Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays: Salome; Lady Windermere’s Fan

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was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854. He was an outstanding student of classics at Trinity College, and, in 1874, entered Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize with his poem Ravenna (1878). An early leader of the Aesthetic Movement, which advanced the concept of Art for Arts Sake, Wilde became a prominent personality in literary and social circles. His volume of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), was followed by The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and The House of Pomegranates (1892). However, it was not until his play, Lady Windermeres Fan (1892), was presented to the public that he became widely famous. A Woman of No Importance (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) confirmed his stature as a dramatist. In 1895 he brought libel action against the Marquis of Queensbury; during the trial shocking revelations concerning Wildes character were made. In May of that year, he was sentenced under the Criminal Law Amendment Act to two years imprisonment with hard labor for homosexual offenses. Upon his release in 1897, he settled on the Continent, where he wrote his most powerful and enduring poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Oscar Wilde died in Paris on November 30, 1900.

A brief chronology of the life of Oscar Fingal OFlahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) is appended to this Introduction: at the outset it is enough to say that by April of 1895 this Dublin-born writer had captivated the English-speaking world with his conversation, his lectures, his novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), and his plays, two of which were running with great success in theaters in the West End of London. But his involvement with Lord Alfred Douglas (familiarly known as Bosie) and his subsequent conviction in April of 1895 for homosexual offenses with several young men of low social position effectively brought his career to an end. After his release from prisonthe term was for two yearshe wrote only one significant work, a long poem entitled The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

As early as 1881 he had encapsulated his entire career in a sonnet entitled Hlas, which served as an epigraph to his Poems, Wildes first significant book. Glancing at the echoes of Milton, Shelley, and others in this volume, Punch said, The poet is Wilde, but his poetrys tame, and it must be admitted that there is something schoolboyish in calling the epigraph Hlas rather than Alas; but the poem is wise beyond its years in its perception of the consequences of rejecting ancient wisdom and austere self-control in favor of a life subject to all winds.

The sigh of the title and the note of self-criticism at the beginning are moderated in the last two-and-half lines, where Wilde, quoting 1 Samuel 14:27 (Jonathans confession that he has broken the fast imposed upon him by Saul), insists that his offense was slight and his punishment disproportionate. With hindsight one inevitably sees in the reference to the honey-tipped rod a phallic suggestion, but the passage must, of course, more generally be taken as concerned with the conflict between Christian asceticism and what Walter Horatio Pater (1839-94)quoting this line of the Bible in Studies in the History of the Renaissancespoke of as the artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness. We will shortly return to Paters Renaissance, which Wilde read in his first months at Oxford and which he characterized as a book that had such a strange influence over my life, but it is worth mentioning here that Wilde as a playwrightespecially as the author of Salomwas also influenced by Paters Appreciations (1889), in which he read that a play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as it approaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or a ballad were still lying at the root of it. With Paters assertion of the primacy of lyric over dramatic writing, compare a remark in a letter Wilde wrote shortly after being released from Reading Gaol:

Wilde wrote Salom in French, chiefly during a stay in Paris in the fall of 1891; he did not put the final touches on it until December of that year, after he had already completed Lady Windermeres Fan, but we can nevertheless begin with Salom in our effort to see what he contributed to enlarging the horizon of drama. There is no reason to doubt his assertion that he discussed the subject of Salom at lunch with Andr Gide and several other French writers and, warming to his own conversation, returned to his lodgings, wrote for several hours, supped, and then finished his draft of the play. In time he submitted a French text to Pierre Louys and to other French writers for revision, but their contributions apparently were slight; we have Gides word that Wildes French was excellent. In the spring of 1892 Sarah Bernhardt was in London and asked Wilde to read the play to her. After hearing it, she told him she wanted to act the title role, and the play went into rehearsal. Public productions of plays in England, however, had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, and Salom was refused a license because it violated the centuries-old prohibition against portraying Biblical characters, a prohibition originating in puritan opposition to the old Roman Catholic mystery plays. (Not until 1968 was this statute removed, though it had ceased to be enforced several decades earlier.) The production of Salom was therefore dropped, but the play was published in France in 1893; in 1894 it was published in an anonymous English translation, dedicated to Alfred Douglas, with a cover design and ten illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Salom was first produced in February 1896, in France, when Wilde was still in prison. A Berlin production of 1902 was an enormous success, as was Richard Strausss operatic version, first performed in Dresden in 1905, and it is the opera rather than either the French play or the English translation that chiefly survives on the stage. The authorship of the English translation, by the way, is uncertain. Douglas prepared a version, but Wilde was dissatisfied with it; perhaps the anonymous versionwhich is often said to be by Douglasis by Wilde himself, or is Wildes revision of Douglass attempt. (Henceforth, because I am talking about the translation, I will use not the French but the English spelling of the name.)