Today is the birthday of Oscar Wilde,
born in Dublin in 1854, who was already a successful playwright when he
fell into a love affair with the young aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas.
Wilde was married with two children at the time, and the affair ruined
his reputation in society. He later wrote, "I curse myself night and day
for my folly in allowing him to dominate my life." But it was the most
creative period of his life. He wrote three plays in two years about
people leading double lives, including A Woman of No Importance
(1893), An Ideal Husband
(1895), and his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895), about two men who use an imaginary person named Earnest to get
themselves out of all kinds of situations, until their invented stories
and identities get so complicated that everything is revealed.
The actor who played Algernon Moncrieff later said, "In my
fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than the
first night of The Importance of Being Earnest."
But that same year, Wilde was accused of sodomy by the father of his
lover. Wilde might have let the accusation pass, but he chose to sue his
accuser for libel, because he thought he could win the case by his
eloquence alone. Private detectives had dug up so much damning evidence
on Wilde that he was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to two years of
hard labor. His plays continued to be produced on the stage, but his
name was removed from all the programs. He was released from prison in
1897 and died
three years later in a cheap Paris hotel.
Oscar Wilde, who said, "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."
And, "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea
at all."
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