Wilde, Oscar (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills)
Wilde, Oscar (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills)
- Anthony Parr
(b Dublin, Oct 16, 1854; d Paris, Nov 30, 1900). Irish writer. His plays, most notably Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), brought to the Victorian stage a wit that was both scintillating and subversive. Wilde cultivated the image of an aesthete and flouted convention at every turn. He was lampooned (in the decadent character of Bunthorne) by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience (1881), and a musical ‘Travestie Suggested by Lady Windermere's Fan’ was produced at the Comedy Theatre in 1892. Following Wilde's imprisonment in 1895 for homosexual acts, the composer Dalhousie Young published a pamphlet entitled Apologia pro Oscar Wilde; after his release Wilde planned a libretto for Young's opera Daphnis and Chloë, but the scheme never materialized. Wilde died prematurely in exile, and it was German (largely operatic) interest in his work that was to revive his reputation, beginning with Max Reinhardt's Berlin production of Salomé in 1902, and Richard Strauss's operatic version of the same play. In the mid-20th century Wilde's plays became material for the musical stage, in such entertainments as Noël Coward's After the Ball (1954), Vivian Ellis's So Romantic (1950) and Half in Earnest (1957), and Anne Croswell's Earnest in Love (1960), with music by Lee Pokriss. Wilde himself had more sympathy with the visual arts than with music, but he tried to place the latter within his aesthetic scheme in the essay ‘The Critic as Artist’ (in his book Intentions) and in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. His prose style was widely praised for its ‘limpid and lyrical effects’ (Max Beerbohm) and its ‘sonorous and majestic music’ (H.L. Mencken).
