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Oscar O'flahertie Wills Wilde

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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Dramatic and literary ability shown in these plays, all of which were published later in book form, was as undoubted as their diction and ideas were characteristically paradoxical. In 1893 the licenser of plays refused a licence to Wilde's Salome, but it was produced in French in Paris by Sarah Bernhardt in 1894. His success as a dramatist had by this time gone some way to disabuse hostile critics of the suspicions as regards his personal character which had been excited by the apparent looseness of morals which since his Oxford days it had always pleased him to affect; but to the consternation of his friends, who had ceased to credit the existence of any real moral obliquity, in 1895 came fatal revelations as the result of his bringing a libel action against the marquis of Queensberry; and at the Old Bailey, in May, Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour for offences under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. It was a melancholy end to what might have been a singularly brilliant career. Even after leaving prison he was necessarily an outcast from decent circles, and he lived mainly on the Continent, under the name of "Sebastian Melmoth." He died in Paris on the 30th of November 1900. In 1898 he published his powerful Ballad of Reading Gaol. His Collected Poems, containing some beautiful verse, had been issued in 1892. While in prison he wrote an apology for his life which was placed in the hands of his executor and published in 1905. The manuscripts of A Florentine Tragedy and an essay on Shakespeare's sonnets were stolen from his house in 1895. In 1904 a five-act tragedy, The Duchess of Padua, written by Wilde about 1883 for Mary Anderson, but not acted by her, was published in a German translation ( Die Herzogin von Padua, translated by Max Meyerfeld) in Berlin. It is still impossible to take a purely objective view of Oscar Wilde's work. The Old Bailey revelations removed all doubt as to the essential unhealthiness of his personal influence; but his literary genius was none the less remarkable, and his plays were perhaps the most original contributions to English dramatic writing during the period. (H. CH.)