Oscar Wilde

Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Wilde was the second son to William and Jane Wilde. His father was a prominent physician—he was later knighted—and his mother was a free-thinking political radical, whose standards of behavior were not to fit in, but to be true to oneself, politically, ethically, and intellectually. Wilde won a scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin and transferred to Oxford in 1874, where he majored in classics. He graduated Oxford in 1878 and began a career as a writer, wit, and man-about-town. He became so well known as a flamboyant aesthete—cherishing beauty and art—that Gilbert and Sullivan satirized him in their operetta Patience (1881). Wilde was invited to lecture on aesthetics in the U.S., and he took America to his heart. In response to the customs officer’s query as he entered New York in January 1882, he replied, “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” He met the major writers—Henry James, Longfellow, and Whitman—and enjoyed a wildly triumphant lecture tour, the success of which was well publicized in England.

After a year in the United States, he returned home to make his living for the next three years primarily from lecture tours and writing reviews and articles. He married Constance Lloyd in May 1884; their first son was born that year in November. His second son was born in 1886, and the following year Wilde became editor of Woman’s World, a magazine that, under his guidance, dealt not only with décor and fashion, but feminism, women’s rights, and women as working professionals; he edited the magazine for two years. Wilde’s first successful book was a collection of stories he had written to entertain his sons. Like some modern-day children’s books, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) had stories that could be enjoyed by children and adults. The book was well received critically and sold well.

Wilde’s next major work was the highly successful (and sensational) The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891. Known for its fantastic line of action in which Dorian Gray remains young and beautiful, while his portrait ages and grows ugly from the sins of its subject, the novel exposed the hypocrisy of Victorian England and included scenes in which one man admired the beauty of another. Very popular, the novel was nonetheless generally considered immoral. “No one will speak to us,” Constance Wilde complained to her husband after its publication. But many people, including Wilde’s mother, thought it the best thing the young author had written up to that time.

A Double Life

The fact that two male characters in Dorian Gray admired one another was a not too subtle reference to Wilde’s private life in the homosexual underground of England. Wilde had always admired the beauty of young men, but it was not until 1886, the year his second son was born, that Wilde had his first homosexual experience.

In 1885 Parliament had passed the Labouchere Amendment, which outlawed all forms of same-sex intimacy. Wilde, like many gay men in England, was soon leading a double life, living as a respectable husband and public man of letters, while taking up a series of affairs with younger men. (It should be noted that many heterosexual men in London led similar lives, preserving their social reputation and family life while engaging in sexual trysts with female prostitutes or mistresses.)

Oscar Wilde recognized that his literary strength was in revealing characters through dialogue. Dorian Gray was almost entirely written in dialogue, and Wilde, whose early writings were plays, soon returned to that form. In 1891 he wrote the first of his four great social comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan. Actor-producer George Alexander offered Wilde £1,000 for the rights—an astonishing amount of money—to which Wilde replied, “A thousand pounds! I have so much confidence in your judgment, my dear Alec, that I cannot but refuse your generous offer—I will take a percentage.” Needless to say, this arrangement gave Wilde far more money than £1,000. Lady Windermere opened in January 1892 at the St. James’s Theatre and was a great success.

Wilde spent the latter part of 1892 working on his next comedy, A Woman of No Importance, which opened at the Haymarket Theatre in April 1893. Again, it was a great success, running 118 nights and earning Wilde £100 a week; the London run generated a New York production later in the year. In the summer of 1893, Wilde worked on An Ideal Husband, his third major comedy. He said of the play to scenic and costume designer Charles Ricketts, "It was written for ridiculous puppets to play, and the critics will say, ‘Ah, here is Oscar unlike himself’ though in reality I became engrossed in writing it, and it contains a great deal of the real Oscar."

An Ideal Husband does contain similarities to the real Oscar:  Lord Goring is a mirror of Wilde, or at least the kind of person Wilde might hope to be.  Goring, like Wilde, is full of epigrams and witty remarks, yet he can be deadly serious about life—again, like Wilde could be. As the modern critic Otto Reinert has noted, “Wilde first employed a pattern of ironic inversion in An Ideal Husband”:

It’s hero, Lord Goring, is not the irresponsible dandy he seems to be, the surface frivolity is not the real man, and his flippant paradoxes emphasise the irony of his moral position relative to that of [Sir Robert] Chiltern, the pretended pillar of society. For the first time in his plays Wilde puts the fine art of epigram to serious purposes: it participates in the total meaning of the play. “Satiric Strategy in The Importance of Being Earnest.” 1956.)

In An Ideal Husband, Wilde created characters superficially reminiscent of characters in his other plays, though they behave quite differently. Mrs. Cheveley appears like the adventurous Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere's Fan, but wants to sacrifice Chiltern for herself rather than sacrificing herself for her daughter. Lord Illingworth from A Woman of No Importance and Lord Goring are both exceedingly clever dandies, but Illingworth was a villain, while Goring is a hero. The kindness of Wilde is more evident in An Ideal Husband than his others. The play shows the universal inability to live up to the ideal: even ideal husbands might be a bit criminal.

Lord Alfred (“Bosie”) Douglas

In June 1892, Wilde had been introduced to Lord Alfred Douglas, a young man from Oxford, who was the son of the ninth Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde and Bosie, as Alfred Douglas was known, began a passionate relationship that ran hot and cold for the rest of Wilde’s life. Bosie’s father was an extreme heterosexual and homophobe. He also invented the rules for boxing. He was not especially mentally stable (nor was Bosie), and it was not long that his son’s flamboyant, effeminate, quasi-public, and almost theatrical relationship with Wilde caught Queensberry’s attention. Bosie, to Wilde’s horror, relished opportunities to irritate his father, and the young man did everything he could to antagonize and insult the marquess. This led to disaster for Wilde.

From 1892 to 1894, Wilde lived an ever more expensive double life, maintaining an increasingly strained relationship with Constance and presenting the face of a respected husband and father to society, all-the-while spending more and more time with (and money on) Lord Alfred. It was a costly proposition, for Wilde’s house on 16 Tite Street, where his family lived, was staffed by cooks, maids, and servants. Meanwhile, the time spent with Bosie was often time spent spending money. Wilde was unrestrained in money matters and could not refuse Bosie expensive entertainments, gifts, or vacations. As his personal life became more complex and costly, Wilde’s finances were strained to the breaking point. Despite the theatrical successes of Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance, he found himself in mid-1894 with little money. An Ideal Husband was not to be produced until early 1895, but Wilde had an idea for another play.

He corresponded with actor-producer George Alexander, seeking funds to support the composition of The Importance of Being Earnest. “Well, I think an amusing thing with lots of fun and wit might be made,” he wrote in July 1894. “If you think so, too, and care to have the refusal of it—do let me know—and send me £150.”

Alexander fronted the money, and Wilde and his family went south to the seaside resort of Worthing. “I remember the time very well,” his son Vyvyan Holland has written. “He spent the mornings writing, but most of the afternoons playing on the beach with us. He had a remarkable imagination in the all-important architectural matter of building sand-castles, which he would man with lead soldiers and toy cannon bought in the town.” In Wilde’s life, the summer months of 1894 in Worthing were likely the most “normal” he ever enjoyed with his family. He was, he knew, at the height of his creative power: he was writing well, and he was enjoying a calm he rarely knew, on holiday with his children and his wife. Of course, his life would never be like this again.

He submitted Earnest to George Alexander, noting the play “was exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fantasy, and it has its philosophy … that we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality…. [R]ealism is only the background; it cannot form an artistic motive for a play that is to be a work of art.”

Alexander liked the play, but thought it too long. He requested that Wilde cut the play from four acts to three. Wilde wrote to Alexander, “The scene which you feel is superfluous caused me back-breaking labor, nerve-racking anxiety, and took fully five minutes to write.” He cut the play and returned to London, where he faced a heightened persecution from the Marquess of Queensberry, who was adamant that Wilde stop seeing his son. Queensberry pursued Wilde in all the fashionable restaurants of London, hoping to catch Wilde and Bosie in public and cause an embarrassing scene.

1895—An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest
and Social Disaster

On January 3, 1895, An Ideal Husband opened at the Haymarket Theatre to great acclaim. The play, whose charm comes from the gradual expansion of affection and tenderness, rather than the exposure of hypocrisy, drew applause and calls for the author from an audience that included the Prince of Wales, the Earl of Balfour, and influential politician and businessman Joseph Chamberlain. It was cleverly plotted, charmingly acted, and full of witty sayings. It was also received some high praise in the press, including a glowing review from Bernard Shaw in The Saturday Review. Shaw particularly enjoyed the modern note in “Sir Robert Chiltern's assertion of the individuality and courage of his wrongdoings as against the mechanical idealism of his stupidly good wife and in his bitter criticism of a love that is only the reward of merit.”

The next month, on Valentine’s Day, The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St. James’s Theatre, again to enthusiastic reviews and audiences. The only cloud that darkened Wilde’s triumph appeared when he learned that the Marquess of Queensberry had an opening night ticket at the St. James’s. Fearful that Queensberry would stand up in the theatre and denounce him, Wilde instructed Alexander to refund Queensberry his ticket price, telling the marquess that the performance had been sold out. When Queensberry arrived at the theatre on February 14, accompanied by several thugs, he found the building protected by London police. Unable to gain entrance, he finally left Wilde a bouquet of vegetables at the stage door.

Things soon came to a head and went completely out of Wilde’s control. On February 18 Queensberry left his card at Wilde’s club, on which he had accused the playwright of being a “somdomite.” Wilde felt he had no recourse but to sue Queensberry for libel, and so began the first of three trials. Wilde lost his case against Queensberry and was then arrested for being a homosexual and tried. His first trial ended in an undecided jury. His second trial, however, ended in a verdict of guilty. His plays closed almost immediately, his books were withdrawn from sale, and he was forced into bankruptcy. He was sentenced to two years hard labor, which was served in three different prisons. His family moved abroad and changed the family name to Holland, although Constance supported her husband until her death in 1898. He never saw his children again.

Wilde was released from prison in 1897. He traveled to France and lived there and in Italy until his own death in a hotel in Paris from a severe ear infection. He was 46 years old.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, books by Oscar Wilde began to appear on bookshelves, and theatres began to produce his plays.

Tom Shafer, Dramaturg
IU Department of Theatre and Drama

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