Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
1. INTRODUCTION
2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
3. OSCAR WILDE
3.1 EARLY LIFE
3.2 HIS PLAYS
3.3 HIS DOWNFALL
4. BERNAND SHAW
4.1 EARLY LIFE
4.2 HIS PLAYS
4.3 THE ‘NEW DRAMA’
4.4 WORLD WAR I
4.5 FINAL YEARS
5. CONCLUSION
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. INTRODUCTION
This topic deals with two of the most important Anglo-Irish writers in history.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) were born in Dublin and
both made major contributions to the English drama. They were masters of witty
paradox and regarded themselves as socialists. However, in all other respects, their
attitudes to life and art were quite different. Shaw’s public career was also very much
longer than Wilde’s due to the fact that he outlived the latter in fifty years.
Throughout these pages we will try to explain the reasons that made them be
remembered for ever.
2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
England continued to prosper through the 19th century and, by its end, a strong
national economy and overseas empire had been established.
Education improved and most people were at least literate. One result of literacy
was the development of the mass-circulation newspapers.
The theatre had deteriorated partly as a result of the severe restrictions imposed
by the Puritans a hundred and fifty years previously and partly as a result of the
undemanding taste of the audiences who were content with melodramatic tragedies,
sentimental romances and farcical comedies.
One conventional aspect of society which merited satire was the existence of an
aristocracy who lived in a great wealth and led extravagant ways of life. These people
became prominent in the public eye, for newspapers reported their activities in social
columns. Reading about their activities provided the same world of fantasy as that we
could find nowadays in film stars.
In the 1880’s, a small literary and artistic movement flourished. ‘The
Aesthetics’, as they were called, aimed to make amends for several decades of artistic
monotony. They devoted themselves to “art for art’s sake” rejecting the notion that art
should have a social or moral purpose. Oscar Wilde was the most famous and
outstanding figure of this movement.
Oscar Wilde as well as Bernard Shaw used their works to show that although on
the surface this was a successful society, below it there exist many problems. They grew
a social sense that can be show in their works. Their essays, journalism, plays and
poetry were used to bring social issues to a wide audience.
All in all, the Victorian age began within a general social malestar but as time
went by, the conditions improved….However, it is very important to remember that the
unfortunately arrival of the First World War (1914-1918) changed for many people their
view of the world once again.
This situation/panorama was this reflected in literature because artists felt they
had to express their ideas very differently in new forms, which were difficult for
everyone to understand….
Within two years, he had made quite a name for himself. His first published work,
Poems (1881), was well received. The next year he agreed to lecture in the United
States and Canada, experience that proved to be a brilliant success (On his arrival to
New York he announced “I have nothing to declare but my genius”). His play Vera
(1883), a rather immature one, ran for one week in New York but never reached the
boards in London. In his return to Europe, he finished another play, The Duchess of
Padua and in 1884 he married Constance Lloyd; they had two sons, for whom he
wrote The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which really are poems in prose more
than fairy tales for children, revealing his gift for romantic allegory and expressing his
humanitarian sentiments and sympathy with the sufferings of the poor. By the time of
his marriage, he was working as a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became
editor of Woman’s World (1887-9), a very reputable publication.
His active literary career, though, can be said to begin in 1891 with his publication of
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (a collection of tales including The
Canterville Ghost, The Sphinx Without a Secret and The Model Milliorare) and a
collection of fairy tales The House Of Pomegranates. It was in this same year when
Intentions came out; this is by far the most interesting and entertaining book of essays in
the form of dialogues that Wilde wrote in which he really gain rein to his imagination
(they contain Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy). It is probably the most absorbing of all his
works (The most interesting essay of the book is The Decay Of Lying, which dominant
theme is the vast superiority of Art over Nature). And 1891 also saw the appearance of
his one and only novel: The Picture Of Dorian Gray. The book has some parallels with
Wilde’s own life. A story of horror, it depicts the corruption of a handsome Victorian
gentleman, Dorian, who sells his soul to keep his youth and beauty in a painting.
Although he himself remains young and handsome, his portrait becomes ugly and
acquires certain evil, reflecting his moral degradation. The book highlights the tension
between the polished surface of high life and the life of secret vice. In the end sin is
punished.
His poems, short stories, essays and one novel were well received, but Wilde’s
creative genius was to find its highest expression in drama.
Wilde wrote a series of plays in the style of ‘the comedy of manners’ which had
been popular during the 18th century before the decline of the theatre. In essence, ‘the
comedy of manners’ is a type of play that pokes fun at the artificial conventions,
customs and follies of the society and times in which it is written. Wilde’s plays are a
gentle satire of the upper classes who were so content with their own life. The typical
genre style is that it gains strength from brilliant wit in the dialogue. Characterisation
and plot are artificial and incidental; they are used simply as vehicles for scintillating
speech. The comedy of manners appealed to the mind rather than the emotions. Wilde
called his plays “trivial comedies for thinking people”. Absurdity of plots, improbable
situations and the unbelievable characters poked the immediate laugh in the audience.
Epigrams are characteristic of Wilde’s wit; they are short, polished sayings with an
unusual twist of meaning. His plays are sprinkled with them and many have become
famous out of context: “I can resist everything except temptation”; “One should never
trust a woman who tells her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one
everything”…
However, respectability was a terrible burden for Wilde and he submerged himself
in a disorienting sea of liquor and young men. Shortly thereafter he separated from his
wife (1893, claiming that he'd been away from home for so long that he’d forgotten the
house number) and he also cut off ties with most of his family and intellectual peers.
Ironically as it may seem, it was during this period, the last decade of his life, that
Wilde wrote nearly all his major works.
Strange as it may seem, Wilde made his reputation in theatre between the years
1892 and 1895, with a series of highly popular plays, all of them being extremely clever
and filled with witty epigrams and paradoxes:
- Salome: biblical and rather perverse, it describes the death of John the Baptist.
Lord Chamberlain banned this play to be performed because it contained biblical
characters. This fact so annoyed Wilde that he announced his intentions of renouncing
to his British nationality, although he never carried out his threat.
- Lady Windermere’s Fan: his first success in London, it deals with a woman
who is about to leave her family to run off with her lover, but she is dissuaded form
doing so. The play suggests that obeying virtuous dictates leads to unethical behaviour
which distorts the personality.
- An Ideal Husband: it deals with blackmail, political corruption and public and
private honour.
His years of triumph ended dramatically when his personal life was open to
rumours. Later 1895, Wilde declared to have a homosexual affair with Lord Alfred
(ADD SODOMITE) Douglas (Bosie). Therefore, the Lord of Queensbury, Douglas’s
father, forced a trial and Wilde was found guilty of homosexual practices and was
sentenced to prison. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a
deeply moving letter addressed to Douglas, which was published posthumously in 1905
as De Profundis (a moving description of his spiritual progress to religious insight).
The once flamboyant public figure shied away from his former audience,
choosing to live the rest of his life under the alias of Sebastian Melmoth. In 1900,
Oscar Wilde, plagued by ill health and bankruptcy, died penniless and alone in a Paris
hotel at the age of 46. He was buried without much ceremony.
Wilde wrote in all the main literary forms: poetry, fiction, drama and essays.
As he once said, he put his talent into his writings and his genius into his living and, as a
result, Wilde survives as a myth, a legend of pure style that ultimately turned to
tragedy, rather than as a conventional man of letters whose work can be assessed in the
ordinary way.
When Shaw began writing for the English stage, dramatists of the period were
trying to break away with the artificial plots and conventional character types to develop
a modern realistic drama.
In 1892, Shaw wrote his first drama Widower's Houses, a play recognisably
‘Ibsenite’ in tone, in which a well-intentioned young Englishman falls in love and then
discovers that his father-in-law's fortune derive from exploitation of the poor; it is the
social evil and not the romantic predicament on which attention is concentrated, and the
action is kept well within the key of ironic comedy. The same dramatic predispositions
control Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), which deals with the discovery by a well-
educated young woman that her mother has graduated through prostitution to become a
part-proprietor of brothels throughout Europe. Again, the economic determinants of the
situation are emphasized, and the subject is treated remorselessly. Shaw called these
first plays ‘unpleasant’ because their dramatic power was used to force the spectator to
face unpleasant facts.
They were followed by a group of ‘pleasant’ plays for the commercial theatre in
an effort to make amends with the producers and audiences to whom mordant comedies
had offended: Arms and the Man (1894) makes sometimes fun of romantic falsifications
of both love and warfare, Candida (1897) –the play represents its heroine as forced to
choose between her clerical husband -a Christian Socialist- and a young poet who has
fallen wildly in love with her. She chooses her husband because she reckons that he is
actually the weaker, The Man of Destiny (1897), among others. Both groups of plays
were revised and published in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898).
In 1898, Shaw got married and lived a period of rest regarding theatre.
However, the first year of the 20th century saw his next collection of plays, Three Plays
for Puritans (1901), and continued what became the traditional Shavian preface: an
introductory essay in an electric prose style dealing as much with the themes suggested
by the plays as the plays themselves (prefaces sometimes much longer than the plays
themselves). These plays include The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra (Shaw’s
first great play –it depicts a credible rather than a supernatural Caesar and a spoiled and
vicious 16-year-old Cleopatra; nothing to do with Shakespeare's Antony and
Cleopatra), and Captain Brassbound's Conversion.
4.3 THE ‘NEW DRAMA’
In the first decade of the new century, Shaw’s complete absence of respect for
any kind of convention made him seek for a ‘New Drama’ on the stage in London. He
had a native gift of eloquence and wit that enabled him to construct his dramas on rules
of his own and he knew that, whatever tricks he played, his ability to hold the
audience’s attention through sheer words would carry him through. What he wanted
with his plays was to make audiences/readers examine their consciences and overhaul
their conventional beliefs. He turned the conventional assumptions of English society
upside-down, so that woman becomes the stronger sex and man the weaker, man the
dreamer and woman the realist, woman the pursuer and man the pursued. This is an
important idea in Shaw.
In between 1904 and 1907, the Royal Court Theatre performed John Bull’s
Other Island (towards an Irish audience), Man and Superman (where Shaw expounded
one of his significant themes: the conflict between man as spiritual creator and woman
as guardian of the biological continuity of the human race), The Doctor’s Dilema (satire
upon the medical profession) or Major Barbara (backing the idea salvation is only
possible through political activity). Shaw’s radical rationalism, his utter disregard of
conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum
of ideas.
By this time, Shaw had already become a major playwright both on the
continent and on the States by the performance of his plays there.
In an attempt to withdraw form politics and philosophy, Shaw wrote possibly his
comedic masterpiece, and certainly his funniest and most popular play: Pygmalion
(1913). It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, but deep down
the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. The play is about
the training that phonetician Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to
pass as a lady; and it is also about the repercussions of the experiment’s success –the
relationship between a creator and his creation. The scene in which Eliza Doolittle
appears in high society when she has acquired a correct accent but no notion of polite
conversation is one of the funniest in English drama. Pygmalion has been both filmed
(making Shaw win an Academy Award for his screenplay) and adapted into an
immensely popular musical, My Fair Lady.
5. CONCLUSION
The life and work of both Wilde and Shaw have been interesting not only for
the literary panorama of Ireland and the world at large, but also for the film industry,
that has seen on them a good source for producing films. They can be of a great aid for
our students in order to approach them to the society and customs of the period in which
the works were written.
We can also establish a link with another subject of the curriculum, Spanish
Literature, where authors such as Mariano José de Larra or Gaspar Núñez made use
of the witty paradox in their writings.
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY