and with the gradual acceptance of Ibsenite themes on the English stage in the early 1890s. The Profligate appears at the moment when audiences were increasingly willing to confront hypocrisy, sexual double standards, and the public consequences of private conduct, even as censorship and convention still constrained what could be said outright in performance.

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The play’s moral framework reflects Victorian legal and social structures around marriage, legitimacy, and reputation. Until the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870 and 1882), married women’s control over property was limited; even afterward, social expectations continued to emphasize female domestic virtue. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 created a civil divorce court, but divorce remained difficult, expensive, and stigmatized, with unequal standards for husbands and wives. Such realities made marriage a public institution with legal and economic stakes, and they heightened the dramatic weight of any past behavior that could endanger a household’s standing.

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Sexual morality was a prominent public issue in the decades before The Profligate. The Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869), aimed at regulating prostitution near military bases, provoked sustained protest and were repealed in 1886 after a major national campaign. Debate over prostitution, “fallen women,” and male responsibility circulated widely in print culture and philanthropy. In 1885 Parliament passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent and intensified scrutiny of sexual exploitation; the same year saw sensational press attention to sexual vice. These controversies formed the backdrop for dramatizing male dissipation and its harms.

paragraphs','Pinero wrote during a time when urban expansion and consumer culture intensified class display and anxiety about respectability. Late-Victorian London offered new leisure spaces—clubs, restaurants, music halls, and hotels—while also sharpening contrasts between wealthy districts and impoverished areas documented in contemporary social investigation. Middle- and upper-class identity was tied to codes of conduct enforced by family, employers, and social circles. The theatre itself was entwined with these dynamics: it was both a respectable pastime for many and a site where the boundaries of propriety were tested. Pinero’s dramas frequently explore how social surveillance and self-interest sustain public virtue.','paragraphs','Censorship shaped what Pinero could stage. Since the Licensing Act 1737, the Lord Chamberlain’s office had authority to license plays for public performance; scripts could be required to change language, situations, or endings. Playwrights often negotiated this system by framing contentious material in moral terms or by emphasizing punishment and repentance. The Profligate’s treatment of sexual wrongdoing and marital risk developed within these constraints and within a critical climate that demanded “wholesome” outcomes. The licensing regime influenced not only dialogue but also plot architecture, encouraging forms of resolution that could be defended as upholding public morality.','paragraphs','The play’s original reception illustrates how closely Victorian theatre was tied to moral debate. When The Profligate was first produced, its conclusion became a point of public contention, and Pinero revised the ending soon afterward for subsequent performances. This documented change reflects the pressures exerted by audiences, critics, and theatrical management on plays that touched sensitive themes. It also shows how late-Victorian drama could function as a negotiation between artistic aims and communal standards. The very fact that an ending could be publicly contested indicates that theatre was an arena for adjudicating responsibility, forgiveness, and social consequence.','paragraphs','Within this context, The Profligate reflects and critiques its era by centering the social costs of male sexual license and the precarious position of women within marriage and reputation economies. It draws on late-Victorian realism and society drama to expose how respectable façades can conceal past misconduct, and how institutions—family, law, and polite society—can prioritize appearances over justice. At the same time, its trajectory was conditioned by censorship and prevailing moral expectations, demonstrating the period’s tension between confronting uncomfortable truths and preserving public decorum. The play thus stands as evidence of an English stage increasingly engaged with social ethics at the century’s end.

The Profligate

Main Table of Contents

The Profligate A PLAY In Four Acts

THE FIRST ACT. THIS MAN AND THIS WOMAN.

THE SECOND ACT. THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES.

THE THIRD ACT. THE END OF THE HONEYMOON.

THE FOURTH ACT. THE BEGINNING OF A NEW LIFE.

The ProfligateA PLAYIn Four Acts

Table of Contents

By ARTHUR W. PINERO

“It is a good and soothfast saw;

Half-roasted never will be raw;

No dough is dried once more to meal,

No crock new-shapen by the wheel;

You can’t turn curds to milk again[1q],

Nor Now, by wishing back to Then;

And having tasted stolen honey,

You can’t buy innocence for money.”

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

First Printed, 1891New Impressions, 1902, 1909, 1914

All applications respecting amateur performances of this play must be made to Mr. Pinero’s Agents, Samuel French Limited, 26 Southampton Street, Strand, London, W.C.

Copyright

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Table of Contents

It is now more than four years since “The Profligate” was written, and in the interval we have seen many conflicting influences at work upon the theatre, many signs of progress; but in June 1887, although the dramatic atmosphere was full of agitation and uncertainty, and the clamorous plaints of the pessimists were loud, the bolt of Norwegian naturalism had not yet fallen upon our stage, Ibsen was still, as far as England was concerned, an exotic of the library. Mr. Pinero, however, appears to have been an unswerving optimist in the face of spreading pessimism; he evidently felt that the air was clearing, that the period was approaching when the British dramatist might begin to assert his artistic independence, and at least attempt to write plays which should, by means of simple and reasonable dramatic deduction, record actual experience flowing in the natural irregular rhythm of life, which should at the same time embody lofty ideals of conduct and of character. So he wrote “The Profligate,” wrote it as he explained, to fit no particular theatrical company, fettered the free development of his ideas by no exigencies of managerial expediency.

As soon as the play was completed he sought the opinion of one whose attitude towards the drama has always been marked by keen artistic sympathy and generous devotion—that delightful comedian, that masterly manager, John Hare[1]. Mr. Hare’s opinion of “The Profligate” found expression in very practical form. He was at that time on the eve of becoming theatrically homeless, but explaining to the author his plans for the future, he begged Mr. Pinero to keep his play for him until such time as he should be in a position to produce it, a request to which Mr. Pinero gladly acceded.

Two years elapsed, during which period the battle of the isms had proceeded apace, realism clashing with conventionalism, naturalism with romanticism. And the time now seemed ripe to gauge the practical progress of the modern dramatic movement, as we may call it, to test how far theatrical audiences were really prepared to accept serious drama without “comic relief.” The opportunity was at hand, the new Garrick Theatre was completed, and Mr. John Hare produced “The Profligate.”

It must be admitted, however, that in doing this a question of managerial policy prompted a concession to popular taste or custom which Mr. Pinero had never anticipated in the composition of “The Profligate.” He had ended his play with the suicide of the penitent profligate at the very moment that the wife is coming to him with pity and forgiveness in her heart, resolved to share his life again, to bear with him the burden of his past as well as his future—a grimly ironical trick of fate which the author considered to be the legitimate and logical conclusion of this domestic tragedy.