oscar wilde biography, Apuntes de Teatro

¡Descarga oscar wilde biography y más Apuntes en PDF de Teatro solo en Docsity! Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900 from Literature Online biography Published in Cambridge, 2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company) Copyright © 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All Rights Reserved. Oscar Wilde (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills) (1854-1900), Irish author and aesthete, was born on 16 October 1854 into a respectable, if flamboyant, middle-class Dublin family. His father, Sir William Wilde was an eminent surgeon, his mother, Jane Francesca Elgee ('Speranza'), a well-known poet. Both parents were Irish nationalists-- Sir William collected Irish folklore, and Lady Wilde wrote romantic nationalist poetry and translated Celtic tales under the name 'Speranza'. Their house at 1 Merrion Square was a centre of Dublin social and artistic life. Lady Wilde's talent for self- publicity and for inventive self-fashioning (e.g. her adoption of Italian names, based on a probably spurious claim that her family was of Italian origin), her love of poetry and languages, and her extravagant dress were all models for the young Oscar. Wilde was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Trinity College Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874-1879). He revealed a prodigious talent for modern and classical languages, and at Portora was already developing a reputation for dandyism and Hellenism; this was facilitated by the 'aesthetic' climate at Trinity, where Wilde's reading included Swinburne, Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites and John Addington Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets. His tutor at Trinity was the Reverend J. P. Mahaffy, who fostered Wilde's love of Greek culture, and was one of the first Classicists to touch on the question of Greek homosexuality in his writings. Wilde accompanied Mahaffy on a tour of Greece and Italy 1877, which resulted in his being suspended from Magadalen, but also inspired the poem 'Ravenna' which won him the Newdigate Prize for Poetry the following year. At Oxford, Wilde was eager to meet the aesthetic writers John Ruskin, who was the Slade Professor of Fine Art, and Walter Pater, a fellow at Brasenose College. Pater was a profound influence on Wilde: he read Studies in the History of the Renaissance during his first term at Magdalen, and would constantly refer to it as 'my golden book'. He learnt much of it by heart, especially the then controversial 'Conclusion' in which Pater urges the pursuit of experience merely for its own sake, and the cultivation of 'moments' of intense but unstable ecstasy: 'To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life'. In keeping with this creed, Wilde further developed his 'aesthetic' persona at Oxford, becoming famous for his mannered pose, his collection of objets d'art, and for his wit. The first of many attributed epigrams to achieve wide fame was the scandalous comment that 'I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china'. This circulated around the university, was castigated by an Oxford priest for its immorality, and finally gave Wilde national fame when it inspired the first of many caricatures by George Du Maurier in Punch. Wilde was a pioneer of the modern art of celebrity, becoming famous more for his 'personality' than his works. After settling in London in 1879 he continued to cultivate this eccentric and brilliant persona, and his self-publicizing was aided by satirists such as Du Maurier and W. S. Gilbert, who used Wilde as the main model for the long-haired, lily- sporting aesthete Bunthorne in his 1881 comic opera Patience. In fact, Wilde and his satirists publicized each other: Wilde's extensive lecture tour of North America in 1882 was organized by Richard D'Oyly Carte to coincide with the tour of Patience, and was intended to introduce aestheticism to the American public. Wilde saw his role as that of 'civilising America', preaching practical aestheticism in the face of what he saw as a prevalent vulgar materialism. On both sides of the Atlantic, Wilde's work was received with ridicule and outrage. His 1881 volume Poems was sent back by the Oxford Union Library after a heated debate in which Wilde's poetry was declaimed as thin, immoral and full of plagiarisms. Punch described his poems as 'Swinburne and water', and many other reviewers readily condemned the poems for indecency, insincerity and artificiality; even favourable readers, such as Symons, saw the volume as uneven and overly eclectic, while praising Wilde's technical achievement and promise. Wilde followed aestheticist practice by publishing these poems in a deluxe edition at his own expense, and many of the poems also recall the writers of the aesthetic movement: 'The Garden of Eros', 'The Burden of Itys' and 'Humanitad' share Swinburne's interest in paganism and perverse sexuality, while 'Hélas' and 'Charmides'-- which describes a young man's amorous embraces with a statue of Athena--closely echo Pater's essay on Winckelmann in The Renaissance. This was Wilde's only published volume for almost a decade. Throughout the 1880s he was known primarily as an art critic and wit, famed for his exchanges with James McNeill Whistler. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd-- they had two sons, Gilbert and Vyvyan--and settled in Tite Street, in the bohemian quarter of Chelsea. He continued to lecture on dress reform and the importance of beauty in modern life, and to pursue an extravagant social life; in 1886 he also began his first homosexual affair, with Robert Ross. Financial strains encouraged Wilde to become editor of Woman's World from 1887 to 1889, and from this time he began an extraordinarily productive burst of literary activity. He wrote two volumes of highly stylized children's fables, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), a volume of short stories, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1892), a witty short story on the scandalous subject of the possible identity of Shakespeare's male muse called The Portrait of Mr W. H. (1891), a volume of essays, Intentions (1891), a further essay entitled The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) and Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Together with the five plays which followed in the early 1890s, it is on this novel that Wilde's literary reputation largely rests. Richard Ellmann has described The Picture of Dorian Gray as 'the tragedy of aestheticism'. It depicts the beautiful young dandy, Dorian Gray, who comes under the influence of an extreme spokesman of Paterian aestheticism, Lord Henry Wotton. Wotton declares that 'the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it', and suggests that even murder is 'simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations'. Dorian gradually falls further and further into a life of vice (his sins are never quite specified, but it is implied that homosexuality is one of them); however, due to a wish he has made, he remains young and innocent-looking, while his portrait, locked in the attic, grows old and hideous in his place. The plot appears to offer an indictment of the 'New Hedonism', as Dorian is ultimately punished for his amoral pursuit of sensations, but the novel also flaunts its own aestheticism both through its ornate, 'decadent' style, and through the addition of a 'Preface', a series of epigrams which declare that 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.' Predictably, the novel provoked outrage--W. H. Smith's refused to sell it-- but it was also received with enthusiastic praise by like-minded writers such as Pater (who reviewed it for The Bookman) and Lionel Johnson . Together with its sensationalism and apparently frivolous wit, the novel explored themes which were taken up in the essays published in Intentions. Wilde's declaration, in his 'Preface', that 'all art is quite useless' was a provocative attack on utilitarian and moralistic views of art; his relentless use of paradox and celebrations of surface rather than depth offered a critique of Matthew Arnold's view that the study of art depended on sincerity and 'high seriousness'. Whereas Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) claimed that culture appealed to our 'best self', and thus offered a defence against the anarchy of the modern world, Wilde's essays present art in terms of individual interpretation, flux and disintegration. In 'The Critic as Artist', which is written as a Socratic dialogue, Wilde writes that 'What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities'. He argues for a far more creative, even fanciful role for criticism than Arnold allows for, and explicitly rewrites Arnold by the addition of the word 'not' in the following phrase: 'the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not'. Wilde's disdain for customary notions of truth and sincerity is also evident in another aesthetic dialogue, 'The Decay of Lying', in which the speaker Vivian bemoans the 'decay of lying' in current realist art and literature. He argues for artificiality as opposed to mere reflection of nature, and even that nature itself actually imitates art rather than vice versa: he claims that the fogs in London did not exist until the Impressionists painted them. The brilliant epigrammatic style of these dialogues, with their outrageous paradoxes, is developed to great effect in Wilde's social comedies of the 1890s, the first of which was Lady Windermere's Fan (1892). The play was a sensational success, and Wilde added to the sensation by appearing before the curtain smoking a cigarette, wearing a green carnation, and congratulating the audience on their intelligence in appreciating the play. In the same year, rehearsals began for a production of Salomé, which Wilde had written in French, starring Sarah Bernhardt; but the play was banned by the Lord Chamberlain because of its depiction of Biblical characters. The play won praise from Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck, and was published in English in 1893, translated by Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas (with corrections by Wilde), and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. Further acclaim followed for the comedies A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The latter, still Wilde's most popular play, continues to satirise ideas of 'importance' and 'earnestness' through its