Ruth Leon recommends… Oscar Wilde’s 170th Birthday
Ruth Leon recommendsOscar Wilde’s 170th Birthday
In the West End theatre season of 1895, the playwright Oscar Wilde had three plays running simultaneously in the West End. Lady Windermere’s Fan came first, in 1892, A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1894). He could, it seemed, do no wrong.
And then he could. His private life, which wasn’t very private, and his own hubris, tripped him up. He fell in love with a feckless young man, Lord Alfred Douglas, and this relationship led to a series of disastrous consequences which took him into a catastrophic downward spiral, imprisonment in Reading Gaol, and a solitary death in a Paris boarding house.
This week is the 170th anniversary of the birth of one of our most influential and colourful Irish writers whose profligacy in all ways led to a sudden downfall which nobody could have foreseen in the early years of his unprecedented popularity.
But Oscar Wilde’s talent is still with us in his plays, poetry and other writings. An adaptation of his novel, The Picture of Dorian Grayhas just finished a highly successful run in London’s West End and is about to open on Broadway.
As a reminder of his playwriting craftsmanship, here is the first of his West End hits, a recent production of Lady Windermere’s Fan starring Jennifer Saunders and Samantha Spiro. A comedy of manners exploring the social mores of Victorian high society, the story focuses on young Lady Windermere who suspects her husband of having an affair. Enter Mrs Erlynne, a woman with a past who the chattering classes suspect of being a scarlet woman.
Happy Birthday, Oscar, despite your unhappy end, may new productions of your work continue to influence playwrights forever and may we continue to enjoy them in theatres throughout the world.
In the West End theatre season of 1895, the playwright Oscar Wilde, in the West End, had three plays running simultaneously in the West End.
It’s a very big quarter, there are three parts of it.
Ah, OK, you mean the northern West End, the south-eastern West End and the south-western West End.
Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is, and remains, very witty from beginning to end and has lost nothing of its absurdist humour… from the opening words of the idiotic butler to the ridiculous ending.
But his wit did not leave him even on his death bed in a cheap Parisian hotel where he could not pay his bill. So he mumbled: ‘I’m dying beyond my means!’
He had a deep contempt for the nonsense people of his time, especially the father of his boyfriend who brought him down. Rather than hubris, I would call it carelessness: during his court case, he had a full, easy chance of escaping to France but he said: ‘A gentleman does not escape to France, he travels to France on his own accord’.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
His imagining that his wit would save him is certainly hubris.
It seems more likely that he did not think that court case being a very serious thing, and gravely underestimated its proceedings. As I have read, the case first went quite positively towards his advantage, but when ‘witnesses’ were presented of his shinanigans with ‘rent boys’ in hotels, his case fell through. Very unpleasant business indeed, by the prosecuters.
He may have assumed it was not a serious matter, but he must certainly have known of his lover’s father’s love of a fight, of his disgust of homosexuality which he believed had robbed him of his son and heir re his affair with the Prime Minister, and merely dismissed the strong advice of his lawyers. Plain and simple they said do not take Quensberry to court over this matter. Wilde overruled them until he realised the sordid details of his private life which he believed hidden were about to be made public. Only then did he advise his lawyers to withdraw the suit. And it was his lawyers who had had to prosecute the case! They never stood a chance!
As far as Wilde’s own trial was concerned, no doubt the prosecutors laid out every possible homosexual scandal for the judge and therefore the public to hear. Aware of the evidence of which Queensberry was in posssession from the first trial, not to have assumed this would come out in court during this second trial must surely have been some form of madness on Wilde’s part. Why he did not flee to France to avoid all the public shame and humiliation heaped on him seems a mystery.
His last words (maybe) “Either that wallpaper goes or I do”
Of all his many epigrams, one that has remained with me since I first saw Lady Windermere’s Fan is
” I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
How many more works might he have produced had he not been so self-centred as to sue Alfred Douglas father, I wonder? Can he not have known what that belligerent man was like and that unsavoury elements of his own behaviour were almost certain to come out in court? He must also surely have known about Lord Roseberrry’s revulsion to homosexuality, perhaps in part born of the stong rumours at the time of the affair between his eldest son and heir, Lord Drumlanrig, with the bisexual Prime Minister of the day, Lord Rosebery. The unmarried Drumlanrig is thought to have committed suicide aged 27, although it was covered up as an accident at a shooting party. This occurred 18 months before Wilde’s arrest.
Apologies. Lord Afred Douglas’ father was Lord Queensberry – not Roseberry!
so he is to blame for his sad end and even(!!!) for not presenting us with more wonderfull works?
he is to be blamed because he was genuine and stood up for his beliefs and truth?
wierd remark
Not at all weird given the circumstances.
To a certain extent Wilde was indeed responsible for his own downfall, athough it is clear he never thought that would be the result of his legal action against Alfred Douglas’ father. Lord Queensberry was known to be a brute. For various reasons he was a very unpopular figure in the high society of the day in London. Of the early death of his son and heir, he wrote that “snob queers like [Prime Minister] Rosebery” had corrupted his sons. No one took action against Queensberry unless they were very sure of their facts.
Sadly for Wilde and future generations of theatregoers, he took his legal action against Queensberry on the flimsiest of grounds. Learning of his third son’s sexual association with Wilde, Queensberry left a note at Wilde’s London Club with on the envelope “For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite” [sic]. And it was on this basis Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel – against legal advice. During the trial he and his lawyers learned that Queensberry’s legal team, using evidence uncovered by private detectives he had hired, intended to call up to a dozen male prostitutes. On legal advice, Wilde dropped his libel case. When Queensberry then sued Wilde for the expenses his defence had incurred, Wilde was left bankrupt.
The extensive evidence of Wilde’s liasons with male prostitutes withheld at the libel trial was then forwarded by Queensberry to detectives and used as evidence in the ensuing trial. Homosexuality in England was a criminal act until 1967. WIlde was advised to flee to France but decided to stay. He was found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced to 2 years of forced labour.
For Wilde to sue one of London’s most disliked members of the aristocracy on the basis that a few members of his Club might have seen that envelope was an example of Wilde’s extreme hubris. It is thus fact that his own actions led to his sad demise. We know today that the other fact about the surface morality of London society hiding the decay and immorality hidden underneath was never going to be revealed at that time.
The late 19th Century high society seems an odd combination of everyone-knows and yet everyone’s-shocked.
Yes and therefore ideal material for Wilde’s work.
It was also part of the British social standards of the day: public life being a theatre, and private life a very different sphere. A whole country creating a hughe play where everybody is doing his particular part. Therefore England has bred so many great actors, it is (or was?) in their blood.