Everybody's Husband

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This is the dream of a romance-loving girl on the eve of her wedding-day, after her maid had helped her take off the wedding-dress which she has apparently been trying on. To her maid's astonishment she dreamily talks of running away before the ceremony, and when the bewildered servant has left her she is drawn out of the window by a spell, and presently is seen returning in a carnival costume with a man in a domino. Then comes in her Mother, to be shocked by her symptoms of sentimental revolt, and to be in turn rebuked by her grandmother for her views about prosaic husbands in general and their own in particular. Finally appears her great-grandmother (who, it seems, broke her own matrimonial bondage more than once) to sympathize more than the others with her mood of rebellion, and to point the moral of the didactic dream by the help of the harlequin-lover who, when his domino is snatched off, is revealed as the perfect type of Victorian husband, indifferently affectionate, exacting, commonplace and selfish. He is the one eternal husband - 'everybody's husband' - as he is when the romance of courtship is rubbed off by the reality of marriage. It is a dainty and rather daring little parable, and is unobjectionable, providing that - as will no doubt be the case - the heroine's 'disrobing' and the 'flying leap' into her bed which so shocks her grandmother (as marked p.1 and p.7) are affected with discretion and good taste. Recommended for License. Ernest A. Bendall