Five Major Plays

Seventy years after his death, the legend of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) still flourishes. His fantastic life readily accommodates hatchet men and sentimentalists, moralists and aesthetes. There is food enough for every prejudice. Moreover, the few objective appraisals succeed only in deepening enigma and compounding the paradox. Fore Wilde created a fiction out of his life and a life out of his fiction. And all the Freuds in the world cannot reduce this ill-fated meteor to a case history. Something elusive and tantalizing will remain always. The sum of his parts is never quite equal to the whole man. Perhaps only a Euripides might envision the total truth. One thing is certain, however: much of his work will endure. And in these five major plays-The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and Salomé-he bequeathed to us a unique legacy whose coruscating wit and brilliance will never tarnish.