Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854–1900), Irish wit and writer, best known as a dramatist. Educated in Dublin, he then went to Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for English Verse and, in spite of a reputation for idleness, took a First Class degree in Classics. By 1881 he was well enough known as a poet and aesthete to be satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Patience, and a year later he went to New York, where his first plays, Vera; or, The Nihilists (1882) and The Duchess of Padua (1891) (as Guido Ferrandi), a blank-verse tragedy, were produced, without much success. It was with a succession of comedies, beginning with Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), produced at the St James's Theatre by George Alexander, that he ultimately achieved fame, following up his initial success with A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895), both seen at the Haymarket Theatre. His most characteristic play, The Importance of Being Earnest (also 1895), with Alexander as John Worthing, was seen at the St James's. In it Wilde discarded his former vein of sentiment, which he knew to be false and a concession to the taste of the times, and returned to the pure comedy of Congreve. Though all his comedies have been revived. The Importance of Being Earnest wears best, and has proved the most successful. Few comedies of the English stage have such wit, elegance, and theatrical dexterity. In the year of its first production Wilde, who was married with two young sons, was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour for homosexuality, and afterwards went to Paris, where, broken in health and fortune, he soon died. His last play, the poetic one-act Salomé, written in French, was banned by the censor in England, but was produced in Paris in 1896 by Sarah Bernhardt, and later used as the libretto of an opera by Richard Strauss. It was first seen privately in London in 1905, and has since been revived occasionally. Wilde left an unfinished one-act play, A Florentine Tragedy, completed by Sturge Moore and produced in London in 1906. In 1960 Michéal MacLiammóir toured in a one-man entertainment based on his work. The Importance of Being Oscar.