The Plays of Oscar Wilde [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONOscar Wilde was a remarkable playwright. His work was hailed as unique by the influential theatre critic William Archer:The one essential fact about Mr Oscar Wilde's dramatic work is that it must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama, and, furthermore, that it stands alone on that plane. In intellectual calibre, artistic competence - and in dramatic instinct - Mr Wilde has no rival among his fellow workers for the stage.'Wilde was writing for the stage at a time when critics and fellow play'MTights were campaigning for new theatre writing to be 'literary', offering intellectual and political challenges to its audiences. Continental playwrights such as Zola, Ibsen and Strindberg had already demonstrated that the stage could air radical social ideas. These innovators, and their British counterparts, were rebelling against the commercial interests which dominated theatre practice at the time. They rejected the traditions of spectacular melodrama, music hall, long-running revivals of Shakespeare's plays and, in Britain, translations of French well-made plays, all of which made up the standard fare of theatrical entertainment in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this context Wilde was revolutionary because he delivered plays which were pohtically engaged, artistically innovative and commercially successful.Wilde's prominence on the London stage lasted for only three years, from the opening of Lady Windermere^s Fan in 1892 to that of The lmpo7tance of Being Earnest in 1895. Superficially it may seem that Wilde was a born playwright who simply stepped into dazzling success and whose career was then cut short by the tragic events of his arrest, trial and imprisonment in 1895. But in fact the learning process by which Wilde arrived at his major achievements had beenI William Archer, review oiA Woman of No Importance in World, 26 April 1893