Wilde and the Emergence of Literary Drama, 1880–1895
This chapter examines Wilde’s championship of serious theatre and the authentic performance text by analysing his reviews of the first so-called ‘archaeological’ productions of Greek plays and Shakespeare. It offers a wider context in which to understand the rapidity of his disaffection with Greek plays, as practised among the social elite; and it suggests some ways in which his early enthusiasm for authentic Greek drama and Shakespeare is related to his own later classically informed playwriting, which combines old ideas of theatre as about and for its audiences with new ideas of drama as the appreciation of a literary object. Wilde’s own work as a dramatist straddled that change, prefigured by a comment he made in 1885: ‘An audience looks at a tragedian, but a comedian looks at his audience.’ He combines both these directions of gaze in his 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.