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Vera; or, The Nihilists (1883)
PLAYS
& The Duchess of Padua (1883)
Salome (1891)
This one act play tells the biblical story of Salome, stepdaughter to Herod Antipas, who asks for the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter for dancing the dance of the seven veils. Due to a law that prohibited biblical figures from being depicted on stage, Salome was refused production by the Lord Chamberlain.² Instead, the play was published for reading in French in 1893, followed by an English translation in 1894, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. The play eventually premiered at the Comédie-Parisienne in Paris on February 11, 1896, while Wilde was still in prison. Wilde's poetic tragedy was not seen on the English stage until after his death in 1905.³
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892),
A Woman of No Importance (1893),
& An Ideal Husband (1895)
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
"Never mind, Oscar; other great men have had their dramatic failures!"
1883 cartoon by Alfred Bryan¹
1. "A Selected Resource Of Oscar Wilde's Visits To America." Oscar Wilde in America. Web. 03 May 2016.
2. Gainor, J. Ellen., Stanton B. Garner, and Martin Puchner. The Norton Anthology of Drama. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Print.
3. Stokes, John. Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.
4.Miller, Robert Keith. Oscar Wilde. New York: Ungar, 1982. Print.
References
One of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for the first English edition of Salome.
"You brute! You coward!" from an anonymous artist's illustrations to Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.
A still photograph of the original production of
The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.
These three plays are commonly grouped together as Wilde's "society comedies" which mark the beginning of his commercial success in playwrighting. After the opening performance of Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde stepped onto the stage and announced, "I am glad, ladies and gentlemen, that you like my play. I feel sure you estimate the merits of it almost as highly as I do myself." This joke was met with roaring applause. Both Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance are very melodramatic; only An Ideal Husband comes close to being a great drama. All three address the danger of idealizing reality, but An Ideal Husband does so in a more unconventional way. It is impossible to distinguish between the "good" and "bad" characters. Thus morality, itself, is not idealized as was customary in melodramas.⁴
Oscar Wilde started his playwrighting career with Vera; or, The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua, which were both melodramatic plays.² They were given short runs in New York, and are considered incredible failures. Vera; or, The Nihilists premiered at the Union Square Theatre, but ran for less than a week. The New York Times claimed that the play was "unreal, long-winded, and wearisome." Similarly, The Duchess of Padua premiered at the Broadway Theatre in New York in 1891, where it folded after only three weeks.⁴
Widely considered Wilde's greatest and most popular play, The Importance of Being Earnest premiered at the St. James's Theatre on February 14, 1895. Its philosophy is "that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality" according to Wilde, himself. Unlike his earlier comedies, his final play is characterized by a farce that satirizes the ideals of Victorian society, including marriage, religion, gender roles, education, and earnestness, among other things.² Despite its serious messages, the play is quite funny. Rather than attacking the Victorian society in which he lived, he found more pleasure in merely poking fun at it.⁴
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