In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy!
Plays
by Oscar Wilde
Genre: Comedy
About: A collection of Oscar Wilde's most famous plays. All glorify the trivial with hidden emotional and philosophical depths to their core. In these plays we witness confusion over a mistress and a gifted fan, recognize the handwriting of an inconsequential old acquaintance, judge a man for his past, invent and find a brother and dance in blood under the moonlight.
The Good
I've never read any of Oscar Wilde's stories before and I'm glad to have started with his very light-hearted and fun plays. The dialogue is really clever, the plots utterly and beautifully ridiculous and I can see how entertaining many of these plays would be to see on the stage (and fun to act in them!). If you're a fan of Jane Austen's satire of Society, or you love the surreal and cynical nature of Alice and Wonderland, then I think these plays would be a perfect fit. Oscar Wilde brilliantly mocks Society, both by preaching against it with his extreme moral characters, and by trivialising it with his very fashionable characters. The back and forth between some of the romances is genuinely delightful and the constant contradictions of what someone says and what someone means really adds to the charm.
My order of preference:
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Windermere's Fan
A Woman of No Importance
An Ideal Husband
Salome
Other favourite quotes:
"All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of."
"Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."
"Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is."
"You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none."
The Bad
I don't think I should have read one play after the other. This collection suits reading other things in between as the plays are so very similar in nature. Many of the characters blur because they take on the same stereotypes. There's the Unserious Man who mocks the world, the Wicked Woman who is witty but heartless, the Woman Without Sin who preaches morality, and the Players who live only to be part of Society. These dynamics are quite repetitive and feel like the same lesson being taught over and over again.
And I found Salome almost unreadable. Maybe it was the translation or maybe it was the setting, but I didn't enjoy that play in the slightest. Creepy, obsessive and way too focused on religion.
The Somewhat Iffy
Perhaps it's simply what Oscar Wilde had to do because of the time in which these plays were written, but I didn't love how little progression the characters have. The good stay good, the bad stay bad. For instance, I would have loved if in The Ideal Husband it had focused on the dynamic between Mrs Cheveley and Lord Goring. They are both cynical characters with different morals perhaps but it could have been fun to have a lovers to enemies to lovers again relationship and for one of the 'immoral' characters to have been changed by the end of the play. The only happy endings are for the righteous and it makes the plays a little more tame and innocent leading than its other philosophies suggest.
Also I hated the lesson Lady Chiltern 'learns' when she says - "A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it." I think the rest of what Lord Goring was saying about accepting your partner for his flaws as well as their strengths was the better lesson to focus on. But this also gets undermined when Lord Chiltern refers to his wife by the end as "the white image of all good things, and sin can never touch you." Maybe it's all just comedy and part of the joke is that they never learn to accept flaws in the person they love most, but it came off as idolizes innocence and ignorance.
Overall
A fun collection of satire and triviality. Not to be read one after the other as the stereotypes are repeated often enough to blur. Recommend for fans of Jane Austen and Alice in Wonderland, and definitely would want to see these on the stage.
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