Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, short story writer and Freemason. One of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day, known for his barbed and clever wit, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned after being convicted in a famous trial for gross indecency (homosexual acts).

Biography

Birth and early life

Statue of Oscar Wilde in Dublin's Merrion Square (Archbishop Ryan Park).

Wilde was born into a Protestant Anglo-Irish family, at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, to Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Francesca Elgee. Jane was a successful writer and an Irish nationalist, known also as 'Speranza', while Sir William was Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon, and wrote books on archaeology and folklore. He was a renowned philanthropist, and his dispensary for the care of the city's poor, in Lincoln Place at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road.

In June 1855, the family moved to 1 Merrion Square, in a fashionable residential area. Here, Lady Wilde held a regular Saturday afternoon salon with guests including Sheridan le Fanu, Samuel Lever, George Petrie, Isaac Butt and Samuel Ferguson. Oscar was educated at home up to the age of nine. He attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Fermanagh from 1864 to 1871, spending the summer months with his family in rural Waterford, Wexford and at Sir William's family home in Mayo. Here the Wilde brothers played with the young George Moore.

After leaving Portora, Wilde studied classics at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874. He was an outstanding student, and won the Berkeley Gold Medal, the highest award available to classics students at Trinity. He was granted a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he continued his studies from 1874 to 1878 and where he became a part of the Aesthetic movement, one of its tenets being to make an art of life . While at Magdalen, he won the 1878 Oxford Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna. He graduated with a double first, the highest grade available at Oxford.

During this time, Wilde became familiar with philosophies and writings on same-sex love, and lived for several years with the society painter Frank Miles, who may or may not have been his lover.

Marriage and family

After graduating from Magdalen, Wilde returned to Dublin, where he met and fell in love with Florence Balcome. She in turn became engaged to Bram Stoker. On hearing of her engagement, Wilde wrote to her stating his intention to leave Ireland permanently. He left in 1878 and was to return to his native country only twice, for brief visits. The next six years were spent in London, Paris and the United States, where he travelled to deliver lectures. Wilde's address in the 1881 British Census is given as 1 Tite Street, London. The head of the household is listed as Frank Miles.

In London, he met Constance Lloyd, daughter of wealthy Queen's Counsel Horace Lloyd. She was visiting Dublin in 1884, when Oscar was in the city to give lectures at the Gaiety Theatre. He proposed to her and they married on May 29, 1884 in Paddington, London. Constance's allowance of £250 allowed the Wildes to live in relative luxury. The couple had two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). After Oscar's downfall, Constance took the surname Holland for herself and the boys. She died in 1898 following spinal surgery and was buried in Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa, Italy. Cyril was killed in France in World War I. Vyvyan survived the war and went on to become an author and translator. He published his memoirs in 1954. His son, Merlin Holland, has edited and published several works about his grandfather. Oscar Wilde's niece, Dolly Wilde, was involved in a lengthy lesbian affair with writer Natalie Clifford Barney.

Aestheticism

Keller cartoon from the Wasp of San Francisco depicting Wilde on the occasion of his visit there in 1882.

While at Magdalen College, Wilde became particularly well known for his role in the aesthetic and decadent movements. He began wearing his hair long and openly scorning so-called "manly" sports, and began decorating his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objets d'art.

His behaviour cost him a dunking in the River Cherwell in addition to having his rooms (which still survive as dedicated function rooms at his old college) trashed, but the cult spread among certain segments of society to such an extent that languishing attitudes, "too-too" costumes and aestheticism generally became a recognised pose.

Aestheticism in general was caricatured in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Patience (1881). Such was the success of Patience in New York that Richard D'Oyly Carte invited Wilde to America for a lecture tour. This was duly arranged, Wilde arriving in January 1882. Wilde is reputed to have told a customs officer "I have nothing to declare except my genius", although there is no contemporary evidence for the remark. D'Oyly Carte used Wilde's lecture tour "to prime the pump" for an American tour of Patience, making sure that the ticket-buying public was aware of his personality.

Wilde was deeply impressed by the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater, who argued for the central importance of art in life. He later commented ironically on this view when he wrote, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, "All art is quite useless". This quote also reflects Wilde's support of the aesthetic movement's basic principle: Art for art's sake. This doctrine was coined by the philosopher Victor Cousin, promoted by Theophile Gautier and brought into prominence by James McNeill Whistler.

The aesthetic movement, represented by the school of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had a permanent influence on English decorative art. As the leading aesthete, Wilde became one of the most prominent personalities of his day. Though he was sometimes ridiculed for them, his paradoxes and witty sayings were quoted on all sides.

In 1879 Wilde started to teach Aesthetic values in London. In 1882 he went on a lecture tour in the United States and Canada. He was torn apart by no small number of critics — The Wasp, a San Francisco newspaper, published a cartoon ridiculing Wilde and Aestheticism — but also was surprisingly well received in such rough-and-tumble settings as the mining town of Leadville, Colorado. [1] On his return to the United Kingdom, he worked as a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette in the years 1887-1889. Afterwards he became the editor of Woman's World.

Politically, Wilde endorsed an anarchistic brand of socialism, expounding his beliefs in the text "The Soul of Man under Socialism".

Literary works

: See also: The Manuscripts of Oscar Wilde

"The Peacock Skirt", illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for Wilde's play Salomé

In 1881 he published a selection of his poems, but these attracted admiration in only a limited circle. His most famous fairy tale, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, appeared in 1888, illustrated by Walter Crane and Jacob Hood. This volume was followed by a second collection of fairy tales, A House of Pomegranates (1892), which the author said was "intended neither for the British child nor the British public."

His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published in 1891. Critics have often claimed that there existed parallels between Wilde's life and that of the book's protagonist, and it was used as evidence against him at his trial. Wilde contributed some feature articles to the art reviews, and in 1891 re-published three of them as a book called Intentions.

His fame as a dramatist began with the production of Lady Windermere's Fan in February 1892. This was written at the request of George Alexander, actor-manager of the St James's Theatre in London. Wilde described it as "one of those modern drawing-room plays with pink lampshades". It was immediately successful, the author making the enormous sum of 7,000 pounds from the original run. He wore a green carnation on opening night. In 1894, the Robert Hichens novel The Green Carnation, said to be based on the relationship of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, was published. It would be one of the texts used against Wilde during his trials the following year.

Less successful in 1892 was the play Salomé, which was refused a licence for English performance by the Lord Chamberlain because it contained Biblical characters. Wilde was furious, even contemplating (he said) changing his nationality to become a French citizen. The play was published in English, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, in 1894. A French edition had appeared the year before.

His next play, a social satire and melodrama, was A Woman of No Importance, produced on 19 April 1893 at the Haymarket Theatre in London by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. It repeated the success of Lady Windermere's Fan, consolidating Wilde's reputation as the best writer of "comedy of manners" since Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

A slightly more serious note was again struck with An Ideal Husband, produced by Lewis Waller at the Haymarket Theatre on 3 January, 1895. This contains a political melodrama—as opposed to the marital melodrama of the earlier comedies—running alongside the usual Wildean epigrams, social commentary, comedy, and romance. George Bernard Shaw's review said that "...Mr Wilde is to me our only serious playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors, with audience, with the whole theatre..."

Barely a month later, his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest appeared at the St James's Theatre. It caused a sensation. Years later, the actor Allen Aynesworth (playing 'Algy' opposite George Alexander's 'Jack') told Wilde's biographer Hesketh Pearson that "In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than the first night of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'."

Unlike the three previous comedies, Earnest is free of any melodrama; it brought irony, satire and verbal wit to English drama. Yet follows an unusually clever plotline, where alter egos abound among false identities, mistaken identities and imaginative romantic liaisons. It is in a class of its own in the whole of English drama as a piece of pure, delightful nonsense. This incomparable 'comedy of manners' is a perfect example of Wilde's theory on Art: Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. At least two versions of the play are in existence. Wilde originally wrote it in four acts, but George Alexander proposed to cut it down to three for the original production.

In between An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde wrote at least the scenario for a play concerning an adulterous affair. He never developed it, the Queensberry affair and his own trial intervening. Frank Harris eventually wrote a version called Mr and Mrs Daventry.

It has been suggested that in 1894, Wilde wrote another little-known play (in the form of a pantomime) for a friend of his, Chan Toon, which was called For Love of the King and also went under the name A Burmese Masque. It has never been widely circulated. One copy, held in the Leeds University Library's Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, is marked: "This is a spurious work attributed to Wilde without authority by a Mrs. Chan Toon, who was sent to prison for stealing money from her landlady. A.J.A. Symons." (15, Handlist 148, Leeds handlists index)

Wilde's sexuality

Robert Ross at twenty-four

Though Wilde's sexual orientation has variously been considered bisexual, homosexual, and pederastic, Wilde himself felt he belonged to a culture of male love inspired by the Greek pederastic tradition."We know that Wilde engaged in sex acts with males, loved obsessively at least one male, cultivated a style of maleâ€"male intimacy and of Aesthetic transgression, thought of himself as in a tradition fostered by Greek pederastic love, expressed guilt for his same-sex acts/desires." John Maynard, "Sexuality and Love," in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, Ed. Richard Cronin et al. . His most significant sexual relationships appear to have been (in chronological order) with (perhaps) Frank Miles, Constance Lloyd (Wilde's wife), Robert Baldwin Ross, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde also had numerous sexual encounters with working-class male youths, who were often rent boys.

Biographers generally believe Wilde was introduced to homosexuality in 1885 (the year after his wedding) by the 17-year-old Robert Baldwin Ross. Neil McKenna's biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2003) theorizes that Wilde was aware of his homosexuality much earlier, from the moment of his first kiss with another boy at the age of 16. According to McKenna, after arriving at Oxford in 1874, Wilde tentatively explored his sexuality, discovering that he could feel passionate romantic love for "fair, slim" choirboys, but was more sexually drawn towards swarthy young rough trade. By the late 1870s, Wilde was already preoccupied with the philosophy of same-sex love, and had befriended a group of Uranian (pederastic) poets and homosexual law reformers, becoming acquainted with the work of gay-rights pioneer Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs. Wilde also met Walt Whitman in America in 1881, writing to a friend that there was "no doubt" about the great American poet's sexual orientation â€" "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips," he boasted. He even lived with the society painter Frank Miles, who was a few years his senior and may have been his lover. However, writes McKenna, he was unhappy with the direction of his sexual and romantic desires, and, hoping that marriage would cure him, he married Constance Lloyd in 1884. McKenna's account has been criticized by some reviewers who find it too speculative, although not necessarily implausible [2].

Regardless of whether or not Wilde was still naïve when he first met Ross, Ross did play an important role in the development of Wilde's understanding of his own sexuality. Ross was aware of Wilde's poems before they met, and indeed had been beaten for reading them. He was also unmoved by the Victorian prohibition against homosexuality. By Richard Ellmann's account, Ross, "...so young and yet so knowing, was determined to seduce [Wilde]." Soon, Wilde entered a world of regular sex with youths such as servants and newsboys, in their mid to late teens, whom he would meet in homosexual bars or brothels. In Wilde's words, the relations were akin to "feasting with panthers", and he revelled in the risk: "the danger was half the excitement." In his public writings, Wilde's first celebration of romantic love between men and boys can be found in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889), in which he propounds a theory that Shakespeare's sonnets were written out of the poet's love of Elizabethan boy actor "Willie Hughes".

After meeting and falling in love with Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891, Wilde and his lover embraced an orgiastic life style, and for a few years they lived together more or less openly in a number of locations. Wilde and some within his upper-class social group also began to speak about homosexual law reform, and their commitment to "The Cause" was formalised by the founding of a highly secretive organisation called the Order of Chaeronea, of which Wilde was a member. A homosexual novel, Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal, written at about the same time and clandestinely published in 1893, has been attributed to Oscar Wilde, but was probably, in fact, a combined effort by a number of Wilde's friends, which Wilde edited. Wilde also periodically contributed to the Uranian literary journal The Chameleon.

The Queensberry scandal

Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde.

In 1891, Wilde became intimate with Lord Alfred Douglas, who went by the nickname "Bosie". Bosie's father, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, became increasingly enraged at his son's involvement with Wilde. He confronted the two publicly several times, and each time Wilde was able to mollify the Marquess. Eventually, the Marquess planned to interrupt the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest with an insulting delivery of vegetables, but somebody tipped Wilde off and he was barred from entering the theatre.

On February 18, 1895, the Marquess left a calling card at one of Wilde's clubs, the Albemarle. On the back of the card he wrote "For Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite" (a misspelling of 'Sodomite').

Although Wilde's friends advised him to ignore the insult, Lord Alfred later admitted that he egged Wilde on to charge Queensberry with criminal libel. Queensberry was arrested, and in April 1895, the Crown took over the prosecution of the libel case against him. The trial lasted three days. The prosecuting counsel, Edward Clarke, was unaware that Wilde had had liaisons and romantic relationships with other males. Clarke asked Wilde directly whether there was any substance to Queensberry's accusations and Wilde denied that there was. Edward Carson, the barrister who defended Queensberry, hired investigators who were able to locate a number of youths with whom Wilde had been involved, either socially or sexually, such as the 16-year-old Walter Grainger and other newsboys and valets.

Wilde put on a tremendous display of drama in the first day of the trial, parrying Carson's cross-examination on the morals of his published works with witticisms and sarcasm, often breaking the courtroom up with laughter. For instance, asked whether he had ever adored any man younger than himself, Wilde replied, "I have never given adoration to anybody except myself." However, on the second day, Carson's cross-examination was much more damaging: Wilde later admitted to perjuring himself with some of his answers. On the third day, Clarke recommended that Wilde withdraw the prosecution, and the case was dismissed. The authorities were unwilling to let matters rest. Based on the evidence acquired by Queensberry and Carson, Wilde was arrested on April 6 1895, in room no. 118 at the Cadogan Hotel, London, and charged with "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" (a euphemism for any sex between males) under Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Despite pleas by friends to flee the country, Wilde chose to stay and martyr himself for his cause. The events in the room were immortalised by the poet laureate John Betjeman in his tragic poem The arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel. Clarke offered to defend him for nothing at his upcoming trial.

Trial and imprisonment in Reading Gaol

Wilde brought suit against Lord Alfred Douglas's father, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, for sending him a slanderous note. However, it was Wilde who was forced to act defensively at the trial because sodomy was a crime in late Victorian England and this first trial led to two others (the latter two against Wilde). While Wilde did not speak directly against homosexual practices in his trials, he was forced to twist his answers to Mr. C. F. Gill's examination in order avoid incriminating himself:

Gill: What is "the love that dares not speak its name?"

Wilde: "The love that dares not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as 'the love that dares not speak its name', and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it."

This trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict. The next, and last, trial was presided over by Chief Justice Sir Alfred Wills. On May 25, 1895 Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years' hard labour.

He was imprisoned first in Pentonville and then in Wandsworth prison in London, and finally transferred in November to Reading Prison, some 30 miles west of London. Wilde knew the town of Reading from happier times when boating on the Thames and also from visits to the Palmer family, including a tour of the famous Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory quite close to the prison.

Now known as prisoner C. 3.3, (which described the fact that he was in block C, floor three, room three) he was not, at first, even allowed paper and pen to write with, but a later governor was more friendly. During his time in prison, Wilde wrote a 50,000-word letter to Douglas, which he was not allowed to send while still a prisoner, but which he was allowed to take with him at the end of his sentence. On his release, he gave the manuscript to Ross, who may or may not have carried out Wilde's instructions to send a copy to Douglas who, in turn, denied having received it. Ross published a much expurgated version of the letter (about a third of it) in 1905 (four years after Wilde's death) with the title De Profundis, expanding it slightly for an edition of Wilde's collected works in 1908, and then donated it to the British Museum on the understanding that it would not be made public until 1960. In 1949, Wilde's son Vyvyan Holland published it again, including parts formerly omitted, but relying on a faulty typescript bequeathed to him by Ross. Its complete and correct publication did not take place until 1962, in The Letters of Oscar Wilde.

The manuscripts of A Florentine Tragedy and an essay on Shakespeare's sonnets were stolen from his house in 1895. In 1904, a five-act tragedy, The Duchess of Padua, written by Wilde about 1883 for Mary Anderson but not acted by her, was published in German (Die Herzogin von Padua, translated by Max Meyerfeld) in Berlin.

After his release

Wilde's tomb, sculpted by Sir Jacob Epstein, in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

Prison was unkind to Wilde's health and after he was released on May 19, 1897 he spent his last three years penniless, in self-imposed exile from society and artistic circles. He went under the assumed name of 'Sebastian Melmoth', after the famously "penetrated" Christian saint Sebastian, who has since become a gay icon, and the devilish central character of his great-uncle Charles Robert Maturin's gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer. After his release, he wrote the famous poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. On his deathbed he was accepted into the Roman Catholic church, which he had long admired. However, biographers disagree on whether his conversion was an act of volition, since he may not have been fully conscious at the time. Wilde spent his last days in the Hôtel d'Alsace, now known as L'Hôtel, in Paris. Just a month before his death he is quoted as saying, "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go."Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900. Different opinions are given on the cause of the meningitis; Richard Ellmann claimed it was syphilitic; Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, thought this to be a misconception, noting that Wilde's meningitis followed a surgical intervention, perhaps a mastoidectomy; Wilde's physicians, Dr. Paul Cleiss and A'Court Tucker, reported that the condition stemmed from an old suppuration of the right ear (une ancienne suppuration de l'oreille droite d'ailleurs en traitement depuis plusieurs années) and did not allude to syphilis. Most modern scholars and doctors agree that syphilis was unlikely to have been the cause of his death. Wilde was buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris but was later moved to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. His tomb in Père Lachaise was designed by the sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, at the request of Robert Ross, who also asked for a small compartment to be made for his own ashes. Ross's ashes were transferred to the tomb in 1950. The numerous spots on it are lipstick traces from admirers. The modernist angel depicted as a relief on the tomb was originally complete with male genitals. They were broken off as obscene and kept as a paperweight by a succession of Père Lachaise Cemetery keepers. Their current whereabouts are unknown. In the summer of 2000, intermedia artist Leon Johnson performed a 40 minute ceremony entitled Re-membering Wilde in which a commissioned silver prosthesis was installed to replace the vandalised genitals.

Biographies

*After Wilde's death, his friend Frank Harris wrote a biography, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. This is generally regarded as being very unreliable, although entertaining. Of his other close friends, Robert Sherard, Robert Ross, Charles Ricketts and Lord Alfred Douglas variously published biographies, reminiscences or correspondence.
*An account of the argument between Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde as to the advisability of Wilde's prosecuting Queensberry can be found in the preface to George Bernard Shaw's play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.
*In 1946, Hesketh Pearson published The Life of Oscar Wilde (Methuen), containing materials derived from conversations with Bernard Shaw, George Alexander, Herbert Beerbohm Tree and many others who had known or worked with Wilde. This is a lively read, although inevitably somewhat dated as to overall approach. It gives a particularly vivid impression of what Wilde's conversation must have been like.
*In 1954 Vyvyan Holland published his memoir Son of Oscar Wilde. It was revised and updated by Merlin Holland in 1999.
*In 1975 H. Montgomery Hyde published Oscar Wilde: A Biography.
*In 1983 Peter Ackroyd published The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde.
*In 1987 Richard Ellmann published Oscar Wilde, a very minute biography.
*In 1997 Merlin Holland published a book entitled The Wilde Album. This rather small volume contained many pictures and other Wilde memorabilia, much of which had not been published before. It includes 27 pictures taken by the portrait photographer Napoleon Sarony, one of which is at the beginning of this article.
*1999 saw the publication of Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen written by Robert Tanitch. This book is a comprehensive record of Oscar's life and work as presented on stage and screen from 1880 until 1999. It includes cast lists and snippets of reviews.
*2003 saw the publication of the first complete account of Wilde's sexual and emotional life in The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna (Century/Random House).
*2005 saw the publication of The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, by literary biographer Joseph Pearce. It explores the Catholic sensibility in his art, his interior suffering and dissatisfaction, and his lifelong fascination with the Catholic Church, which led to his deathbed conversion.

Biographical films, television series and stage plays

*Two films of his life were released in 1960. The first to be released was Oscar Wilde starring Robert Morley. Then came The Trials of Oscar Wilde starring Peter Finch. At the time homosexuality was still a criminal offence in the UK and both films were rather cagey in touching on the subject without being explicit.
*In 1960, Irish actor Mícheál Mac Liammóir began performing a one-man show called The Importance of Being Oscar. The show was heavily influenced by Brechtian theory and contained many poems and samples of Wilde's writing. The play was a success and Mac Liammoir toured it with success everywhere he went. It was published in 1963.
*In the summer of 1977 Vincent Price began performing the one-man play Diversions and Delights. Written by John Gay and directed by Joe Hardy, the premise of the play is that an aging Oscar Wilde, in order to earn some much-needed money, gave a lecture on his life in a Parisian theatre on November 28, 1899 (just a year before his death). The play was a success everywhere it was performed, except for its New York City run. It was revived in 1990 in London with Donald Sinden in the role.
*In 1978 London Weekend Television produced a television series about the life of Lillie Langtry entitled Lillie. In it Peter Egan played Oscar. The bulk of his scenes portrayed their close friendship up to and including their tours of America in 1882. Thereafter, he was in a few more scenes leading up to his trials in 1895.
*Michael Gambon portrayed Wilde on British Television in 1983 in the three-part BBC series Oscar concentrating on the trial and prison term.
*1988 saw Nickolas Grace playing Wilde in Ken Russell's film Salome's Last Dance.
*In 1989 Terry Eagleton premiered his play St. Oscar. Eagleton agrees that only one line in the entire play is taken directly from Wilde, while the rest of the dialogue is his own fancy. The play is also influenced by Brechtian theory.
*A fuller look at his life, without any of the restrictions of the 1960 films, is Wilde (1997) starring Stephen Fry. Fry, an acknowledged Wilde scholar, also appeared as Wilde in 1993 in the short-lived American television series "Ned Blessing."
*Moises Kaufman's 1997 play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde uses real quotes and transcripts of Wilde's three trials.
*Wilde appears as a supporting character in Tom Stoppard's 1997 play The Invention of Love and is referenced extensively in Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties.
*David Hare's 1998 play The Judas Kiss portrays Wilde as a manly homosexual Christ figure.
*The main character in the Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty musical A Man of No Importance identifies himself with Oscar Wilde, and Wilde appears to him several times.
Oscar: in October 2004, a stage musical by Mike Read about Oscar Wilde, closed after just one night at the Shaw Theatre in Euston after a severe critical mauling.

Oscar Wilde in modern culture

*Todd Haynes' 1998 film Velvet Goldmine contains many references to Oscar Wilde, and features British child actor Luke Morgan Oliver as the young Wilde, who, in the film's introduction, anachronistically claims that he wishes to be a 'pop idol.'
*Mention of Wilde was made in The Smiths' song, "Cemetry Gates," released on the 1986 album The Queen Is Dead. Lead singer Morrissey has stated that he has long been an admirer of Wilde and his works.
*The Smiths also have a song called "Oscillate Wildly"
*Featured in a sketch from season one of The Kids in the Hall in which Wilde is on an island with Buddy Cole.
*Jimmy Buffett mentions Wilde in his song, "Quietly Making Noise", from his Fuitcakes album.
*In the Starman comics, Oscar Wilde was briefly shown as a friend/acquaintance of the Shade.
*There is a skit about Oscar Wilde in the Monty Python The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief called Oscar Wilde and Friends. It can also be found in the 39th episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus
*A multiple-issue 'chapter' of Dave Sim's comic book Cerebus the Aardvark, entitled Melmoth (later collected as a single volume under that title) retells the story of Wilde's final months with the names and places slightly altered to fit the world of the Cerebus storyline, while Cerebus himself spends most of the chapter as a passive observer.
*In the Godzilla vs. Megalon episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a character in the movie was named and frequently referenced as Oscar Wilde for wearing a very similar haircut.
*Ian Lawson wrote music to the words in his poem "Requiescat".
*Boston-based musical duo New Remorse, taking their name from the Wilde poem "The New Remorse." Singer Stephen Driss has cited Wilde as being "the first rock-star..."
*British singer / songwriter James Blunt mentions Dorian Gray in the chorus of the song "Tears and Rain".
*Fake Oscar Wilde quotes and references are a running gag at Uncyclopedia
* British band The Libertines mention Dorian Gray in the chorus of the song "Narcissist".
* Wilde is celebrated and mourned on the title track of The Divine Comedy's Absent Friends album.
*The 1980 series four episode "Rescue" of Blake's 7 is derived from The Picture of Dorian Grey, to the point of having a villain called Dorian.
* Underground pop singer Robert Marlow with the help of Vince Clarke, had a minor hit with a song based off Dorian Gray, called "The Face Of Dorian Gray"
* Suzanne Vega and John Cale perform a spoken word duet on the song "The Long Voyage" from French producer Hector Zazou's 1994 album Chansons des mers froides (Songs from the Cold Seas). The lyrics are based on Wilde's poem "Silhouettes".
* Musician Rufus Wainwright has an allusion to Wilde in his song "In With The Ladies", in which he speaks to "Bosie" (Lord Alfred Douglas), seemingly from the viewpoint of Oscar Wilde.

Bibliography

Poetry
Poems (1881)
The Ballad of Reading Gaol www (1898)

Plays
*Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880)
*The Duchess of Padua (1883)
*Salomé (French version) (1893, first performed in Paris 1896)
*Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
*A Woman of No Importance (1893)
*Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)
*An Ideal Husband (1895) [3]
*The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) [4]
*La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy first published 1908 in Methuen's Collected Works

(Dates are dates of first performance, which approximate better with the probable date of composition than dates of publication.)

Prose
*The Canterville Ghost (1887)
*The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) [5]
*Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891)
*Intentions (1891)
*The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
*A House of Pomegranates (1891)
*"The Soul of Man under Socialism" (First published in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1891, first book publication 1904)
*De Profundis (1905)
*The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1960) This was rereleased in 2000, with letters uncovered since 1960, and new, detailed, footnotes by Merlin Holland.
*Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal'' (Paris,1893)

References

See also

*List of people on stamps of Ireland
*William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Notes

External links

*Oscar Wilde – Standing Ovations, a variety of resources including full texts.
*Transcript of Oscar Wilde's trials
*Statue of Oscar Wilde and Eduard Vilde in Tartu (second largest city in Estonia)
*William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, home to the most comprehensive Oscar Wilde collection in the world.
* Reading Between the Lines Ragged Edge Magazine article by Louise Norlie, Treatment of Disability in The Birthday of the Infanta
*Prison Reform Oscar Wilde and his letters to the Daily Chronicle; Prison reform and De Profundis
*Making up Oscar Wilde Quotes at the parody website Uncyclopedia
*Oscar Wilde

Online texts:
*Collected Works
*The Oscar Wilde Collection
*Online Books by Oscar Wilde
*:
*Selected Oscar Wilde Poems
*The Soul of Man Under Socialism
*"The Happy Prince" Creative Commons audio recording.
*Free ebook of Oscar Wilde at Project Gutenberg
*Free audiobook of The Happy Prince and Other Tales from LibriVox

Rate this Article

Was this article helpful?

Not at all Definitely                  1 2 3 4 5