Oscar Wilde: The Story of a Playwright

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wildee or known as Oscar Wilde was an Irishman born on October 16, 1854 at Dublin, Ireland and died on November 30, 1900 at Paris, France. He was a writer and a famous poet in London. Oscar Wilde graduated at Trinity College, Dublin. He can speak and understand French as well as English. In 1890`s, Oscar was also a very famous playwright in London. Nowadays, people recognize him because of his epigrams, plays and the conditions of his imprisonment along with his early death.

He’s a son of both successful Dublin intellectuals. Wilde became a fluent speaker in French and German language early in his life. Oscar Wilde proved himself that he was an outstanding classicist in his university through reading, first at Dublin then at Oxford. Walter Pater and John Ruskin were Wilde’s tutors who led him to be famous in his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism. He deeply explored Roman Catholicism to which he alters on his deathbed afterwards. Wilde transferred to London into fashionable cultural and social circles after taking up his college. He was a spokesperson for aestheticism. He practiced different literary activities like publishing, and then returned to London where he worked freely as a journalist. He had a book of poems which was released as a lectured in the United States of America and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art”. Wilde became one of the most well-known personalities of his time and he was known for his piercing humour, glitzy dress, and magnificent conversation.

He developed his ideas regarding the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, beauty into his only novel and The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890s. The chance to create exactly aesthetic details and merge them with larger social themes inspired Wilde to write drama. In 1891 at Paris, he wrote Salome in French but it was rejected to have a licence. In the early 1890s, he also produced four society comedies. His production of those play made him one of the most successful playwrights in late Victorian London.

At the peak of his fame and success, Wilde prosecutes Lord Alfred Douglas, the father of his lover which was the Marquess of Queensberry for libelling, although his masterpiece which was “The Importance of Being Earnest” in the year 1895 was still on theatre in London. The trial exposed evidence that caused Wilde to fall his accuses and led to his own arrest, tried for unpleasant offensiveness with other men. Wilde after two more trials had convicted and imprisoned him for two years of hard labour. While he is in the jail he wrote “De Profundis” in 1897 & published in 1905. This letter discusses his spiritual journey throughout his trials in his life, forming a mysterious counterpoint to his prior philosophy of happiness. Upon his release, he wrote his last work which was the “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898) after that he left right away for France and decided never to return to Ireland or Britain. The poem he wrote honoured the harsh pace of prison life. He died deprived in Paris at the age of forty-six.

The Playwrights Theatre life

In 1891, a survey records the Wildes' residence at 16 Tite Street; this is where he lived with his wife Constance and sons. However, Wilde was not contented being popular just in London. In October 1891, he returned to Paris as a respected writer. He was awarded as a renowned symbolist poet at the salons littéraires, including the famous mardis of Stéphane Mallarmé. During 1880`s, the two plays of Wilde namely Vera; or, “The Nihilists” and The Duchess of Padua was not that successful. Wilde continued his interest in theatre and now, after discovering his skills in writing style, his idea turned once more to the dramatic type as he thought of the biblical iconography of Salome. One night, after discussing the background of Salome all through history, he saw a blank copybook lying on his desk and it immediately came to his mind to record what he had been saying. He rapidly wrote a new play entitled Salome which was written in French.

Oscar Wilde`s Salome

Salome is a story of tragedy. The story goes like this, the stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas who to her stepfather's dismay but mother's delight, requests the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter as a reward for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils. Wilde returned to London before Christmas, the Paris Echo newspaper referred to him as "le great event" of the period. The rehearsals of the play including Sarah Bernhardt started but the play was declined a licence by Lord Chamberlain since it portrays biblical characters in the play. In the year 1893, Salome was published with the partnership in Paris and London but it was not executed until Wilde's later incarceration in the year 1896 in Paris.

Friends turned to Lovers

"It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement… I did not know that when they were to strike at me it was to be at another's piping and at another's pay." - Oscar Wilde

In the middle of 1891, Lionel Johnson introduced Wilde to an undergraduate at Oxford named Alfred Douglas. His family and friends call him "Bosie" because he was handsome but a spoilt young man. A close friendship bloomed between Wilde and Douglas and by 1893 Wilde was obsessed with Douglas and they both agreed to have a passionate affair. If Wilde was relatively careless and showy, Douglas was as well reckless in public. Wilde, who was earning up to £100 a week from his plays (his salary at The Woman's World had been £6), always give what Douglas wants: material, artistic or sexual.

Douglas soon encouraged Wilde into the Victorian underground of gay prostitution and Alfred Taylor introduced cycle of young, working class, male prostitutes from 1892 onwards to Wilde. Wilde meets the boy, offer him gifts, dine him privately and then take him to a hotel room. This rare date regularly took the same form to him. Contrasting Wilde's idealised, pederast dealings with John Gray, Ross, and Douglas, all of whom remained part of his aesthetic circle, these companion were uneducated and knew nothing of literature. "It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement… I did not know that when they were to strike at me it was to be at another's piping and at another's pay." He wrote this quote to Douglas and soon his public and private lives had become rudely separated.

Douglas and some Oxford friends founded an Oxford journal entitled The Chameleon, to which Wilde “sent a page of paradoxes originally destined for the Saturday Review” .But yet The Chameleon was not published again."Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young" was to come under assault six months later at Wilde's trial, where he was strained to defend the magazine to which he had sent his work.

Wilde was a good man but because of the influence of a friend (now his lover) he became a man where he did not imagined. A man will always be deceived by others however, you can always choose to whom you will be deceived; the right person or the wrong one.