2. ¨ A ‘modernist’ play?
¨ The Dandy
¨ The nature of the ‘Comic’; ‘multiple realities’
¨ Subverting/Laughing at conventions of gender
¨ Is the play Utopian?
3. ‘relaxing into laughter if, in
listening to a joke, we are for a
short time ready to accept the
fictitious world of the jest as a
reality in relation to which the
world of our daily lives take
on the character of
foolishness.’
‘On Multiple Realities’(1935).
4.
5. ‘I cannot say that I greatly cared for The
Importance of Being Earnest. It amused me,
of course; but unless comedy touches me
as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a
sense of having wasted my evening. I go
to the theatre to be moved to laughter,
not to be tickled or bustled into it; and
that is why, although I laugh as much as
anybody at a farcical comedy, I am out of
spirits before the end of the second act,
and out of temper before the end of the
third, my miserable mechanical laughter
intensifying these symptoms at every
outburst. If the public ever becomes
intelligent enough to know when it is
really enjoying itself and when it is not,
there will be an end of farcical comedy.
George Bernard Shaw, ‘An Old Play and
a New Old One’, Dramatic Opinions and
Essays with an Apology, vol. 1 (New York:
Brentano’s, 1916).
6.
7. ‘like a mirage-oasis in the
desert, grateful and
comforting to the weary
eye – but when you come
up close to it, behold! It is
intangible, it eludes your
grasp. What can a poor
critic do with a play which
raises no principle, whether
of art or morals....?’
William Archer, on. The
Importance of Being. Earnest.
Signed review in the World,
20 February 1895
8. ‘In The Importance of Being Earnest,
Wilde succeeded – almost, it would
seem, by accident, for he never
realised its infinite superiority to all
his other plays – in writing what is
perhaps the only pure verbal opera
in English. The solution that,
deliberately or accidentally, he
found was to subordinate every
other dramatic element to dialogue
for its own sake and create a verbal
universe in which the characters are
determined by the kinds of things
they say, and the plot is nothing but
a succession of opportunities to say
them’.
W. H. Auden, "An Improbable Life."
Rev. of The Letters of Oscar Wilde. The
New Yorker 9 March 1963.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15. “I had no idea that
there were any
families or persons
whose origins was
a Terminus.”
16.
17. ‘The Army Lists of the last forty years are here.
These delightful records should have been my
constant study. (Rushes to bookcase and tears the
books out). M. Generals ... Mallam, Maxbohm,
Magley – what ghastly names they have – Markby,
Migsby, Mobbs, Moncrief! Lieutenant 1840,
Captain, Lieutenant-Colonel, Colonel, General
1869, Christian names, Ernest John. (puts the book
down very quietly and speaks quite calmly). I
always told you Gwendolen, my first name was
Ernest, didn’t I? Well, it is Ernest after all. I mean it
is naturally Ernest’.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22. ‘it is very painful for me to
be forced to speak the
truth. It is the first time in
my life that I have ever
been reduced to such a
painful position, and I am
really quite inexperienced
in doing anything of the
kind’
23. ‘here on the lock are my
initials. I had forgotten
that in an extravagant
mood I had had them
placed there. The bag is
undoubtedly mine. I am
delighted to have it so
unexpectedly restored to
me. It has been a great
inconvenience being
without it all these years’
24.
25.
26.
27.
28. ‘ Man for the field, and woman for the hearth;
Man for the sword, and for the needle she;
Man with the head, and woman with the heart;
Man to command, and woman to obey;
All else confusion.’
Tennyson, ‘The Princess’ (1847).
29.
30. ‘The Queen is most anxious to enlist
everyone who can speak or write to
join in checking this mad, wicked folly
of Woman’s Rights,’ with all its
attendant horrors, on which her poor
feeble sex is bent, forgetting every
sense of womanly feeling and
propriety ...
It is a subject which makes the Queen
so furious that she cannot contain
herself. God created men and women
different – then let them remain each
in their own position. Tennyson has
some very beautiful lines on the
difference of men and women in ‘The
Princess.’ Woman would become the
most hateful, heathen, and disgusting
of human beings were she allowed to
unsex herself; and where would be the
protection which man was intended to
give to the weaker sex?’
Queen Victoria on calls for female
suffrage.
31.
32.
33. Behrendt, Patricia Flanagan, Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics (London:
Macmillan, 1991).
Bristow, Joseph, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885 (Buckingham:
Open University Press, 1995).
Dollimore, Jonathan, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London:
Verso, 1996).
Sammells, Neil, Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde (Essex: Pearson
Education Limited, 2000).
Schutz, Alfred, ‘On Multiple Realities’, in Collected Papers, vol.1 (The Haugue:
Nijhoff, 1962).
Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer
Movement (London: Cassell, 1994).
