Oscar wilde as a prolific writer

CHAPTER 2 Oscar Wilde - American literature
2.1. Best plays (Comedies) and tales by Oscar Wilde and their plot
Wilde’s literary works are polished achievements in established modes instead of experiments in thought or form. His poems and plays tend to seem across English Channel to the samples of the Symbolists and therefore the masters of the pièce bien faite, though his Salomé, a biblical play written in French after the design of the then acclaimed dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, was to engender a yet more significant work of art, Richard Strauss’s opera of an equivalent title. If they're not intellectually or technically adventurous, however, Wilde’s works are incomparable for his or her talk—talk that tends to be Wilde’s own put into the mouths of his characters. The outrageous, elegant, paradoxical conversation volleyed by Wilde’s languid verbal athletes have given English literature more quotable tags than have the speeches of the other dramatist save Shakespeare.⁹
Oscar Wilde completed seven plays during his life, and for the aim of dialogue , these works are often divided into two groups: comedies and high works. The four social comedies Wilde wrote for the commercial theater of his day, Lady Windermere’s Fan, a lady of No Importance, a perfect Husband, and therefore the Importance of Being Earnest, brought him money and prestige but not artistic satisfaction. there have been three plays intended as serious works of art: Vera, The Duchess of Padua, and Salomé. None of those three plays gained popular regard, critical acclaim, or theatrical success in Wilde’s lifetime.
One can disregard the primary two serious plays and lose little by the omission. Vera, published whenWilde was only twenty-five, is an apprentice piece that unsuccessfully mingles revolutionary Russian politics (particularly ill-timed, for Czar Alexander II had recently been assassinated, and therefore the consort of his successor was sister to Alexandra, wife of the prince of Wales), improbable psychology, creaky melodrama, and what was already Wilde’s dramatic forte: witty, ironic speech. The Duchess of Padua may be a derivative verse drama within the intricate, full-blown style that worked so well within the hands of the Jacobeans and has failed so dismally for his or her many and sometimes talented imitators. When read, the play has its fine moments, but even at its best, it's nothing quite an honest piece of imitation. In Salomé, however, Wilde offered the planet a significant drama of unquestionable distinction, a piece that further enriched Western culture by providing a libretto for Richard Strauss’s fine opera of an equivalent title.
Salomé
The English-speaking public, to whom Wilde’s four comedies are familiar enough, is a smaller amount likely to possess read or seen performed his Salomé, yet this biblical extrapolation, with its pervasive air of overripe sensuality, is of all of his plays the one most characteristic of its age and most vital to the ecu cultural tradition. Wilde wrote his poetic drama in France, and in French, during the autumn of 1891. Wilde’s command of the French language wasn't idiomatic but fluent within the schoolroom style.
This very limitation became an asset when he chose to cast his play within the stylized, ritualistic mold set by the Belgian playwright Maeterlinck, whose works relied heavily on repetition, parallelism, and chiming effect—verbal traits equally characteristic of a writer who thinks in English but translates into French. just like the language, the biblical source of the story is bent to Wilde’s purposes. within the New Testament accounts of the death of John the Baptist, Salomé, the eighteen- year-old princess of Judea, isn't held liable for John’s death; rather, blame for the prophet’s death is laid on Salomé’s mother, Herodias. Furthermore, as Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, and variety of other critics have observed, Wilde’s Herod may be a synthesis of a couple of biblical Herods and tetrarchs. AlthoughWilde’s license with the language and sources of his play is usually deprecated, it shouldn't be faulted. As a poetic dramatist, a verbal contriver of a symbolic ritual, his intention wasn't to transcribe but to transfigure.
The action of Wilde’s Salomé takes place by moonlight on an excellent terrace above KingHerod’s banquet hall. the straightforward setting is deftly conceived to heighten dramatic effects. On this spare stage, all entrances—whether Salomé’s, and later Herod’s and Herodias’s by the good staircase of Jokanaan’s from the cistern where he has been imprisoned— are striking. additionally , the play’s ruling motifs, moonlight and therefore the recurrent contrasts of white, black, and—with increasing frequency because the play moves toward its grisly climax—red, emerge clearly.
As the play begins, a cosmopolitan group of soldiers and pages attendant on the Judean royalty occupy the terrace. Their conversation on the sweetness of the Princess Salomé, the strangeness of the moon, and therefore the rich tableau of the Tetrarch and his party feasting within sets a weird tone that's enhanced by the sound of Jokanaan’s prophesies rising from his cistern prison. Salomé, like “a dove that has strayed . . . a narcissus trembling within the wind . . . a silver flower,” glides onto the terrace. The prophet’s strange voice and words stir the princess as deeply as her beauty troubles the young Syrian captain of the guard, a conquered prince now a slave in Herod’s palace. At her command, the Syrian brings forth Jokanaan from his prison. The prophet’s uncanny beauty—he seems as chaste and ascetic as she has just pronounced the moon to be—works a double charm of attraction and repulsion on Salomé. His body sort of a thin white statue, his black hair, his mouth “like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory” all kindle the princess’s desire. His disgusted rejection of her love only fans the flames of lust. She must have him: “I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,” she chants, because the Syrian who adores her kills himself at her feet and therefore the prophet who despises her descends another time to his cistern.
At now , Herod and Herodias, attended by their court, enter. Their comments on the moon (toHerod, “She is sort of a mad woman, a mad woman who is looking everywhere for lovers”; to Herodias, “the moon is just like the moon, that's all”) introduce the many differences in their equally evil natures. Herod is superstitious, cowardly, obliquely cruel, a tyrannical yet vacillating ruler; Herodias is brutal with the callous directness of an utterly debased woman. Salomé’s strange beauty tempts Herod even as Jokanaan’s tempts Salomé. Despite Herodias’s disapproval and Salomé’s reluctance, Herod presses the princess to bop . He offers her whatever reward she may request, even to the half his kingdom. Having exacted this rash promise of the infatuated despot, Salomé performs her famous dance of seven veils and for her reward requires the top of Jokanaan on a silver charger.
As horrified by this demand as his ghoulish consort is delighted, the superstitious Herod offers Salomé an extended and complex catalog of other payments—the rich, rare, curious, and vulgar contents of an Oriental or fin de siècle chest .With the sure instincts of truth collector, Salomé persists in her original demand. Unable to interrupt his vow, the horrified king dispatches the Nubian executioner into the cistern. Presently, during a striking culmination of the play’s color imagery, the Nubian’s arm rises from the cistern. This ebony stem bears a wierd flower: a silver shield surmounted by the prophet’s bloody head. Delirious with ecstasy, Salomé addresses her passion to the disembodied lover-prophet she has asked for, silenced, and gained. “I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan,” she concludes as a moonbeam falls on her. At Herod’s cry, “Kill that woman!” the soldiers rush forward, crushing her beneath their shields.
The play’s psychological and symbolic suggestiveness are equally rich. one among Wilde’s great contributions to the Salomé story was to supply psychological underpinnings for the sequence of events. To Wilde’s invention are owed Salomé’s spurned love for the prophet and therefore the mutual hostility that counterbalances the sensual bond between Herod and Herodias. As an expression of love’s ambivalence, Salomé is “the incarnate spirit of the aesthetic woman,” a collector who (much within the spirit of Robert Browning’s duke of Ferrara, it might seem) doesn't desire a living being but a “love object” handsomely mounted. Richard Ellmann finds something more personally symbolic within the tragedy. Jokanaan, says Ellmann, presents the spirit-affirming, bodynegating moral earnestness ofWilde’s “Ruskinism”; Salomé, who collects beauty, sensations, and strange experiences, who consummates her love for the prophet in “a relation directly totally sensual and totally ‘mystical,’” stands for the rival claims of Pater. Herod, like his creator, vainly struggles to master these opposing impulses both within and out of doors himself.
Wilde’s comedies still be performed and enjoyed by contemporary audiences, yet it's The Importance of Being Earnest that has, especially , secured for Wilde an area within the history of stage for having given the planet one among the foremost singularly witty and clever comedies of all time, an achievement that's anything but trivial.¹⁰