the Lady Windermere's Fan study guide. - Shaw Festival Theatre

About the Playwright
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OSCAR WILDE
Lady Windermere’s Fan was Oscar Wilde’s first theatrical hit, but he made himself famous well
before he created any notable work of art by actually being a work of art. Before he graduated
from Oxford, Wilde had turned himself into a living example of something called the Aesthetic
Movement. It was an ideology that believed that art should not seek to convey a moral, sentimental
or educational message but should give sensual pleasure. The aim was “to exist beautifully”:
Art for Art’s sake.
Wilde grew his hair long, dressed in outlandish clothes and wore a fake green carnation in his
lapel. He became what is known as a Dandy; a cynical, witty, flamboyant, and well-dressed
man. He was a hit at dinner parties and a celebrity before he ever really created anything. So
much so, that when Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, a satirical opera on British dandies and the
aesthetic movement, was preparing for a run on Broadway, the producers recruited Wilde to
do a lecture tour of the United States. Basically, dandies didn’t exist in the U.S., so Wilde was
sent ahead of the opera to talk about aesthetics across America, with the idea that when the
show did hit Broadway, its audience would know exactly who it was making fun of. But, instead
of making fun of him, the American public loved him. In a letter home he wrote “Great
success here. Nothing like it since Dickens they tell me.”
By the time he returned to London, Wilde was ready to start practicing what he preached. He
wrote a book of poetry, moved on to some literary essays, and then wrote the novel The
Picture of Dorian Grey, which was heavily criticized for its decadence and homosexual
allusions. The Daily Chronicle called it “poisonous,” and “heavy with mephitic odours of moral
and spiritual putrefaction.” Though nowadays, many consider this to be Wilde’s greatest work.
It wasn’t until the play Lady Windermere’s Fan that Wilde received the artistic acclaim he’d
been seeking. After that, Wilde rapidly followed the next three years with a series of other hit
plays climaxing with The Importance of Being Earnest.
Many of Wilde’s plays are about the consequences of being forced out of society through
scandal. This recurring theme foreshadowed Wilde’s own impending fall. He had no idea that
in a few short years his own life would become the scandal of the century. In 1895, at the
height of his fame and while The Importance of Being Earnest was in its opening run, Oscar
Wilde was tried, convicted and imprisoned for gross indecency. He was sentenced to two
years’ hard labour for his intimate involvement with other men. He never saw his children
again and three years after his release, he died, impoverished in a Paris hotel room. He was
46 years old.
Upon graduating, his Oxford classmates asked what he planned to do with his life, Wilde responded
“God knows; I won’t be an Oxford don anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist,
somehow or other, I’ll be famous, and if not famous, notorious.” As it turned out he managed
to accomplish all of these things, and oddly enough, in that order.
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