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.