Survey of Selected Western Classics
Unit 10-11: 西洋戲劇: Oscar Wilde, “The
Importance of Being Earnest”
授課教師 :國立臺灣大學外國語文學系 王寶祥 副教授
本課程指定教材為:
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
Barnet, Sylvan, et al (eds). Types of Drama: Plays and Contexts. 8th ed. New York: Longman, 2001.
請讀者自行準備。
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1
Oscar Wilde Oct 16,1854-1900
• Born in Dublin, Ireland
• Anglo-Irish stock
• Mother a feminist and
Irish nationalist
“Speranza of the
Nation”
• Father Sir William
Wilde a surgeon
2
Residence in fashionable district of
Dublin
3
Trinity College, Dublin
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Read classics
Scholarship to Oxford
Oxford Hellenism:
1. Reaction against industrialism
2. Religious revival of
Anglicanism (Cardinal Newman)
• 3. Secular revival of Greek cult
of physical beauty and youth
(Gladstone to Pater)
4
Oxford education, 1878
• Magdalen College, Oxford
• “Oxonian”
• Studied with John Ruskin
and Walter Pater
• Tutor-pupil homoeroticism
• Boy worship
• 1879 graduated with honors,
prize for first poem Ravenna
• 1881 Poems published
5
Victorianism
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Reign of Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Pan-European doctrine of Empire
scientific materialism
moral conservatism
utilitarianism
colonialism and empire
woman as “angel of the house”
rise of sexuality studies
6
Dandyism: theatrical to the core
• Baudelaire on Beau Brummel and modern flaneur as dandy
artiste
• Dandyism: excessive focus on fashion and appearance
• aestheticism vs. utilatarianism
• Aristocratic cult of idleness and frivolity
• 20th century notion of “camp” aesthetics: surface and style,
exaggeration and extravagance
• You are what you look, how is done over what is done
• Dandy as an artist, his creation his life: “dandyism is the
assertion of the absolute modernity of beauty”
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Beau Brummel:
the dandiest of them all
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Aesthetic dualism
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•
•
•
Beauty over Thought
Style over content
Surface over depth
Personality over
functionality
• Culture over nature
• The ephemeral over the
permanent
• Sin over virtue
•Art over life
•Decadence over
regeneration
•Masquerade over face
•Illusion over reality
•Lies over truth
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“Straight” Wilde
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•
•
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Married with children
Wife Constance Lloyd 1883
Children Cyril and Vyvyan
essay The Soul of Man
Under Socialism (1891) an
attack on poverty
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Vera, or The Nihilist
•Early play Vera (18791880) nihilism, aristocratic
socialism, democracy
•Performed in New York in
1882 while Wilde was on
his lecture tour
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The queer Wilde
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
/File:A_Wilde_time_3.jpg
12
Lord Alfred Douglas ( 1870-1945)
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•
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Longtime companion
Son of Marquess Queensberry
English translator of Wilde’s Salome
Editor and publisher
Landed in jail for libel against Winston
Churchill
• Married with children, homophobic hysteric
• “Childe Alfred” by Shaw
• Biographer a 20-year old Oxford student
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Oscar and Bosie
• Played by Stephen Fry
and Jude Law in film
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Fairy Tales: allegories of selfhood
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Happy Prince
The House of Pomegranates
The Selfish Giant
The Birthday of Infanta
“an attempt to mirror modern life in a form
remote from reality".
15
1882 US lecture tour
• "ambassador" of the
aesthetic doctrine
• Managed by D’Oyly
Carte, producer of
comic operas
• “I have nothing to
declare except my
genius”
16
Caricature by Max Beerbohm ca.1894
• Half brother of director
manager Beerbohm Tree
17
Caricatures by Illustrator Alfred Bryan
• On Wilde’s first “dramatic
failure” in 1883 with Vera.
• Lady Windermere’s fan
18
Criticism: critic as artist
• The Decay of Lying (1891):
defends art for art’s sake
• Self-reflexivity: “Art never
expresses anything but itself”
• “Life imitates Art far more than
Art imitates Life”
• “What the highest Criticism
really is, is the record of one’s
own soul” rather than history,
which is concerned with events
• “Lying, the telling of beautiful
untrue things, is the proper aim of
Art”
• The Critic as Artist (1891): favors
vita contemplativa over vita
activa
• Collapsing boundary between art
(creative) and criticism (derivative)
• Derivativeness/digression as invention
• Self-invention as a continued rewriting/constructing/constituting of
selfhoods
• Criticism as autobiography
• Self-invention as diary? (Cicely)
• Socratic dialogues best represent
conflicted subjectivities
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The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890
• The only novel
• Manifesto of aestheticism and
decadence
• androgyny 雌雄同體
• Boy worship
• Life imitates art: dynamic of art
and life, illusion and reality
• Helmut Berger (pic)
• 王大閎<<杜連魁的畫像>>
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Mrs. Pat and Forbes-Robertson
• Romeo and Juliet
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Salome, 1891 莎樂美
• Wilde as Salome in drag,
transvestitism?
• Written in French for Sarah
Bernhardt
• banned by Lord Chamberlain on
religious grounds
• Opera by Richard Strauss 1905
• Pater aestheticism (Salome) vs.
Ruskin asceticism (John the
Baptist)?
22
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)
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少奶奶/ 溫夫人的扇子
First produced play
An instant success
Hypocrisy of high society
Woman with a past
Femme fatale, ingenue, and rake
1916 silent film by Fred Paul
1925 film by Ernst Lubitsch 劉別謙
1949 remake by Otto Preminger The
Fan
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A Good Woman (2004)
• Film adaptation of Lady
Windermere set in the 1930s
Amalfi coast
• Helen Hunt
• Scarlett Johansson
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A Woman of No Importance (1893),
produced by Beerbohm Tree
• Victorian melodrama: binary
opposition of good and evil
• “people love a wicked aristocrat who
seduces a virtuous maiden”
• A woman with a past
• “one can survive everything
nowadays, except death, and live
down anything except a good
reputation”
• “One should never take sides in
anything, earnestness follows shortly
afterwards and the human being
becomes a bore”
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An Ideal Husband (1895)
• Unmasking the veneer of Victorian
respectability
• Lord Goring “flawless dandy” as
Wilde personified
• Lord Chiltern as the “ideal husband”
involved in a political scandal
• Lady “with a past” blackmails
• Social critique: class and politics
• Hypocrisy of Victorian morality
• 1999 Rupert Everett as Goring /2000
James Wilby as Chiltern
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The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
• Actor-manager and matinee idol
George Alexander as Jack
• Comedy of manners
• Continue and subvert Restoration
comedy
• Masquerade and mistaken identity
• Witticisms and puns
• Critique of or complicity with
Victorian dualism
• City/country, appearance/ reality,
fiction/ truth, materialism/
spiritualism, trivial/ serious
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Classic 1952 film
• Dame Edith Evans as
Lady Bracknell
• Michael Redgrave as
Jack
• John Gielgud in audio
version
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2002 film
•Starring Judi Dench, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Reese
Witherspoon
•Cecily as a critic? (“the aim of the true critic is to try and
chronicle his own moods”), “impressions” gleaned not from
“actual life” from “what Art has touched”
•“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred
is …an inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture” -The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde
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Portrait of Wilde by Toulouse-Lautrec 1895
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Lionized and feted by the society and
the literati
• 34, Tite Street (formerly
no. 16.) Tite Street in
Chelsea, fashionable
district
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Evening News 1895
• Labeled as a
“sodomite” in public
by Queensberry
• Marquess of
Queensberry rules
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Three trials of Wilde
• First modern celebrity trial
• Charges of sodomy, “gross
indecency”
• Wilde filed libel suit against
Queensberry
• Opposed appearance of Bosie
in court as witness
• Sentenced to two years of hard
labor
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Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of
Oscar Wilde (1997)
• Play by Moises
Kaufman chronicling
Wilde’s celebrity trials
• Putting art on trial
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Reading Gaol 1895-97
• It was “misplaced faith in the prison-house of
language, the reading gaol, that landed Wilde in the
Reading Gaol”. Valentine Cunningham
• De Profundis, long letter to Bosie
• Offspring changed name to Holland (Merlin Holland,
Vyvyan’s son)
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Post-Reading exile in Europe
• Nom de plume: Sebastian
Melmoth
• Portrait by Walter Sickert
• Wilde’s visiting card
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Monument by Jacob Epstein 1912
.'
• Died destitute in Paris, 1900
• accepted into the Roman Catholic Church
the day before
• “ And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.” (The
Ballad of Reading Gaol)
37
From Wilde to “Holland”
• Son denied admittance to Oxford
• Family refused accommodation at a Swiss
hotel
• Forced to change name
• Grandson Merlin Holland, Wilde researcher
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The Wilde Century
• Book by Alan Sinfield
• Wilde as a precursor of celebrity
culture, self-publicity, selfaggrandizement
• Gay icon in queer movement
• postmodernist deconstruction
• pop culture (fashion, cult)
• postcolonial studies
(Eagelton)
• Revival in theatre and film
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Oscar Wilde (1936), a play by Leslie
and Sewell Stokes
• Film adaptation (1960) with Robert Morley as
Wilde and Ralph Richardson as Marquis’s lawyer
• Opens with the pair vacationing in Algiers
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Saint Oscar by Terry Eagleton
• Field Day Company 1989
• Stephen Rea as Wilde
• Irish humor, parable and paradox as subaltern
language against British hierarchy
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Tom Stoppard The Invention of Love
(1997)
• Poet A. E. Housman
• an imagined exchange with
Wilde
• Wilde’s apparition
discourses on love
• Travesties (1974): James
Joyce rehearsed Earnest in
WWI Zurich
42
The Judas Kiss (1998)
by David Hare
• Liam Neeson as Wilde
• Rupert Everett in 2012
revival
• fidelity tested in days
before arrest
• To stay or to flee; love or
freedom
• Cadogan hotel, London
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Wikiquote:
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_Wilde.jpg
作者名稱: Napoleon Sarony
作品描述: Portrait of Oscar Wilde
使用者: SF007
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作品描述: Trinity College, Dublin
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作品描述: Portrait of John Ruskin, Ashmolean
Museum
使用者: Yann
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Wikimedia Commons:
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作者名稱: Alexander Bassano (1829-1913)
作品描述: Portrait of Queen Victoria
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The Culture Concept Pty
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Wonders & Marvels:
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ilde_by_Napoleon_Sarony_(18211896)_Number_18_b.jpeg
作者名稱: Napoleon Sarony
作品描述: Portrait of Oscar Wilde
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WIKIPEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oscar-williewilde23.jpg
作者名稱: Alfred_Bryan
作品描述: Willie Wilde comforting his brother
Oscar Wilde after the failure of his play Vera;
or, The Nihilists in the United States.
使用者: Araujojoan96
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WIKIPEDIA:
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_3.jpg
作者名稱: Napoleon Sarony
作品描述: Oscar Wilde, photographic print on
card mount: albumen.
使用者: Docu
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Sonnet Central:
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作品描述: Wilde and Douglas,
photograph taken in 1893.
使用者: Magnus Manske
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WIKIPEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oscar_W
ilde_(Boston_Public_Library).jpg
作者名稱: Boston Public Library
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The City University of New York:
http://www1.cuny.edu/portal_ur/news/cun
y_matters/2003_march/beerbohm.html
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WIKIPEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oscarwillie-wilde23.jpg
作者名稱: Alfred_Bryan
作品描述: Willie Wilde comforting his
brother Oscar Wilde after the failure of his
play Vera; or, The Nihilists in the United
States.
使用者: Araujojoan96
瀏覽日期: 2013/12/18
Glarean Magazin:
http://glareanverlag.wordpress.com/tag/jo
achim-ringelnatz/
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http://www.besuche-oscarwilde.de/worte/zeitung/fall.htm
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Victoria and Albert Museum:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/g/g
ender-ideology-and-separate-spheres19th-century/
作品描述: A scene from Romeo & Juliet
by William Shakespeare, Lyceum Theatre,
London,1895.
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International Psychoanalysis:
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WIKIPEDIA:
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rformance.jpg
作品描述: A Woman of No Importance
program from 1930
使用者: Luke C
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Victoria and Albert Museum:
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e-importance-of-being-earnest-first-stageproduction/
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WIKIPEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oscar_Wilde_
-_An_Ideal_Husband__You_brute!_You_coward!.jpg
作品描述: "You brute! You coward!" from an
anonymous artist's illustrations to Oscar Wilde's
An Ideal Husband.
使用者: Adam Cuerden
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WIKIPEDIA:
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ortance_of_Being_Earnest__Cigarettecase.jpg
作品描述: Photograph from Act 1 of the
original production of The Importance of
Being Earnest (1895). Photograph taken at
St.James's Theatre, London 1895.
使用者: Ramac
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Started The Criterion Collection:
http://www.criterion.com/films/355-theimportance-of-being-earnest
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Olga's Gallery - Online Art Museum:
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作品描述: Photo taken by User: Adam
Carr, June 2002.
使用者: Magnus Manske
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Oscar Wilde Fan Club:
http://oscarwildefanclub.com/index.php/le
tter-to-bosie-from-his-father-yourdisgusted-so-called-father/
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作品描述: The Wilde Trial as recorded in
The Illustrated Police News, May 4 1895.
使用者: Osado
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Tectonic Theater Project:
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Branch:
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es=ellen-crowell-oscar-wildes-tombsilence-and-the-aesthetics-of-queermemorial
作者名稱: Ellen Crowell
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The Independent:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world
/europe/the-vatican-wakes-up-to-thewisdom-of-oscar-wilde-1750093.html
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London Box Office
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