Literary Guest - Oscar Wilde

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day the Symposium is proud to add witty playwright, poet, and notorious dandy Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde to our guest of honour line up.

Wilde is known for his ideas about the supremacy of art and has incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He has wrote Salome in French in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to the absolute prohibition of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of London.

His masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest is still on stage in London, but the drama was off the stage when the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted Wilde for libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The charge carried a penalty of up to two years in prison, but the trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for “gross indecency with other men.” After two more trials he was convicted and imprisoned for two years’ hard labour. In prison, he wrote De Profundis, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his latest work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six . . .

Ah . . . I guess we won’t be having Oscar Wilde as a guest after all, at least not until we can repair our time machine, but he shall certainly be with us in spirit and revered as one of our favorite Irish writers. Learn more about Oscar Wilde from the Wikipedia page where I “borrowed” all the above information, and watch the amazing biographic motion picture Wilde staring Stephen Fry.