atrocity because few of us
hate an adulteress to the extent of desiring such a penalty, or of
being prepared to take the law into our own hands if it were withheld.
Now what applies to this extreme case applies also in due degree to the
other cases. Offences in which sex is concerned are often needlessly
magnified by penalties, ranging from various forms of social ostracism
to long sentences of penal servitude, which would be seen to be
monstrously disproportionate to the real feeling against them if the
removal of both the penalties and the taboo on their discussion made it
possible for us to ascertain their real prevalence and estimation.
Fortunately there is one outlet for the truth. We are permitted to
discuss in jest what we may not discuss in earnest. A serious comedy
about sex is taboo: a farcical comedy is privileged.

THE FAVORITE SUBJECT OF FARCICAL COMEDY.

The little piece which follows this preface accordingly takes the form
of a farcical comedy, because it is a contribution to the very
extensive dramatic literature which takes as its special department the
gallantries of married people. The stage has been preoccupied by such
affairs for centuries, not only in the jesting vein of Restoration
Comedy and Palais Royal farce, but in the more tragically turned
adulteries of the Parisian school which dominated the stage until Ibsen
put them out of countenance and relegated them to their proper place as
articles of commerce. Their continued vogue in that department
maintains the tradition that adultery is the dramatic subject par
excellence, and indeed that a play that is not about adultery is not a
play at all. I was considered a heresiarch of the most extravagant kind
when I expressed my opinion at the outset of my career as a playwright,
that adultery is the dullest of themes on the stage, and that from
Francesca and Paolo down to the latest guilty couple of the school of
Dumas fils, the romantic adulterers have all been intolerable bores.

THE PSEUDO SEX PLAY.

Later on, I had occasion to point out to the defenders of sex as the
proper theme of drama, that though they were right in ranking sex as an
intensely interesting subject, they were wrong in assuming that sex is
an indispensable motive in popular plays. The plays of Moliere are,
like the novels of the Victorian epoch or Don Quixote, as nearly
sexless as anything not absolutely inhuman can be; and some of
Shakespear's plays are sexually on a par