Oscar Wilde took London by storm with his first comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan. The cornbination of dazzling wit. subtle social criticism, sumptuous settings and the theme of a guilty secret proved a winner, both here and in his next three plays. A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and his undisputed masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. This volume includes all Wilde's plays from his early tragedy Vera to the controversial Salome and the little known fragments, La Sainte Comtisane and A Florentine Tragedy. The edition affords a rare chance to see Wilde's best known work in the context of his entire dramatic output, and to appreciate plays which have hitherto received scant critical attention.

Oscar Wilde was a remarkable playwright. His work was hailed asunique by the influential theatre critic William Archer:

The one essential fact about Mr Oscar Wilde"s dramatic work isthat it must be taken on the very highest plane of modernEnglish drama, and, furthermore, that it stands alone on thatplane. In intellectual calibre, artistic competence - and indramatic instinct - Mr Wilde has no rival among his fellowworkers for the stage.1

Wilde was writing for the stage at a time when critics and fellowplaywrights were campaigning for new theatre writing to be "liter-ary", offering intellectual and political challenges to its audiences.Continental playwrights such as Zola, Ibsen and Strindberg hadalready demonstrated that the stage could air radical social ideas.These innovators, and their British counterparts, were rebellingagainst the commercial interests which dominated theatre practice atthe time. They rejected the traditions of spectacular melodrama,music hall, long-running revivals of Shakespeare"s plays and, inBritain, translations of French well-made plays, all of which made upthe standard fare of theatrical entertainment in the latter half of thenineteenth century. In this context Wilde was revolutionary becausehe delivered plays which were politically engaged, artistically innova-tive and commercially successful.……

Vera; or, The Nihilists

The Duchess of Padua

Salome

Lady Windermere"s Fan

A Woman of No Importance

An Ideal Husband

The Importance of Being Earnest

La Sainte Courtisane

A Florentine Tragedy

NOTES