Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

Introduction The Triumph of ArtificeOscar Wilde's short run of success with his brilliant social comedies was one of the most remarkable episodes in literary history. In a span of just three years, from 1892 to 1895, Wilde established himself, alongside George Bernard Shaw, as the premier playwright of England. Then, just as quickly and brilliantly as he had ascended, Wilde plunged into obscurity. After three scandalous trials centering on the issue of Wilde's homosexuality, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband were shut down in the middle of their lucrative runs, and Wilde's career as a playwright was over. His writing was obscured by prurient rumor, homophobia, and hypocritical shock and condemnation.It took decades for Wilde's work to reemerge as worthy of study. When it did, his readers found that the plays that had delighted Wilde's contemporary audiences had a doubled life on the page. What seemed on the surface to be merely ridiculous situations and nonsensical paradoxes designed to get a laugh revealed themselves to be subtle experiments in social critique and philosophy. Wilde's plays move expertly from the subject of faith in marriage to political power to motherhood and back to romance, desire, and identity. When scholars have returned to Wilde's life to mine its fascinating contradictions for insight into the quicksilver genius of the plays, they have found parables of identity, codes of gay life, and commentary on truth and art. Looking at Salome, the only play presented in this volume that was banned from production in England, they found further evidence of Wilde's bold imagination, complexity, and tolerance for endless paradox.For more than one hundred years, Wilde's comedies have retained their fresh laughter and their delicate grace, and Hollywood, whose worship of style and glamour could have been invented by Wilde himself, turns out new productions of them on a regular basis. Salome's weird sensuality and chilling perversity still shock and enthrall theatergoers in an age when it sometimes seems there are no taboos left. Wilde's epigrams, which have turned ever more from nonsense to truth as the years have progressed, are regularly quoted (and misquoted) by those who have no idea that they were written by Wilde, let alone which play they come from. To enter the world of these plays is to be lifted into Wilde's strange and surprising world and to realize how thoroughly his sensibility has become our own. Life and Work of Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, to the Irish nationalist and writer Speranza Wilde and eye-and-ear doctor William Wilde. Young Oscar did exceptionally well at school, earning scholarships and taking high honors at both Trinity College Dublin and Oxford. While at Oxford, he met his teacher and mentor, Walter Pater, and became an enthusiastic follower of the aesthetic movement Pater championed.After graduating from Oxford in 1874, Wilde moved to London. He quickly gained notoriety for his sharp wit and flamboyant style of dress -- he was especially famous for wearing a dyed-green carnation, a French symbol of decadence and homosexuality, in his lapel. In addition to writing plays and criticism, Wilde traveled in London's most brilliant social circles, becoming a local celebrity. When he traveled to America to speak on aestheticism in 1882, he thrilled audiences from New York City socialites to western miners. By the time he returned to London, he was a transatlantic sensation.In the early 1880s, Wilde was regularly publishing plays and poems, but they were received badly. It wasn't until the late 1880s and early 1890s that he published some of his best-loved works, including The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), as well as a number of influential critical volumes, including IntentionsWilde, Oscar is the author of 'Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781416500421 and ISBN 1416500421.