Wilde: Four Plays -- The Importance of Being Earnest; An Ideal Husband; A Woman of No Importance; Lady Windermere's Fan

by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's complete dramatic works are brought together in this volume now re-issued: his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest ('The first Act is ingenious, the second beautiful, the third abominably clever ' -- his own comment), printed here in its usual three-act form with an appendix containing the best material from the original four-act version; Lady Windermere's Fan, his first great success ('I am told that Royalty is turned away nightly'), A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, ('Pray do not take out a single word' -- the Prince of Wales), as well as his once-banned Salome and several less well-known plays, The Duchess of Padua, Vera, or The Nihilists, A Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane.

320 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2008

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Reviews

[Nataliia · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the plays of Oscar Wilde, amongst the one's I've read, are hilarious. One has to have a good sense of humour and wit to write such a thing. Totally in love with these four. Worth the time. Might want to read them again some time, they are not becoming obsolete.
---
Best moments: Lady Windermer’s Fan
***
Dumby: Good evening, lady Stutfield. I suppose this will be the last ball of the season?
Lady Stutfield: I suppose so, Mr. Dumby. It's been a delightful season, hasn't it?
Dumby: Quite delightful! Good evening, Duchess. I suppose this was the last ball of the season?
Duchess of Berwick: I suppose so, Mr. Dumby. It has been a very dull season, hasn't it?
Dumby: Dreadfully dull! Dreadfully dull!
Mrs. Cowper-Cowper: Good evening, Mr. Dumby. I suppose this will be the last ball of the season?
Dumby: Oh, I think not. There'll probobly be two more.
***
Lord Windermere: What is my wife’s fan doing here in your rooms? Hands off, Cecil. Don’t touch me.
Lord Darlington: Your wife’s fan?
Lord Windermere: Yes, here it is?
Lord Darlington: I don’t know!

Best moment: A Woman of No Importance
***
Lord Illingworth: It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

Best moments: An Ideal Husband
***
Lord Goring: I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.
***
Lady Chiltern: Robert is as incapable of doing a foolish thing as he is of doing a wrong thing.
Lord Goring (after a long pause): Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.
Lady Chiltern: Are you a Pessimist? What will the other dandies say? They will all have to go into mourning.
***
Mrs. Cheveley: Why don't you call me Laura?
Lord Goring: I don't like the name.
Mrs. Cheveley: You used to adore it.
Lord Goring: Yes; that's why.

[Zach Grasee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Earnest

[Kristen Harvey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just read the play Importance of being Earnest. :)