Read two texts about Oscar Wilde’s biography and creative activity.

A brief Oscar Wilde’s biography

Act One

William Wide and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, Oscar's parents, were Dublin celebrities. William Wilde was a prominent eye and ear surgeon. In addition to his successful practice, he wrote numerous volumes on his particular branch of medicine. He was a talented conversationalist, and led a busy and active social life in the midst of Dublin's elite.

Lady Wilde was a noteworthy agitator for Irish Independence (the "Green Movement"), revolutionary poetess, critic, and early advocate of women's liberation. She was a genius (self-proclaimed, also however so testified by acquaintances), and a witty talker, and Oscar Wilde would assume most of her characteristics.

The sixteenth of October, 1854, Oscar Wilde was born into a most stimulating environment. The family, which included two year old brother Willie, lived on the North Side of Merrion Square.

Oscar Wilde, at the youngest of ages, was encouraged by both parents to sit among such visitors as, perhaps, John Ruskin - later an influential teacher and friend at Oxford - and fetch books for his father, or amuse adults with his stories.

After nine years, Wilde was sent to the Portora Royal School, which some years later also cultivated Samuel Beckett.

The Wildes strove to preserve their children from the rest of the middle class, and Wilde observed that he "grew up surrounded by this poverty, but he was protected from its harsh realities as he played in the garden of Merrion Square."

If Wilde's family strove to distinguish themselves in their present, they also worked to do so by rejuvenating their past, discovering links to Irish myth and heroism in a way that was very influential for Wilde.

Wilde and his mother were very superstitious people, and Wilde claimed to have been visited by both his mother and his wife on the eve of their deaths, although on both occasions they were separated by many miles.

Irish superstition and myth not only set Wilde apart in England by fueling excellent stories, but also by leaving its mark on his dress (he always wore a scarab ring on each little finger), and in his actions (he advised friends about avoiding the "Evil Eye"). Cultivation of mystique worked, and through a combination of strange behavior, entertaining storytelling, and effortless academic prowess - all of which attributes were somewhat gained by his uniqueness as an Irishman steeped in domestic myth and tradition - Wilde was a star before he had really published anything at all.

Act Two

Wilde won a spot at Trinity College Dublin in 1871, having easily won an important prize in Greek - much to the surprise of all who had believed him to be brilliant but slothful. At Trinity, Wilde won all sorts of prizes for his scholarship.

In 1874 Wilde matriculated in Magdalen College, Oxford on scholarship. Here, his already discussed preference for the past was sustained and furthered by his growing friendship with two great tutors, John Ruskin and Walter Pater.

At Oxford, Wilde was also introduced to the joys of combining Mahaffey's Greek ideal with homosexuality - the University's young men, according to several biographers, expressed delight in each other's beauty and brilliance, and Wilde later wrote of the pleasures of strolling through the grounds observing his pleasant peers.

Act Three

Just before he left Oxford, Wilde won the Newdigate Prize for a poem, "Ravenna". Indeed, Wilde was the favored pupil of the best. Many of his religious poems of this period were well received at British monasteries.

In addition to the intellectual energy Wilde was expending at the time, he endured some emotional stress as his father died and left the family with little money and greater debts. To add too his problems, he had recently been disappointed in love by Florence Balcombe when she broke off a loose affair without telling him and married Bram Stoker..

In 1882 Wilde, again short of funds, embarked on a lecture tour of the United States. He appears to have valued the stories that he gained from his journey more than the experience itself, and his last statement to an American reporter, "They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris. I would add that when bad Americans die, they stay in America," seems to sum up his feelings.

He spent the next couple of years in Britain and France, championing 'Art Nouveau' - essentially the Aesthetic, art for art's sake movement - before violating all of his bachelor's principles in an attempt to "settle down" and marry the attractive, love-struck, Constance Lloyd.

The marriage, in late May 1884, represented all that was to go badly with the union as a dumbfounded and unappreciative woman of quite mediocre intelligence was thrust into the resplendent world of the Aesthete Prince.

This period of short-lived domestication saw Wilde become editor for Woman's World magazine, and for the middle of the decade he was less productive creatively. By 1889 he was bored with the tame life, had let the editorship of Woman's World slip away along with the substance of his marriage, and was publishing provocative essays largely dealing with the self-explanatory Art for Art's Sake. His book, Intentions, contained essays called The Decay of Lying; The Critic as Artist; Pen, Pencil and Poison; and The Truth of Masks. They were written in the form of "dialogues" between a new Plato and his young disciples, an intellectual exercise that the author would soon begin to live out. The next five or seven years saw the height of his fame as he published and produced witty and scandalous plays like The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A Woman of No Importance. Additionally he published perhaps his best work - but one that led his wife to complain that people would no longer talk to them after having read it -The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Act Four

Unfortunately, popular acclaim made him too cocky, and he became increasingly aboveboard about his interest in homosexuality and Platonism. He met the charming but temperamental Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie") and began a very close relationship with him. This continued for years until Bosie's father, Lord Queensberry, began to search for evidence with which he could persecute Oscar.

In 1895 Wilde sued him for libel after receiving an accusatory note, and Queensberry began to turn London inside out in a search for evidence to support his claim. A number of Wilde's passionate letters to Bosie were already circulating, and were used with several of Wilde's own works - and a list of male child prostitutes that he kept company with - to defeat the poet.

Wilde was defeated on sodomy charges with the same evidence. After the trial, he was given several opportunities to flee the country, but did not. He remained in prison until 1898, and the humiliation led him to produce De Profundis, which was an Apologia in the form of a bitter letter to Bosie. He also drew from his experience to produce The Ballad of Reading Gaol and several articles against the poor conditions in British prisons, one of which contributed to the passing of a law to prevent the imprisonment of children.