Allowed to mingle and eat with the guests, they learned to value intellectual and witty conversation, an influence that would have profound and long-lasting effects on young Oscar Wilde. Through their home passed intellectuals, artists, and internationally known doctors - and the children were not left to a governess or nanny. These offspring would not experience a standard, conventional childhood. Wilde had two siblings: an older brother named Willie, born in 1852, and a sister, Isola, born in 1856, but who died at the age of 10. She attracted artists like herself and established a literary salon devoted to intellectual and artistic conversations of the day, through which Lady Wilde brought literature, an interest in art and culture, and an elegance and appreciation for wit into the lives of her children. An Irish nationalist, she wrote under the pen name Speranza. Wilde's mother, Jane Francesca Elgee (or Lady Wilde), saw herself as a revolutionary and liked to trace her family through the Italian line of Alighieris, including Dante. His father, Sir William Wilde, was an eminent Victorian and a doctor of aural surgery. He was born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde on October 16, 1854, at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, Ireland. Although it's out of print (and therefore might be hard to find), one might also consult Richard Pine's groundbreaking study, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (1995).Oscar Wilde's unconventional life began with an equally unconventional family. Playsįor more on this playwright from an Irish Studies perspective, see Jarlath Killeen's book, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland (2005).
During his imprisonment and after, he produced two more classic works: his greatest poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", and an open letter to his former lover, Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, entitled De Profundis. He left prison a broken man (physically and financially) and spent his last years on the continent – mostly in Paris. Wilde was gay and was sentenced to two years hard labour for "homosexual offenses" in 1895.
#Oscar wilde plays license#
It was denied a license by the Lord Chamberlain (England's theatrical censor), because it depicted Biblical characters – and in a sexy way, no less! The play received its professional, English-language premiere in a production mounted by the Gate Theatre Company at Dublin's Peacock Theatre (the Abbey Theatre's experimental space) in 1928. In addition to Wilde's four brilliant social comedies, he is also remembered as a dramatist for his powerful Biblical play, Salomé, which was originally written in French. Indeed, when his characters repeatedly make detached comments about "the English", it comes across strongly as the observations/criticisms of Wilde, the Irish outsider. To Wilde the aristocrats of England were as the nobles of Baghdad." That said, Wilde, being a socialist (see his essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism"), saw that the charmed lives of these aristocrats were predicated on the exploitation of the lower classes therefore, he also repeatedly makes cutting observations about the English people who he finds so charming. Yeats put it, " was an Irishman and England to an Irishman is a far, strange land.
In these works, Wilde seems somewhat charmed by the "exotic" ways of the English upper classes as W.B. Many critics have noted that the folkloric element in Wilde's fiction for children and adults is one of the most Irish aspects of his art.Īlso quite Irish is his outsider's view of the English, abundantly present in his fiction and his social comedies. Mayo, and, during these holidays, young Oscar heard much Irish folklore from his parents (who collected stories from the local tenantry) and Frank Houlihan (a Galway man who worked for Wilde's father). The Wilde family spent their summers in Connemara and later Cong, Co. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to Sir William Wilde (a celebrated eye and ear surgeon and folklorist) and Lady Jane Wilde (a fiery Nationalist poet who wrote under the pen name "Speranza").
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