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    File: \DP\0227\02275.TXT         Sun Jun 06 10:48:51 1993
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$Title{Plays of Oscar Wilde
The Plays}
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$Author{Wilde, Oscar}
$Affiliation{Department Of English, Hunter College}
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Title:       Plays of Oscar Wilde
Book:        Introduction to Oscar Wilde
Author:      Wilde, Oscar
Critic:      Schwartz, Grace Horowitz
Affiliation: Department Of English, Hunter College

The Plays

Dramatic Heritage:

     English writers have produced some of the greatest plays in the world. In
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, William Shakespeare wrote
his plays, which are unmatched in dramatic literature. He was surrounded by
other writers who were also great but have been overshadowed by him. In the
late seventeenth century, a number of skilled writers wrote highly polished,
elegantly artificial comedies. (These are called Restoration comedies, because
they appeared during the time King Charles II (1660-1685) was restored to the
English throne. Before him, a revolution had turned England into a republic
for a number of years.) The English stage was brightened again in the
eighteenth century by the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan.

     But in the nineteenth century, the English theatre came upon bad days.
The best writers wrote poetry or novels. Once in a while a fine writer would
attempt a play (Robert Browning tried several times), but usually he was
unsuccessful.

     On the stage, Shakespeare's plays were popular. Only they were so cut,
changed around and added to, that probably Shakespeare himself would not have
recognized them. These productions were mounted in magnificent style, with
spectacular costumes and superb scenic effects. But probably most intelligent
people found it more rewarding to stay home and read the play in the original
than to attend such performances.

     Besides Shakespeare, many modern works were produced. These were usually
comedies and melodramas. They were so stereotyped that they tended to resemble
one another a great deal, and they were practically devoid of intellectual
content-like many routine motion pictures of our own time.

     Rescue from this dramatic sterility came in the 1880s and 1890s. Henrik
Ibsen, a Norwegian dramatist, and August Strindberg, a
Swedish writer, each produced a series of plays, employing brilliant skill,
to present highly controversial ideas about marriage, parents and children,
and other subjects. These plays translated and produced in England. Bernard
Shaw publicized this new style of drama. By 1892, he was beginning to write
intelligent, stimulating plays himself.

     But even when it came, this new type of play was in the minority for a
long time. Most of them were predictable comedies and stereotyped dramas. The
Scandinavians, Ibsen and Strindberg, would be the inventors of the
revolutionary new drama. The conventional older dramas also had foreign
parentage-Eugene Scribe and Victorien Sardou of France.

     Eugene Scribe (1791-1861) ruled the French theatre for thirty years,
reaching the height of fame in the 1830s. Scribe developed a five-act comic
play full of movement and with a twisting, turning plot. He seems to have had
a methodical mind, for he developed a system for putting together such
comedies. It was so exact that the formula could be easily followed. The story
always followed the same outlines. There was an explanation of the opening
situation, complications were introduced, the action reached a climax, and
then everything was straightened out so that everybody who deserved to lived
happily ever after. Even the entrances and exits of the different characters
were arranged according to a pattern.

     With the help of collaborators who wrote under his direction, Scribe ran
a sort of play factory that turned out over four hundred works. His collected
works run to an incredible total of seventy-six volumes. He stamped his
influence on uncounted other plays besides those bearing his name. Wilde's
comedies certainly belong to the same family as Scribe's and such comedies
still open on Broadway every season.

     Scribe believed that the theatre was a place for being amused. He denied
that teaching or ideas belonged on the stage.

     Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) was of a later generation; he was also
influential and popular. His greatest success was in the field of melodrama.
(A melodrama is a play full of sad and violent happenings. It does not have
characters of great depth, so it does not usually arouse profound emotions on
the part of the audience. It sometimes has a happy ending.) Like Scribe,
Sardou could put together a play in a neat, efficient manner. His later plays
were written for Sarah Bernhardt, the famous actress. Among these were Fedora
(1882) and La Tosca (1887). La Tosca later was made into an effective opera by
the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini.

Wilde's Dramatic Technique:

     When we turn to the plays of Oscar Wilde, we see that they belong, in
terms of technique, to the school of Scribe, Sardou, and innumerable
second-rate writers who followed them. It is interesting that Lady
Windermere's Fan was produced in 1892, the same year as Bernard Shaw's first
play, Widower's Houses. The two plays came from different worlds. Shaw's play
is touched by the spirit of Ibsen and Strindberg. Not a trace of this spirit
appears in Wilde's play.

     In Wilde's dramas we find the standard ingredients-plot, counterplot,
vital secrets, letters which fall into the wrong hands. Wilde handles them
very well. It is really surprising that Wilde should have picked up the
technique of writing plays so quickly and easily. His plays move well on the
stage. A far greater writer, Robert Browning, was unable to put together a
playable drama-one that would hold the interest of an audience in a theatre.

     But, the plots of these plays show no more than efficient handling. Wilde
juggles the standard ingredients in a way Scribe would have approved of. But
he does not care about the foolish wives, noble husbands, scheming
adventuresses and lost fans. He does not even seem to believe in them. He
merely goes through the motions.

     These are no personal moral convictions in Wilde's plays. He writes of
high society-or at least that is what he calls it, though it does not seem
to resemble any real group of people that ever lived. He projects secondhand
morality along with secondhand plots. A good woman is the finest influence on
a man-if she tempers her strict standards with a little mercy for most of
humanity, who are, naturally, not nearly as good as she is. An adulteress is
the worst of sinners. However, love conquers all. The love of a mother is the
greatest love in the world. And so forth.

     Considering that Wilde's plays have little distinction of story or idea,
why have they lasted? Why are they still read and acted, when many plays like
them have fallen into oblivion?

     The answer seems to be that they have one special ingredient-satire.
Wilde's blend of criticism, wit, and ironic humor aims at ridiculing the
conventional morality of his characters. His cleverness, gaiety, Irish high
spirits, and love of the ridiculous - those things that made his personality
unique to those who knew him - are transferred to the plays. Usually, he
introduces one or two characters who speak as Wilde himself did, or who
demonstrate his ability to inject absurdities into the conventional
conversations of the characters who are in his plays. For example, in Lady
Windermere's Fan, Lord Darlington often sounds like Oscar Wilde himself. At
one point he remarks: "I can resist everything except temptation."

     In the same play, the Duchess of Berwick and her daughter, Lady Agatha,
are fine examples of Wilde's gay inventiveness. The Duchess is a nonstop
talker who is busy at the serious occupation of getting her daughter engaged
to be married. The dutiful Agatha says absolutely nothing in the course of the
play except "Yes, Mama." A high point is reached when her mother refers to
her lovingly as "my little chatterbox."

     Another example of comic inventiveness is the forgetful Lady Markby, in
An Ideal Husband. She reminisces, for example, about an acquaintance whose
life was so unhappy that "she went into a convent, or on to the operatic
stage, I forget which."

     The above are very minor examples of the wit which decorates Lady
Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband. Indeed, the
finest examples have not been mentioned, in order to give the student the
pleasure of discovering them as he reads the plays.

     We must add that these generalizations do not apply to The Importance of
Being Earnest. In this, the last of his plays, Wilde has made certain changes
in his methods which are so effective that we may call them an inspiration.

     In the earlier plays, Wilde wrote two kinds of material. One was a
complex melodramatic play of the sort made popular by Scribe and Sardou. The
other was a quantity of witty dialogue, having only a distant relationship to
the main part of the play. What Wilde did was to stop the play occasionally
and insert a scene of this verbal byplay. It was apparently the same sort of
extravagant humor with which he used to entertain his friends. This humor is
the best thing by far in the earlier plays, but it does start and stop
abruptly. It is not really a part of these plays. That is, most of the best
humor in these plays could be removed and still leave the plays practically
intact - though dull.

     What the author does in The Importance of Being Earnest is to make the
entire play, plot and characters as well as dialogue, equally ridiculous. Now
the verbal humor is integrated with the whole.

     For example, the play is about the troubles of two pairs of young
lovers-Jack and Gwendolen, and Algernon and Cecily. For a time it seems as
though neither couple will be permitted to get married. Jack cannot identify
his parents, so that Gwendolen's mother will not consent to their marriage.
Algernon and Cecily also meet with disapproval. Then, too, there are temporary
misunderstandings between the couples themselves. At one point they quarrel
and break their engagements.

     This all seems usual enough in outline. However, it begins to take on a
unique quality when we add that Jack's parent-substitute is a black leather
valise (he was found in it as a baby), and that Gwendolen's mother tells
him that this is no basis for a recognized position in good society. She
advises Jack to produce at least one parent before the end of the social
season. She cannot allow her only daughter to "form an alliance with a
parcel."

     Also, the basis for the quarrels between the young people themselves is
partly that each young lady is determined to marry a young man named Ernest;
each is furious when she finds out that her young man is not called Ernest,
though he has pretended to be.

     The characters have no depth, but they have wonderful vivacity and
polish. There is Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen's mother, who is described by her
future son-in-law as "a monster, without being a myth, which is rather
unfair." Gwendolen is sophisticated and Cecily is naive, but they are both
crisply efficient about getting their young men to propose marriage. Dignified
Jack and wily Algernon are excellent partners for them.

     The minor characters are drawn with equal skill. Miss Prism, the
governess, is the very image of propriety - and the only woman in literature
absent-minded enough to put a literary manuscript in a baby carriage and a
baby in a valise instead of the other way around. Canon Chasuble, the local
clergyman, is a superb example of clerical dignity.

     Thus we have a complicated plot, full of intrigue, and recognizable
characters. But the plot is given the dimension of fantastic absurdity, and
the characters are exaggerated until they become caricatures. All this is
embodied in dialogue of a kind that is unique with Wilde. The wonderful
style is maintained throughout. Even explanations that would be a tiresome
necessity in other plays are witty and funny.

Style:

     What are the elements of Wilde's style? A close examination of the plays,
especially Earnest, will provide the best and most enjoyable answer. But we
may attempt to point out a few of its more conspicuous characteristics.

     One element is the use of misapplied logic. This is found in dialogue
that sounds reasonable but is actually nonsensical. It is similar to the
old joke in which a man is asked where the Second National Bank is located and
replies that he does not even know where the First National Bank is. For
example, Algernon, in Act One, cautions Jack not to eat the cucumber
sandwiches, which are for Lady Bracknell. Jack points out that Algernon
himself has been eating them steadily. Algernon replies: "That is quite a
different matter. She is my aunt." In a later scene, as Lady Bracknell leaves
with Gwendolen to catch a train, she remarks: "We have already missed five, if
not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform.

     Another element of style is the use of paradox, which is a statement that
seems contradictory, unbelievable, or absurd. Lady Bracknell is questioning
Jack to find out whether he is a desirable suitor for her daughter. She asks:
"You have a town house, I hope? A girl with a simple, unspoiled nature, like
Gwendolen, could hardly be expected to reside in the country." (Girls with
simple, unspoiled natures are of course usually expected to live in the
country.)

     In another scene, Gwendolen refers to her father. She says she is glad
that nobody outside of his home has ever heard of him: "I think that is quite
as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man."
(This turns upside down the common saying that the proper place for a woman is
in the home.)

     One must also mention the use of the language itself in the play. Line
after line is a triumph of glittering, scintillating loquaciousness, so
perfect that not a word could be changed without spoiling the effect. Lady
Bracknell describes Miss Prism as, "a female of repellent aspect, remotely
connected with education." Algernon remarks about a recently widowed
acquaintance: "I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief." Miss prism
describes a novel she once wrote: "The good ended happily, and the bad
unhappily. That is what Fiction means."

     To summarize, The Importance of Being Earnest is a perfect union of plot,
character and style. All blend to create something as weightless and luminous
as a bubble. That the play is quite frivolous does not make it any less
remarkable. Art with a deep purpose is not the only worthwhile kind. Gaiety,
polish, elegance - these also have their value.

A Note On Salome:

     This strange one-act play has an interesting history. It is the story of
Salome, the daughter of Queen Herodias, Princess of Judea; the other leading
character is Saint John the Baptist. The terrible story of how Salome became
infatuated with the saint and had him killed by her stepfather, Herod, because
he repulsed her, is of course derived from the New Testament.

     Wilde converts it into a sinister mood-piece full of weird symbols of
blood and death. It is a compelling little study of passion and evil. The
language is rich with suggestion. It is quite different from Wilde's usual
elegance of expression. The vocabulary is simple; there is much repetition.
This gives an understated, almost hypnotic tone to the play.

     The style is apparently influenced by that of the Belgian writer, Maurice
Maeterlinck. In fact, Wilde wrote it first in French (in 1891) for the actress
Sarah Bernhardt. She was hesitant about appearing in it, at the time. The play
was translated into English in 1894. It has had a long and successful career,
especially in an operatic adaptation (1905) by the German composer Richard
Strauss.

