Inspired by his triumph with Lady Windemere’s Fan, he wrote his next play very quickly and A Woman of No Importance opened in April 1893. The play was a great success, providing Wilde with wealth and status in the theatre. Mrs Erlynne allows herself to be compromised in order to save her daughter’s marriage. However, Mrs Erlynne persuades her otherwise by revealing that she is really Lady Windemere’s mother who abandoned her family twenty years earlier. Lady Windermere believes that her husband is having an affair with an older woman, Mrs Erlynne, and so decides to leave him. While the play is awash with witty observations and bon mots, the subject matter concerns the breakdown of a marriage and a terrible secret. Lady Windermere’s Fan is a finely conceived mixture of the comic and the serious. It seemed that the audiences who attended these plays never fully understood that they were the targets of Wilde’s mockery. These plays are laced with a sparkling frivolity of humour, cleverness, and sharpness of wit, satirising in a fierce fashion the morals of society, exposing the fraudulent emotions and motives that lay beneath the sophisticated veneer of the upper-class milieu. This was the first of a quartet of brilliant plays which ensured his fame and established him as one of the great British playwrights. ![]() He finally achieved major success with Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892. The play was intellectually stimulating but hardly an entertaining crowd-pleaser. Wilde chose to present his version of the story as a piece of symbolist theatre and the structure is built around three major dialogues: the first between Salome and the prophet Jokanaan, the second between Herod and Salome and finally the rather gruesome intercourse between Salome and the severed head. This was staged in London the following year and was very controversial, featuring the notorious femme fatale who beheaded John the Baptist. In the winter of 1891, while living in Paris, Wilde composed Salomé in French. However, critics and audiences begged to differ while the poetry has moments of brilliance, the play is not regarded as one of Wilde’s major efforts and has rarely been performed or discussed. Nevertheless, Wilde regarded it highly, commenting, ‘I have no hesitation in saying that it is the masterpiece of all my literary works, the chef d’oeuvre of my youth’. Wilde’s second play, a dark tragedy, The Duchess of Padua (1883), written in blank verse and set in Renaissance Italy, was also poorly received. Vera was first performed in New York in 1883 but was not a success and folded after only one week. This is a far cry from the social comedies that we now associate with Wilde. It has been suggested that the plot was inspired by Vera’s attempted assassination of Trepov, the head of the Moscow police. It is a melodramatic tragedy set in Russia and is loosely based on the life of Vera Zasulich, a revolutionary. His first foray was a drama called Vera: or, The Nihilists. It seems inevitable therefore that Wilde, who had literary ambitions, would involve himself in the world of the theatre and in particular writing plays. Indeed, he first achieved widespread notoriety by being lampooned in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, a satire on the aesthetic movement featuring a thinly disguised Wildean character, Reginal Bunthorne, ‘a fleshly poet’. ![]() Wilde (1854 – 1900) was a flamboyant, theatrical individual who could easily have been an outrageous character in one of his own dramas. The same could be said of the key plays of Oscar Wilde. They continue to appeal because of their rich drama, humour, brilliant dialogue and an array of universal truths. ![]() For example, the majority of Shakespeare’s plays are regularly redressed and reinterpreted for new audiences. After its initial success on the stage, it will be constantly revived in various versions throughout the years. The mark of a great play is its resilience and the ability to enthral successive generations. ![]() ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ and ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ are the two most popular of a quartet of brilliant plays that established Oscar Wilde as one of the great British playwrights.
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