Oscar Wilde: Declaring His Genius
By Ian Butcher
“I have nothing to declare except my genius”
Oscar Wilde wrote some nine plays between 1879 and 1894, including four society comedies in the 1890s which made him London’s most popular playwright. These comedies cemented his reputation including: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1899) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In 1893 he also wrote a play in French, Salomé, to star the legendary Sarah Bernhardt.An English translation was produced a year later. The play was banned by the Lord Chancellor under a law which prohibited depictions of biblical characters. It caused an outrage as the illustrations in the printed version by Aubrey Beardsley were considered obscene.
“This wallpaper is dreadful: one of us will have to go”
Wilde worked hard on his plays but liked to give the impression that he dashed them off with lazy brilliance. He once said of The Importance of Being Earnest (which had gone through about eight drafts)“I assure you that it must have taken me fully five minutes to write!” (Eltis). In a very modern way, every word that Wilde spoke and every action he took was carefully planned by him to portray himself in the way he wanted. He believed that it was important to control his own image, and he did so by keeping up the performance wherever he went.
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go”
Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, second of three children. His father was Irish-speaking and several uncles and relatives had been ordained in the established Church of Ireland. Wilde’s mother frequently held literary salons. Until he was nine, he was educated at home where a French nursemaid and a German governess taught him languages. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and won a half-scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Greats (Classics) with top honours (double First). He won a Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna and continued to publish lyrics and poems in various magazines. He attracted attention by wearing knee breeches, bow ties and ornate hats. In 1883 he wrote a five-act tragedy called The Duchess of Padua which was never performed but renamed Guido Ferranti for its first showing at the Broadway Theatre in New York in 1891 to modest success and few further productions (Edwards). Curiously, given his aesthetics of beauty, idleness and genius, he described himself as a socialist and wrote the fantastically ideal The Soul of Man Under Socialism (Wilde).
“I can resist anything but temptation”
Wilde met Constance Mary Lloyd, the daughter of Horace Lloyd, a wealthy lawyer. The couple were married in 1884 producing two sons. To all intents and purposes, the pair enjoyed a normal sex life, until – three years later – Wilde started experimenting with homosexual affairs, encouraged by his friend Robert Ross. He found employment as book critic for the Pall Mall Gazette, and was editor of Lady’s World, before he changed the title to Woman’s Word. His first major essay was Shakespeare and Stage Costume which was published in Nineteenth Century Magazine in 1885. He published a number of stories and books, his first being The Canterville Ghost (1887), The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1988), The Selfish Giant (1888) and his famous The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In 1882 he toured the US giving some 150 lectures and earned the princely sum of $6000 [roughly $190,000 in today’s money]. He spent much of 1883, 1884 and some of 1885 lecturing throughout the United Kingdom, with titles such as “Personal Impressions of America” and “The Value of Art in Modern Life”.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”
1895b was a turbulent year for Wilde. At the height of his success in with The Importance of Being Earnest, he received a card at his club, The Albemarle. The card was from the ninth Marquess of Queensberry accusing Wilde of being a “ponce and somdomite” [sic – sodomite] or of “posing as a somdomite” [sic] (Lemmey and Miller). The Marquess was the famous, but vicious man who drew up the Queensberry Rules for boxing, and who was the father of Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, a spoilt 21-year-old with whom Wilde was having a tempestuous affair. The Marquess – a former prize fighter himself, and who kept brutish company – had a deep hatred of “snob queers”. Inadvisedly, Wilde responded by taking out a warrant for criminal libel, and the case went to the Old Bailey. Wilde’s own lawyer said that he could only accept the brief if there was no truth in the charge. He asked Wilde “will you give your solemn assurance, as an English gentleman, that there is no vestige of truth in this allegation?” Fatally, Wilde lied and said that there was not. Not the first time Wilde lied under oath (Hall).
It was alleged that Wilde had committed a number of sexual acts with male persons at dates and places named, including Charles Parker. Wilde was charged under the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) together with Alfred Taylor, the owner of a male brothel that Wilde had used. Wilde was sentenced to two years penal servitude with hard labour on four accounts for “gross indecency”. He served it first in Pentonville, then Wandsworth, then famously in Reading Gaol, where he wrote a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas posthumously named De Profundis [From the Depths], a self-justification and defiant rejection of society’s norms, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (published in 1898). Perhaps one of gay rights’ first martyrs.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”
The scandal – a real cause célèbre at the time -meant that Wilde’s playwriting career was over, and Importance closed after 86 performances. When his affair with Bosie became public knowledge, he had rotten vegetables thrown at him and was booed, spat at and cursed. This rejection caused economic hardship for his wife and family. His wife did not divorce him but changed her name and went to live in Switzerland. She died in 1898.
Wilde was taken to bankruptcy court in September 1895 and was declared bankrupt in November. After discharge from prison, which had been physically and psychologically destructive, Wilde went to live in Berneval, near Dieppe in France, using the name Sebastian Melmoth. Dieppe was a fashionable resort for the English gentry, but Wilde was shunned by them and could not reintegrate into society. He continued to travel through Europe staying in cheap hotel rooms and bereft of his previous sparkling wit. He was rescued from dying on a Paris street and given extreme unction and absolution by an Irish priest. He died on November 30,1900 of cerebral meningitis aged 46 and is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery. Bosie was not imprisoned but forced into exile after the trial. After Wilde’s death, Bosie married the bi-sexual poet Olive Custance, and later died in obscurity in 1945 (Lemmey and Miller).
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them more”
The Importance of Being Earnest
“I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best”
Subtitled “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People”, this is his most famous play which is frequently produced to this day on stage and in film. Wilde called it “written by a butterfly for butterflies” (Eltis). It started off as about two and a half times the length of the final, compressed version. It encapsulates Wilde’s success, anarchically mocking the conventions and manners that that the audiences lived by, using highly formalised language and full of Wilde’s famous witty aphorisms. It is also a comedy about performance, warning about the treachery of appearances and fluidity of identities: no one in play is what they seem. Lies turn out to be truths, and it is impossible to separate lies and truth in any meaningful way. Jack remarks to Gwendolen, typically inverting the usual logic, “it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?”
“Work is the curse of the drinking classes”
Wilde’s reputation is based on these epigrams, puns and aphorisms which invert the social platitudes of the day, transgressing the slavery of custom and based on paradoxes, such as “bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same”, “moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess”, and “the home seems the proper sphere for the man”. Lady Bracknell, a font of these aphorisms, remarks to Jack Worthing on the news that he has no living parents “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”. In the play, the matriarchy appears to be in control.
“I don’t want to go to heaven; none of my friends are there”
There is a homosexual sub-text in the play. “Earnest” was a slang word for homosexual in the late nineteenth century, as in “Is he earnest?”, “Is he musical?” or “Is he so?”. Bosie had sex with a busboy named Ernest who testified at his trial.“Cecily” is also slang for a male prostitute. In 1892, three years before the play, John Gambril Nicholson – a former classmate of Wilde – published a book of pederastic poetry entitle Love in Earnest. In his sonnet Of Boy’s Names Nicholson mentions both Cecily and Ernest (“Ernest sets my heart aflame”). Nicholson was one of several dozen clandestine “Uranian” or homosexual poets in the late 1880s and mid-1890s. Uranian is derived from the German term “urning” for homosexual. It was Bosie, Wilde’s fateful lover and also an Uranian poet, who famously described homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name” (from his poem Two Loves of 1894.
“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends”
The Rev. Chasuble and Miss Prism wish to appear religious and as moral pillars of society but are burning with lust for each other. Chasuble has only one sermon (the meaning of manna in the wilderness) which he adapts to all situations. Even Lady Bracknell who is insistent on Jack having been born into correct society and having a fortune, admits that “when I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind”.
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing”
Jack and Algernon are men but are rather effeminate dandies. It is they who live double lives. Jack is the rather sensible one contradicting with “nonsense” some of Algernon’s wilder claims. For example, when Algernon states “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain”. Jack has created a troublesome younger brother, named Ernest, whom he pretends lives in the city. He has a cigarette case which reveals his name as Ernest. Cigarette cases were a frequent gift by Wilde to his male lovers. Algernon, a member of the upper classes but both idle and indulgent, has invented an invalid friend called Bunbury whom he uses to visit frequently to escape tiresome social events that he has promised to attend. He opines in Act I “in married life three is company and two is none”, indicating that one must have a third person on the side for it to be a successful marriage, hence the “bunburying”. Even though there is a real village in Cheshire called Bunbury and there is an aristocratic family descended from Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury (sixth baronet, 1740-1821), it is broadly hinted that “bunburying” involves some sort of secret homosexual activity. “Bun” from “bunbury” has, in certain gay readings, been attributed to buttocks and queer brothels. So, Algernon’s sudden infatuation with Cecily whom he hardly knows seems somewhat implausible, but good cover. Both Cecily and Gwendolen repeatedly emphasise that they could only fall in love with someone called Ernest, and no other name. Hence the importance of being named Ernest, and the importance of the double homosexual life of being “Earnest”. The play finishes rather conventionally with three couples united in what seems like love and imminent marriage.
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train”
A 1993 production of Importance at the Aldwych Theatre in London where Jack and Algernon greet each other with a kiss brought to the surface the gay text. As if to exploit and amplify the queer theme of the play, in the more recent productions of the Importance, the redoubtable Lady Bracknell is sometimes played by a man. In 1998 an adaptation in New York’s gay-populated Chelsea district was played by an all-male cast, as was the 2005 production at the Abbey Theatre. In this version, there is an added short prologue where Wilde is featured being shunned in a fashionable Paris café, the same actor playing Wilde and Lady Bracknell. Over the last few years, the play has been taken over by gender-blind, drag queen inspired performances. Not only is Lady Bracknell played by a man, but virtually all other characters are played by the opposite sex.
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”
In London’s National Theatre in 2024/2025, the play was produced with a crowd of drag queens and a number of scenes never envisaged by Wilde, otherwise not gender-blind. At the Royal Danish Playhouse in 2025 a production of the play was put on prominently featuring the name Bunbury, as if to excuse the fact that it deviated significantly from Wilde’s play. Apart from Cecily and Lane, all characters were played by actors cross-dressing. Some key scenes were maintained (the interview of Lady Bracknell and Jack, for example) but much of the rest was lost in high camp and pantomime as if the director believed that the Danish audience would not understand Wilde played straight even in a Danish-language production. The stage set comprised a large, hi-tech screen onto which key words and images flashed, and the characters’ enlarged shadows were projected. The audience was treated to three irrelevant pop songs on guitar and drums (The Doors? Why?).
“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after”
As a result, much of the subtlety and many of the subversive aphorisms were lost at the expense of characters posturing, grimacing and strutting in drag. In 2003 Van Gelder wrote of a drag version of the play in New York
style steamrollers delicate substance…A Victorian comedy celebrated for its epigrammatic wit and deft skewering of British aristocracy has been transformed…where bits of stage business intended to provoke laughs have all the subtlety of a pile driver…the highborn stoop to low comedy…when actions speak louder than its clever words, Earnest becomes only half-witted (Van Gelder).
This judgement could aptly apply to the Danish production where the focus on the outrageous costumes and mincing of the cross-dressed characters took precedence over the wit of the play. It is a serious misjudgement when a director believes that he can out-wit Wilde. Even though he spent his life outside the mainstream, Wilde would have been turning in his grave.
Works Cited
Edwards, Owen, Dudley. 2004. “Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.or/10.1093/ref:odnb/29400. Accessed 30 April 2025.
Eltis, Sos. 2017. “The best books on Oscar Wilde”. London: Five Books.
Hall, Jean, Graham. 2001. “Oscar Wilde – The Tragedy of Being Earnest: Some Legal Aspects”, The Wildean, 19 July, pp.35-42.
Lemmey, Huw, and Ben Miller. 2023. “We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie?” Verso, 5 June.
Van Gelder, Lawrence. 2003. “THEATER REVIEW: Wilde’s Victorian Wit Dumbed Down in Drag”, The New York Times, 5 July.
Wilde, Oscar. 2001. The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose. London: Penguin Classics.
Ian Butcher is English-Belgian living in Belgium and Denmark with his Danish wife. He has degrees from the Universities of Kent and York, and from The Open University in the UK. He was a lecteur d’anglais at the University of Nice in France and taught in various institutions throughout Europe. He has published a number of academic articles on Beckett, Pinter, Annie Ernaux, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, theatre topics and the importance of working titles in Titology. He worked as a Senior Vice President in the European office of a US-based management consulting company for over thirty years.